Henry, on the other hand, was a joy. “What can have made the difference between our two sons, educated together as they were together & alike,” asked Zilpah in 1825, when Stephen had been rusticated by the college—that is, sent to live and study for a term with a clergyman in Kennebunk because of his chronic misbehavior. “Henry is beloved by all, his conduct is very correct, and he gives much pleasure to his friends. . . .”
The college to which they had been sent was a stage for the enactment of this drama of the good brother and the disappointing one. Henry, as we shall see, was one of its stars even as an undergraduate. Stephen’s passage through its halls left little trace, although he did graduate.
In writing in 1879 of the Longfellows’ classmate Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James was to dismiss Bowdoin as “a highly honorable, but not very elaborately organized, nor a particularly impressive, seat of learning.” He described it as “a homely, simple, frugal ‘country college,’ of the old-fashioned American stamp. . . .” He allowed that it did exert “a civilizing influence” amid “the log-houses and the clearings” and sufficiently educated “the future lawyers, merchants, clergymen, politicians, and editors, of the very active and knowledge-loving community that supported it.” And it “numbered poets and statesmen among its undergraduates, and on the roll-call of its sons it has several distinguished names.” This was not an entirely accurate description of Bowdoin, but James was right in acknowledging the success of many of its early graduates.
In retrospect, the most distinguished among these was Hawthorne, although he never quite matched the contemporary fame of his friend Longfellow. In an early work that he later tried to suppress, Hawthorne described a country college that most critics, including James, took to be Bowdoin. Yet Harley College, the setting of Hawthorne’s 1828 novel Fanshawe, suggests Bowdoin without actually depicting it. Bowdoin could not boast of “an existence of nearly a century,” nor did it lack candidates for degrees. It was not situated in “a narrow vale” in almost inaccessible “hill-country” adjacent to a sparsely settled village of farmhouses. Among its students were no “young descendants of the aborigines,” and its kindly head, Dr. Melmoth, in no way resembled Bowdoin’s president in Hawthorne’s day, the overbearing William Allen. Harley seems closer to hill-bound Dartmouth College, with its early tradition of educating the Indians. Where Harley does resemble Bowdoin is in the presence of a tavern next to campus (such inns were a common and not necessarily debilitating feature of every New England town, and served as public meeting places) and in something its author has to say about the students: “A few young men had found their way hither from the distant seaports; and these were the models of fashion to their rustic companions, over whom they asserted a superiority in exterior accomplishments, which the fresh though unpolished intellect of the sons of the forest denied them in their literary competitions.” Hawthorne himself was from a not-too-distant seaport, Salem, though he had also spent an idyllic time as a son of the forest, or rather of the apple orchards, as a ward of his Manning uncles in rural Raymond, Maine. But it was Portland students like the brothers Longfellow who gave Brunswick much of its social tone in the 1820s. There were few rustics—save some divinity students on scholarship—but a good many well-positioned youths seeking to model themselves on the ideal of the republican New England gentleman. Each Maine town had its leading family—often the owners of the local lumber mill—and, well into the twentieth century, each generation of these families typically sent a son to Bowdoin. Stephen and Henry fit easily into this social world.
Henry’s letters home, once he had settled into true collegiate life (after a sophomore year spent boarding with a clergyman on nearby Federal Street), reflect his jauntiness. In October of 1823, after moving with Stephen into third-floor rooms in what is now Maine Hall, he wrote his sister Elizabeth:
The room we occupy at present, is situated in the North Eastern corner of the North College—but I forget myself! From such a description, you, who have never seen the colleges, can form no idea of its situation. . . . —the bed-room window looks toward the village and Professor Cleaveland’s,—the other two windows afford a delightful prospect,—no less so than the charm of an extensive woodland scenery of—pine trees,—groves, beautified by a great quantity of bushes cut during the Summer, and left, dry, withered, sere, to beauty and vary the Autumnal landscape—a fine view of the road to Harpswell and the College Wood Yard. But within! How shall I describe it! Yellow floor! Green fire-place. Mantel and window-seats, blueish white,—and three great doors, mahogany color. But jesting apart!—the room is a very good room, although more pleasant for Summer than Winter, as it is in back. . . .
