Longfellow

by Charles C. Calhoun

  On August 27, however, Henry wrote to the president of Bowdoin, turning down the offer made a year earlier to be instructor in modern languages, at a salary of six hundred dollars: “having at great expense, devoted four years to the acquisition of the French, Spanish, Italian, and German, languages, I cannot accept a subordinate station with a salary so disproportionate to the duties required.” This was an exaggeration of his command of German (and of his time in Europe), but the objection was well founded. Since the new term was soon to begin, the college faced some embarrassment (everyone he had seen in Boston, he told his father, assumed he had the professorship). The trustees persuaded the overseers to compromise. On September 2, he accepted the professorship, at a salary of eight hundred dollars, with an additional hundred for serving as college librarian (a post that required one hour of work a day in term), “with the understanding that my salary shall at some future day be made equal to that of the other professors.” It was a nice piece of work, offering all parties a chance to save face. It also revealed an independent streak in Henry that put his father on notice that the terms of their relationship had changed.

  Earlier that year, while still at Göttingen, Longfellow had allowed himself, in a letter to his father, to envision an ideal university. The traditional New England model of the country college, with its classical curriculum and its theological tone, was clearly out of date in a land that enjoyed both freedom of thought and “the matter-of-fact way of thinking”; it would soon be swept away, he predicted, by democratic public opinion. Germany and France had shown the way by making higher education available to everyone who deserved it. But what was the idea of an American university? “Two or three large brick buildings with a chapel, and a President to pray in it.” Even Jefferson—“Mr. Jefferson,” he calls him—failed at his attempt to create a modern university because he began “where everybody else in our country would have begun,—by building college halls and then trying to stock them with Students.” European universities had not shared this architectural fixation—“one might live in Göttingen from one year’s end to the other without having the slightest idea of its being the seat of a University.” Rather, they had originated as gatherings of professors renowned enough to draw students to them and “capable of teaching them something they did not know before.”

  By this point in his prospectus, Longfellow had really got going—one can see the fluttering student lamp on his table, smell the pipe tobacco—and he rhapsodized: “instead of seeing a new College ushered into existence every winter by a petition to the Legislature for funds to put up a parcel of Woolen-Factory buildings for students—we should see capital better employed in enriching the libraries of the country and making them public!—and instead of seeing the youth of our country chained together like galley slaves and ‘scouraged to the dungeons’—as it were—our eyes would be cheered by the grateful spectacle of mind throwing its fetters off—and education freed from its chains and shackles.”

  It is not known what Stephen Longfellow, a very conventional man and trustee of the local college, made of this. Possibly he took the woolen-factory buildings as a reference to Waterville College (today, Colby), Bowdoin’s new rival in Maine; the Fichtean tone of “mind throwing its fetters off” must have sounded like the worst excesses of the new German romanticism. But his son was just warming up. The University of Paris, with its free lectures, would be his model—“We think in America, that there is nothing but frivolity in France—would God we had a little such frivolity in our country.” Or take German universities as models:

  Let two or three Professors—begin the work—let them deliver lectures in some town—(Portland seems to me better adapted for it than any other place in our part of the country)—not in a village—not in the woods if their lectures be worth anything—they will have hearers and disciples enough—and a nucleus will thus be formed around which is to grow an University. In the outset, lectures could be gratis—no, the profits arising therefrom should be the Professor’s support. Every one should rely upon his own talents for support—and his pay would in consequence be in proportion to his ability.

  What followed must have caused Stephen some alarm. Henry reaffirmed that he wanted nothing to do with Bowdoin, whose “system is too limited and superficial.” He would sow the seeds of university reform on the European model back in Maine. “Portland is just the spot for an University—(not a College)—it is neither too large nor too small.” Upon returning home, he would put his shoulder to this particular wheel. He reminded his father that even he had once proposed giving up practice and offering lectures in the law instead (possibly on the model of Tapping Reeve’s famous law school in Litchfield, Connecticut). The two of them would join forces and welcome others. “Let not a word be said about an University but let lectures upon different subjects be read—and students will collect. Thus we may steal silently upon the world with these innovations—and without Legislative grants, or College buildings, our State will see an University spring into existence in its very bosom—without its having even an intimation of its origin.”

