One very uncertain test of a man of genius is his “table-talk.” Surrounded by a group of men who were such masters of this gift as Lowell, Holmes, and T. G. Appleton, Longfellow might well be excused from developing it to the highest extent, and he also “being rather a silent man,” as he says of himself, escaped thereby the tendency to monologue, which was sometimes a subject of complaint in regard to the other three. Longfellow’s reticence and self-control saved him 274 from all such perils; but it must be admitted, on the other hand, that when his brother collects a dozen pages of his “table-talk” at the end of his memoirs, or when one reads his own list of them in “Kavanagh,” the reader feels a slight inadequacy, as of things good enough to be said, but not quite worth the printing. Yet at their best, they are sometimes pungent and telling, as where he says, “When looking for anything lost, begin by looking where you think it is not;” or, “Silence is a great peace-maker;” or, “In youth all doors open outward; in old age they all open inward,” or, more thoughtfully, “Amusements are like specie payments. We do not much care for them, if we know we can have them; but we like to know they may be had,” or more profoundly still, “How often it happens that after we know a man personally, we cease to read his writings. Is it that we exhaust him by a look? Is it that his personality gives us all of him we desire?” There are also included among these passages some thoroughly poetic touches, as where he says, “The spring came suddenly, bursting upon the world as a child bursts into a room, with a laugh and a shout, and hands full of flowers.” Or this, “How sudden and sweet are the visitations of our happiest thoughts; what delightful surprises! In the midst of life’s most trivial 275 occupations,—as when we are reading a newspaper, or lighting a bed-candle, or waiting for our horses to drive round,—the lovely face appears, and thoughts more precious than gold are whispered in our ear.”
The test of popularity in a poet is nowhere more visible than in the demand for autographs. Longfellow writes in his own diary that on November 25, 1856, he has more than sixty such requests lying on his table; and again on January 9, “Yesterday I wrote, sealed, and directed seventy autographs. To-day I added five or six more and mailed them.” It does not appear whether the later seventy applications included the earlier sixty, but it is, in view of the weakness of human nature, very probable. This number must have gone on increasing. I remember that in 1875 I saw in his study a pile which must have numbered more than seventy, and which had come in a single day from a single high school in a Western city, to congratulate him on his birthday, and each hinting at an autograph, which I think he was about to supply.
At the time of his seventy-fourth birthday, 1881, a lady in Ohio sent him a hundred blank cards, with the request that he would write his name on each, that she might distribute them among her guests at a party she was to give on that day. The same day was celebrated by some 276 forty different schools in the Western States, all writing him letters and requesting answers. He sent to each school, his brother tells us, some stanza with signature and good wishes. He was patient even with the gentleman who wrote to him to request that he would send his autograph in his “own handwriting.” As a matter of fact, he had to leave many letters unanswered, even by a secretary, in his latest years.
It is a most tantalizing thing to know, through the revelations of Mr. William Winter, that Longfellow left certain poems unpublished. Mr. Winter says: “He said also that he sometimes wrote poems that were for himself alone, that he should not care ever to publish, because they were too delicate for publication.”[105] Quite akin to this was another remark made by him to the same friend, that “the desire of the young poet is not for applause, but for recognition.” The two remarks limit one another; the desire for recognition only begins when the longing for mere expression is satisfied. Thoroughly practical and methodical and industrious, Longfellow yet needed some self-expression first of all. It is impossible to imagine him as writing puffs of himself, like Poe, or volunteering reports of receptions given to him, like Whitman. He said to Mr. Winter, again and again, “What you 277 desire will come, if you will but wait for it.” The question is not whether this is the only form of the poetic temperament, but it was clearly his form of it. Thoreau well says that there is no definition of poetry which the poet will not instantly set aside by defying all its limitations, and it is the same with the poetic temperament itself.
[100] Scudder’s Men and Letters, p. 68.
[101] Life, ii. 19, 20.
[102] The New England Poets, p. 141.
[103] Life, ii. 189.
[104] Tennyson’s Life, by his son, i. 507.
[105] Life, iii. 356.