Henry James had touched on the college’s great strength. It did prepare lawyers, editors, statesmen for the great world. It did not prepare them for intensive scholarly pursuits or teach useful technological skills or encourage them to pursue commercial careers on a grand scale—no American college did any of that until after the Civil War—but it did not do a bad job of fulfilling its mission, which was to socialize a leadership class and polish those public skills—particularly in speaking and writing—with which they would pursue the common good. (Some graduates also proved entrepreneurial, especially in land speculation, but in truth a college education was a waste of time in the early nineteenth century for anyone who simply wanted to make money.) And Bowdoin was not quite as provincial as its landlocked fellow colleges. It shared with other small colleges such as Williams and Amherst and Middlebury an intensely local clientele (unlike Harvard, which was already attracting a national student body, despite its first loyalty to the Boston elite). But Bowdoin operated, at least in its early decades, on a larger scale than the other country colleges. Thanks to its new Medical School of Maine, it had the promise (never fulfilled) of becoming a small university. Thanks to bequests from its original benefactor, James Bowdoin III, it had one of the best libraries in the United States (especially rich in eighteenth-century French books), an interesting cabinet of natural curiosities (including an important mineral collection), and a collection of European art unmatched by any nineteenth-century American college or university (to the extent that this collection was open in Massachusetts Hall to any respectable person who wished to visit it, Bowdoin could be said to have had the first collegiate art museum in the country). The college did not have the cultural and social aura that flowed up the Charles with the tide from Boston to Cambridge, but in 1825 its faculty was enhanced by the presence of the pioneer mineralogist Parker Cleaveland—a good friend of the Longfellows—and the proximity of Portland across Casco Bay brought some small degree of worldliness to the sandy plains of Brunswick.
This moment of exceptional possibility was not going to last, and Bowdoin already had its problems. It was run by a very unpleasant (though gifted) man and by two governing bodies seething with animosity toward each other. (The bicameral system of governance, like much of the campus architecture, had been copied after Harvard’s.) The president, the Reverend William Allen, was a learned man in the recitation room but a fire-breathing Calvinist in the pulpit, where the students heard him deliver daily prayers and Sunday sermons. Longfellow got out of the latter by means of a letter from his father allowing him to join a tiny Unitarian congregation in Brunswick. Hawthorne, who had grown up in Salem amid liberal clergy, was not so privileged, and President Allen may very well have been his introduction to the full brunt of the Puritan heritage and its doctrine of the depravity of man.
From its start, the college had been entangled in Maine politics and religion. The institution’s very name suggested its political tone: James Bowdoin II, who was being memorialized by his son, was the conservative governor who, in the contentious years just after the Revolution, had put down Shays’ Rebellion among the angry farmers of western Massachusetts. The college’s early governing boards were, with a few exceptions, representative of the coastal elite. Many of these men had been religious liberals, but by the 1820s, the state’s orthodox C
ongregationalists were on the verge of taking de facto control of the institution—which was never to have any official denominational affiliation—to the great alarm of a remnant of Unitarian and Episcopalian trustees. More perilously, Bowdoin’s friends, including Stephen Longfellow, had put themselves on the wrong side in the final statehood debate in 1819, a generation-long struggle over whether to separate from Massachusetts. The leaders of Maine’s new Republican (that is, Democratic) majority saw the college as a bastion of Federalism and oligarchy and, through the 1820s, plotted ways to do it harm.
