Major Poets of New England.—With this caption we return to the main stream of American verse, and reach the men whose lives and works may be said to justify a connected account of poetry in the United States. We shall take up Longfellow first. Whatever vicissitudes his literary standing has suffered, or is likely to suffer, he is bound for a long time to appear as the central figure among our poets.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.—The subject of this sketch was born in Portland, Maine, February 27, 1807. He came of a gifted stock. His father was a lawyer of ability, and his mother a woman of artistic temperament and varied attainments, so that the boy grew up in an atmosphere of study and refinement. Longfellow was a wise and gentle child, fond of books, not too sensitive, always normal and sane. Until 1821 he went to school in Portland; in 1822 he entered the sophomore class at Bowdoin College. Here he attained a good rank in scholarship, and became acquainted, not intimately, with the future novelist Hawthorne. Upon graduation in 1825, Longfellow went abroad, in order to fit himself for a professorship in modern languages which lay open to him at Bowdoin. He visited France, Germany, England, and the South of Europe; on his return in 1829 he gave himself up with ardour and success to the activity of teaching. In 1831 he was married to Miss Mary S. Potter. In 1835, having received an invitation to the chair of modern languages at Harvard, he went abroad again for further travel and study, this time mainly to Germany and the North. The death of his young wife, shortly after their arrival in Holland, filled his cup with bitterness, but did not swerve him from preparation for the duties of his chair at Cambridge. Nevertheless, as may be read beneath the surface of his romance “Hyperion,” his determination that he must ultimately become a poet, and not end as a teacher in the classroom, can be traced to this critical epoch in his life.
Longfellow taught at Harvard from 1836 until 1854, with but one intermission, in 1842, when on account of his health he made his third trip to Europe. In 1843 he married Miss Frances E. Appleton, whom he had met in Switzerland sixteen years before, and whose presence and influence are likewise traceable in “Hyperion.” Through the generosity of his father-in-law, he was able to establish a home in Craigie House, where he had been a lodger since 1837, a dwelling of Revolutionary fame. For a while, Longfellow’s study was the room once occupied by Washington. Here, surrounded by his books and, as the years went on, by a growing family circle, he lived in comfort and felicity. His reputation spread, and the number of his acquaintances increased. Among his friends he reckoned Sparks and Prescott, the historians; Ticknor, his predecessor at Harvard, and Lowell, who afterward succeeded Longfellow; Fields, Emerson, Holmes, and Hawthorne; Felton, Sumner, Agassiz, and Norton. He read and wrote variously and extensively; he counted it a privilege to be interpreting Dante “to young hearts.” In time, however, his duties as a teacher, above all the preparation of lectures, gradually wore upon him. He felt that he could not serve two masters, and he clave to poetry. At length, in 1854, he resigned his professorship, to devote himself exclusively to authorship. Seven years later, under the most distressing circumstances, he lost his second wife. From this catastrophe, Longfellow, though he eventually regained his outward cheerfulness, never inwardly recovered. “He bore his grief with courage and in silence. Only after months had passed could he speak of it; and then only in fewest words.” In 1868 he made his last visit to Europe, where he was met with “a flood of hospitality.” In London “he breakfasted with Mr. Gladstone, Sir Henry Holland, the Duke of Argyll; lunched with Lord John Russell at Richmond, ... received midnight calls from Bulwer and Aubrey de Vere.... The Queen received him cordially and without ceremony in one of the galleries of Windsor Castle.” After a visit of two days with Tennyson, Longfellow and his party crossed to the Continent. They spent the summer in Switzerland, the autumn in France, the winter in Florence and Rome. When he returned to America, he “found Cambridge in all its beauty; not a leaf faded.” “How glad,” he wrote, “I am to be at home. The quiet and rest are welcome after the surly sea. But there is a tinge of sadness in it, also.” The last ten years of Longfellow’s life were quiet and serene, with a tinge of sadness in them, also. Yet they were filled with literary projects which, for a man of his age, he carried through with remarkable energy; and, until toward the end, his correspondence was enormous. In 1880 his health showed signs of failing. In 1882 he suffered a brief and sharp illness, and on Friday, March 24, “he sank quietly in death.” “The long, busy, blameless life was ended.”