  Longfellow was a generation ahead of his time in calling for universities on the European research model—he would live to see a version of this emerge in President Eliot’s Harvard after the Civil War—and he romanticized the air of academic freedom and intellectual laissez-faire that he detected in his continental models; in truth, the German universities were all under close government oversight, as some liberal Göttingen professors were to discover to their peril in the 1830s. But he was strikingly progressive in calling for free higher education, free public libraries, merit pay for teaching, and something like a lyceum for the general intelligent public, and he was prescient in criticizing American educators for caring more for bricks and mortar than for ideas. (And he was right in implying that Bowdoin would have been a stronger, freer institution had it been situated in Portland.)

  What Longfellow found when he started teaching in Brunswick in September of 1829 was a college even more deeply mired in politics than when he had left. The struggle between Trinitarian Congregationalists and liberal Unitarians for the “soul” of the institution seemed an intramural affair compared to the public controversy that had erupted over the right claimed by the Maine legislature to pack the college’s governing boards with political appointees. In earlier days, this might have been an advantage in terms of the college’s financial stability, but statehood in 1820 had changed all that. Bowdoin College was identified in the minds of many voters in the new state as a citadel of reaction, a cultural bastion of the antidemocratic views of its Federalist and later Whig supporters. The new Maine majority was Democratic and backcountry, suspicious of the older coastal elite, and decidedly evangelical in its religion, which tended to be Baptist or Methodist rather than Congregational, much less Unitarian. The new state’s constitution placed Bowdoin firmly under the legislature’s control, and it was not until 1833 (and the dramatic dismissal, then return—after a law suit—of President Allen) that the college was able to assert its contractual right to existence as a private institution. (At that point, the state subsidies stopped, and the Congregationalists—who were able to raise funds—tightened their grip for half a century on what was still, strictly speaking, a secular college.)

  These quarrels would have seemed somewhat remote to the young professor, who in 1829 was more or less inventing his discipline as he went along (but not totally remote: it was Stephen Longfellow Sr. who represented the college, unsuccessfully, in the crucial suit McKean v. Allen). If American students were in fact galley slaves, it was now Henry who had to take his turn with the whip. New curricular arrangements at the end of fall term required Longfellow to hear the junior class recite French every afternoon, the seniors recite both French and Spanish three times a week (at noon), and the sophomores recite French every morning—in other words, three recitations a day, Saturday afternoon excepted, in addition to a private lesson in German and the hour each day spent running the libra
ry. (“Recitation” in this context meant calling on each student, without warning, to repeat from memory an assigned lesson or to read and translate some lines of a foreign text on the spot. The instructor gave a numerical mark for each such performance; at the end of term, these were added up, and rank in class determined—often to the students’ surprise, since they had not been told their marks.) “The prospect before me seems thick-sown with occupations,” Henry soon complained to his father, “promising me little leisure for my private studies, which on account of my busy life this last term, already begin to assume a retrograde march.”