In examining Longfellow’s student days in this environment, the most interesting question is why he and Hawthorne did not become friends (as they famously did a decade later). It was a very small place—the class of 1825 had forty-five members, most of them living in two adjacent dormitories and dining in a common hall—and there would have been only a certain number of students keenly interested in literature. One explanation is social: for Longfellow, the son of a congressman and grandson of a Revolutionary general, the college was an extension of the world he had always known in Portland, and his passage from one to the other was relatively seamless; for Hawthorne, on the other hand, Bowdoin was a new, even foreign environment, and he quickly latched on to three amiable friends who eased his passage by giving him—perhaps for the first time in his life—a sense of camaraderie with other males. (Hawthorne’s notorious reclusiveness seems to have been a postcollegiate shift in his dealings with the world.) This does not imply any degree of unworldliness on Hawthorne’s part: his friend Franklin Pierce became fourteenth president of the United States, his friend Horatio Bridge was the son of Augusta’s leading citizen, and his friend Jonathan Cilley became a Maine congressman who was killed in a famous duel in 1838.
The other explanation is political, in both undergraduate and partisan terms. The most intense part of student life did not take place amid the dull recitations or uninspired chapel services. It took place, at Bowdoin as in other antebellum American colleges, in the rivalry between two student societies. These societies had a literary and oratorical public face, but they were in essence fraternal organizations and tended to reflect the political views and social standing of the students’ fathers. Henry Longfellow joined the older of the two, the Peucinian Society—more “establishment,” a bit staid, properly Federalist (and later Whig) in its political leanings, both earnest and urbane in social tone—while Hawthorne chose the Athenaean—slightly more vulgar or at least boisterous, Democratic in its sentiments, a little less predictable. (Stephen Longfellow Jr. became an Athenaean, too, perhaps to annoy his father, perhaps because they were just more fun to be with.) For all their undergraduate pomposity, these societies—whose meetings took place amid a colorful array of other extracurricular pursuits, ranging from cadet military reviews to brutal late-night pranks—fulfilled a serious purpose. For one thing, they had excellent lending libraries of contemporary books and journals, conscientiously maintained and intelligently selected (Longfellow was one of the Peucinian librarians in 1824–25 and helped compile its first catalogue). And the society debates were an important training ground for ambitious young men seeking advancement in a postcollegiate culture that still depended so much on the spoken word—in the pulpit, before a jury, on the election stump. It would be anachronistic to label the Peucinian “conservative” and the Athenaean “liberal,” as many commentators have done, for the modern labels do not exactly fit (Longfellow, for example, was far more progressive in his political views than Hawthorne or his fellow Athenaean Franklin Pierce). Perhaps it is more accurate to say they corresponded to certain ways of viewing the world, and on that the two young writers already diverged.
One other thing distinguished Longfellow from all his fellow students: he was becoming a well-known writer, at least among subscribers to the short-lived but respectable Boston monthly The United States Literary Gazette. Within the two years of its existence, the Gazette published twenty-four of his poems and short prose pieces, surely an unprecedented achievement for an American undergraduate. Fourteen of these poems were republished in Miscellaneous Poems Selected from the United States Literary Gazette in 1826—the first collected publication in book form of any of his work—and two of them, “The Indian Hunter” and “Woods in Winter,” appeared in 1830 in Studies in Poetry, an anthology compiled by his classmate, George Barrell Cheever. This exposure brought Longfellow his first public criticism: in the North American Review for April of 1826, the reviewer of Miscellaneous Poems noted “a good deal of poetical feeling and imagery in the pieces contributed by Mr. Longfellow. . . . He is generally flowing, manly, and correct; but he occasionally allows a feeble line, or negligent expression, to have place. . . . We could point to other occasional blemishes, but these weigh little in comparison with the author’s prevailing merits.”
As Henry wrote to his father in 1824, as they were considering what career he might follow: “I most eagerly aspire after future eminence in literature, my whole soul burns most ardently for it, and every earthly thought centers on it.” But how could he escape the profession his father thought him most suited for, the law?
THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM
Le Havre de Grace, France
AT 4:00 P.M. ON JUNE 14, 1826, the ship Cadmus arrived safely at the mouth of the Seine after a thirty-day voyage from New York. Her passengers included a dozen or more Frenchmen and the nineteen-year-old Henry Longfellow. The extraordinarily smooth passage had been enlivened only by their chattering, “for Frenchmen you know talk incessantly,” as Longfellow wrote to his mother. He had had his first jolt as a traveler: his schoolboy French, he had discovered, was not good enough for him to converse easily with a native. Nor was he prepared for European officialdom. He had thought he could hop immediately on the steamer for Rouen and did not realize the police and customs officers would detain him a day until his papers were determined to be in order. But the novelty of the scene at Le Havre—the seaport’s quaint houses, the ancient fortifications, the laundry flapping from every upper window—diverted him, and he wrote to his brother Stephen that he had been “irresistably seized with divers fits of laughter” at the sight of fiercely whiskered “gens-d’armes,” wooden-shoed women, and “the dames of Normandy with tall pyramidal caps.” This was the giddiness of a youth who had been confined on shipboard for too many days and who could scarcely believe he had at last set foot in Europe. His deep-rooted need to pass all experience through the filter of literature did not fail him: the green highlands of Honfleur across the Seine reminded him that Washington Irving had set his tale “Annette Delarbre” there. And he was immediately struck by the French preoccupation with food: he wrote home with wonderment at the ten-course meal common in a “table d’hote.” Having missed the steamer, he had to take the jostling diligence first to Rouen, where he paid his respects at the tomb of Richard the Lion-Hearted and the site of Joan of Arc’s martyrdom, and then to the “great Babylon” itself, Paris. Not wishing to appear too impressed, he told his sisters “Paris is a gloomy city—built all of yellow stone—streaked and defaced with smoke and dust—streets narrow and full of black mud . . . —no sidewalks—cabriolets—fiacres and carriages of all kinds driving close to the houses—and spattering or running down whole ranks of foot passengers—and noise and stench enough to drive a man mad.”
Yet how thrilled he was to have come so far, so unexpectedly quickly. His last year at Bowdoin had found him worrying over what profession to pursue. He had no taste for medicine or the ministry and feared he lacked the oratorical skills required of a lawyer. The possibility of literary fame enticed him, but his father was adamant that no American could make a respectable living as a writer. A good Federalist in the cultural as well as political sense, Stephen Sr. saw literature as a useful, even important embellishment of a gentlemanly life, but hardly an end in itself. Then a door suddenly opened for his son.
According to the traditional accounts of Longfellow’s life, he was offered the new professorsh
ip of modern languages at Bowdoin because an influential trustee of the college, Benjamin Orr, had been impressed by his smooth translation of an ode of Horace at a public examination; the college subsequently sent him abroad to perfect or acquire knowledge of the languages (French, Spanish, Italian) he was expected to teach. This is improbable on several grounds. Given the curricular war within the early-nineteenth-century colleges—between the traditionalists who championed Latin and Greek and the reformers who sought a more useful curriculum—skill at translating a classical poet would not have recommended anyone to the advocates of teaching modern languages. Nor was there an indication that Longfellow had any special abilities at modern languages beyond the veneer of French expected of every genteel young person. Nor was a college as financially insecure as Bowdoin likely to “send” anyone abroad, least of all a nineteen-year-old aspiring man of letters. The truth is that Longfellow found himself in Paris in the summer after his graduation as a sort of speculation on his father’s part. It was a well-founded venture; a man as cautious as Stephen would not have risked wasting the money or exposing his son to the hazards of foreign travel had not a favorable outcome seemed very likely. But it was based on two premises: that the college was serious about funding such a professorship of languages and that Henry was clever enough to master French and Spanish and possibly Italian well enough to be able to teach them. There were, after all, very few Americans who could claim that degree of knowledge.
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