At the age of thirteen, Longfellow printed four stanzas, “The Battle of Lovell’s Pond,” in a corner of The Portland Gazette. Within the next six years he wrote a considerable number of poems for The United States Literary Gazette. By 1833, in addition to text-books for his classes, he had, in various magazines, published original articles, stories, and several reviews; among them an important estimate of poetry, especially the poetry of America, in a notice of Sidney’s “Defense of Poesy” contributed to The North American Review; as well as translations from the Spanish of Manrique and others, with an “Introductory Essay on the Moral and Devotional Poetry of Spain” (1833). “Outre-Mer,” first published as a series of sketches, appeared in book form in 1835, “Hyperion” in 1839, and “Voices of the Night” in the same year as “Hyperion.” “Voices of the Night” made Longfellow’s reputation as a poet; the edition was immediately exhausted. “Hyperion,” which eventually sold well, though at present it is not often enough read, was at first unfortunate, the publisher failing before this book had a fair start. Of Longfellow’s better known works, published during the latter half of his lifetime, his “Ballads and Other Poems” appeared in 1841, “The Spanish Student” in 1843, “Evangeline” in 1847, “Kavanagh,” another prose romance, in 1849, “Hiawatha” in 1855, “The Courtship of Miles Standish” in 1858, “The Golden Legend” in 1872, and “Aftermath” in 1873. The “Tales of a Wayside Inn” came out in 1863, 1872, and 1873, the First Day separately, the Second and the Third Day in company with other writings.
In consequence, it may be, of a latter-day tendency to disparage Longfellow’s verse, there has been an effort of late to rehabilitate his prose; not so much, indeed, for its own sake, as for its importance in the history of our literature. “Hyperion,” for example, is not merely what Longfellow called it, “a sincere book, showing the passage of a morbid mind into a purer and healthier state”; that is, it is not merely the veiled autobiography of our most popular poet. Its final reception and large sale are a proof that in the forties not a few Americans could be interested in German student life and in the discussion of Continental literatures. With this romance, one might say, began an American literature that, without ceasing to be native, could claim to be cosmopolitan. Possibly no single work produced in this country ever effected more in the dissemination of European culture. Its faults are on the surface. The style is not seldom forced and florid, having the colour of Jean Paul rather than Irving; and the sentiment here and there is gushing. Nevertheless, parts of “Hyperion” are good prose, the prose of a scholar who is aware of what he is saying and of a poet who knows how to avoid scraps of metre when he is not writing verse. The poet-scholar knows, too, on what sort of basis the best poetry is founded: “O thou poor authorling!... to cheer thy solitary labour, remember that the secret studies of an author are the sunken piers upon which is to rest the bridge of his fame, spanning the dark waters of Oblivion. They are out of sight; but without them no superstructure can stand secure.”
The nature of Longfellow’s secret studies is partly indicated by the extent of his published translations. Although one could hardly aver that the poet was anything like a linguistic investigator in the modern sense, he had a wide acquaintance with Germanic and Romance literatures; he spoke several modern tongues with fluency; and he had a sufficient command of idiom to translate with seeming ease from Swedish, German, Old English, French, Spanish, and Italian. His renderings from Tegnér’s “Frithiof’s Saga” seemed so true to the original that the Swedish poet urged Longfellow to complete the translation. The versions of Uhland and others which he made in Germany during the year 1836 were later on extraordinarily efficacious in popularising German literature for America. He may likewise be counted one of the pioneers among American students of Old English or, as he called it, “Anglo-Saxon.” As a teacher of modern languages, he naturally gave heed to Greek and Latin secondarily, and there came a time when he deplored the fact that his familiarity with Greek had slipped away. Yet he loved the classics, his favourite among the Latin poets being Horace. In Horace, he said, one could find all that was worth while in the message of Goethe, expressed just as well, and uttered earlier. Of course the most considerable piece of scholarship undertaken by Longfellow was his translation of the “Divine Comedy,” a task for which his enthusiastic teaching of Dante had helped to fit him, and one which he had commenced (1839) years before the death of his second wife; yet one which he resumed and mainly completed relatively late in life, and, like Bryant’s Homer, something taken up as the resource of a soul bitterly bereaved, unable to accomplish spontaneous creative work. In compassing this task, Longfellow had the encouragement and the direct assistance of Norton and Lowell, to whose knowledge and taste the translation as it now stands is greatly indebted. Even so, it cannot rank high in artistic workmanship. First of all, the translator found that, in order to reproduce the sense with fidelity, he must sacrifice the rhyme, a dubious concession so long as metrical structure was to be retained at all. Still, Longfellow’s translation is pure and lucid English; for the beginner in Dante the critical apparatus is valuable even now; and the three sonnets prefixed to the “Inferno,” “Purgatorio,” and “Paradiso” are in themselves an introduction to Dante of a sort hardly to be surpassed. The best spirit of America is blended in them with the best of the Middle Ages.
In considering Longfellow as an original poet, we shall not go astray if we remember his own conception of originality. To him the poetic gift meant, not the power of creating new material—as the vulgar suppose—but insight, the power of seeing things according to their eternal values. Doubtless he realised that one needs insight to discover how far the vulgar supposition is blind. At all events, we need not look for new ideas or new sentiments in the poetry of Longfellow, but for an attempt to make us see things as he sees them, after he has tried to see them as they are. In his dramas, and in his narratives—these latter being more important—he frankly took material furnished by his wide reading, or lying ready to his hand, and strove to clothe it in a new and more permanent form. “Evangeline” is an instance of his method. The story was given him by Hawthorne; in elaborating it, Longfellow consulted such works on Nova Scotia and the exile of the Acadians as were accessible to him; he was true to his sources. Had he known of better authorities, he would have read them, and his account of the exile would have been historically more precise. The metre of “Evangeline,” suggested by that of Goethe’s “Hermann und Dorothea,” is one of the rare instances where dactylic hexameter has succeeded in English. One can truthfully say that whatever Longfellow took he really appropriated, that is, made his own. It was but seldom that his materials would not fuse, for he had a thorough command of technique. In “Hiawatha,” which has been called “the nearest approach to an American epic,” he employed a form of verse borrowed from the Finnish “Kalevala,” in which to embody traditions of the Indians. As Freiligrath remarked, there is something odd in the notion of Hiawatha, child of the West Wind, meeting with historical Christian missionaries. However, Longfellow’s daring synthesis of heterogeneous elements pleased that great authority on American antiquities Henry R. Schoolcraft; after many failures, a native poet had at length arisen to portray our aborigines, in a long poem, with fidelity and imagination. Ten thousand copies were sold in this country within four weeks, and the poem was translated into six modern languages.
The dramatic works of Longfellow have suffered in comparison with his narrative poems and lyrics. The causes of this are partly internal and partly external. In his “Christus,” which he fancied would endure, he probably chose a subject of too great magnitude for his powers. Yet the second part at least, “The Golden Legend,” at present operates less vitally than it should, largely because of its sympathy with the ideals of the Middle Ages—with ideals which we, still living in the Renaissance, are not ready to comprehend. “‘The Golden Legend,’” said G. P. R. James, “is like an old ruin with the ivy and the rich blue mould upon it.” Is it not more like a Gothic church before mould and ruin have crept in? It is a bit of wholesome, rejuvenated medievalism, an edifice whose threshold the intellectual pride of our age feels discomfort in crossing.
It is by his shorter poems that Longfellow now chiefly lives. Brief narratives such as “The Skeleton in Armour,” and “The Wreck of the Schooner Hesperus,” lyrics of sentiment and pathos—“Psalms of Life”—more rarely bits of humour like the German mechanic’s song, “I know a maiden, fair to see,” were soon established in the popular memory. It would be ungracious to say that the popular taste has been wrong in preferring what is sentimental and pathetic in Longfellow. A poet whose love of the hearth was so strong, and whose personal acquaintance with domestic happiness and domestic grief was so profound, did well to pour out his soul in verses which add sunshine to daylight for the happy, and in which the deeply afflicted may find pensive solace. Yet the popular taste has clung to “Tell me not in mournful numbers,” where the sentiment is not above suspicion, and to “The Skeleton in Armour,” where character, sentiment, and historical setting are for the most part incongruous; and it has almost let the sonnet on Milton fall asleep.
Longfellow was the most popular poet ever brought forth on this continent. His unparalleled vogue was destined to undergo a reaction. Among those who want better bread than is made of wheat, his poetry is not now counted a stimulating diet. However, when American scholarship shall succeed in reducing American literature to a true perspective, he will come to his own again. His patriotism will be rediscovered; his technical skill will be carefully appraised; the honours heaped upon him throughout the civilised world will be recognised as just; and the character from which flowed a well of undefiled poetry will stand out as one of the noblest products of occidental civilisation.