  Longfellow’s most immediate challenge was the lack of adequate, up-to-date textbooks, so he set out to write his own, tailored for his students, and had them set in type by Brunswick’s ambitious printer and bookdealer, Joseph Griffin. In 1830, for example, Longfellow edited (anonymously) a 156-page volume called Manuel de Proverbes Dramatiques for the benefit of his French students. As he explained in a letter to Alexander Slidell, “It is a collection of [seven] small comedies in french, such as are performed in the Soirees of Paris . . . [F]rom necessity I shall be obliged to publish the work in parts, wanting it for immediate use in one of my classes.” His next work that year had a more personal touch: a translation of Lhomond’s Elements of French Grammar . . . with Notes, and Such Illustrations as Were Thought Necessary for the American Pupil—an elementary textbook, much used in France, and especially adapted by its editor for his Bowdoin students. French Exercises, keyed to Lhomond, followed. The same year, Griffin printed Longfellow’s edition of Novelas Espanola. El Serrano de las Alpujarras; y el Cuadro Misterioso. These were Spanish versions of Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Young Italian.” None of this was scholarly work in the modern sense, but it was a remarkable harvest for one year—and from a small provincial printing shop—and one that showed a real spirit of pedagogical enterprise. Longfellow was not the only Bowdoin professor whose textbooks found a national market—Parker Cleaveland on mineralogy, Samuel Newman on rhetoric, and Thomas Upham’s protopsychological treatise on the will were widely used in American colleges—but his rapidity of publication stands out. He personally paid Griffin for printing these works (the five hundred copies of the first Lhomond edition cost him seventy-two dollars) and had them published under the name of the Portland bookseller Samuel Colman; he recovered his costs as students purchased the books. The second edition of the French grammar in 1831 included the first title page to carry his name, a sign of confidence in his increasing skill, and was published in Boston by Gray and Bowen, a sign of his growing marketability. The same firm published his classroom edition of Le Ministre de Wakefield, translated by a Frenchman from Goldsmith, in 1831, and the next year a Syllabus de la Grammaire Italienne. Par H. W. Longfellow, Professeur de Langues Modernes a Bowdoin-College. A l’Usage de Ceux Qui Possedent la Langue Francaise—a subject so new to American collegians, it had to be presented in French. This was followed that year by a reader, Saggi de’ Novellieri Italiani d’Ogni Secolo: Tratti da Piu Celebri Scritorri, con Brevi Notizie intorno all Vita di Ciascheduno. Da H. L. Longfellow—from Boston’s “Presso Gray e Bowen.”

  These textbooks were more than an entrepreneurial venture, in either the monetary or careerist sense. As he explained to his father, he had been delighted to discover in the Bowdoin library some French tales—the proverbes dramatiques—that he knew would delight his students. He made a selection from them, designed for those who were advanced enough in the language to want “a manual of polite conversation on familiar topics.” He was surprised no one had thought to do something along those lines earlier. “The more I see of the life of an instructer the more I wonder at the course generally pursued by teachers. They seem to forget, that the youthful mind is to be interested in order to be instructed: or at least they overlook the means, by which they may best lead on the mental faculties, at an age when amusement is a more powerful incentive than improvement.” Instead, texts reproduced the works of the most polished writers, “fruit that hangs beyond the reach of children, and those whom ignorance of a foreign language puts on the same footing with children.” Hence the appeal of his little collection of dramas, conversational in tone and full of the humor of everyday life.

  The playfulness of this approach does not disguise the fact that Longfellow was deeply unhappy in these first years back in Brunswick. This was more than simply the deflation anyone might suffer if, after years of wandering through the capitals of Europe and sampling a wide range of pleasures, he found himself back where he had started, on the edge of the pine woods and sandy plains of a small Maine town. It had to do with his feeling of stasis. In June of 1830, in a letter full of nostalgia for Italy, he described for George Washington Greene his daily life at college:

  My window looks out upon a balm-of-Gillead tree and the college Chapel—and by way of back-ground, I have a fine view of the president’s barn and the great road to Portland. I rise at six in the morning and hear a french recitation immediately. At seven I breakfast and am then master of my time until eleven—when I hear a Spanish lesson. After recitation I take a lunch—and at 12 o’clock go into the Library where I remain till one. I am then at leisure for the afternoon until five when I have another french recitation—at six I take coffee—walk and visit friends until nine—study till twelve, and then sleep until six—when I begin the same round again. Such is the outline of my life. The intervals of college duty, I fill up with my own studies. Last term I was publishing books for the use of my pupils, in whom I take a very deep interest. This term I am writing a course of lectures on Modern Literature—or rather on French, Spanish, and Italian Literature—which I am to deliver in Portland next winter. . . . You see I lead a very sober, jog-trot kind of life. My circle of acquaintances in town is very limited, and I have taken great pains that it should be so—I am on very intimate terms in three families, and that is quite enough. I dont care for general society. I like intimate footings.

  He took his revenge on Brunswick in a brief work called “The Wondrous Tale of a Little Man in Gosling Green,” which was published in Horace Greeley’s The New-Yorker in November of 1834, after winning fifty dollars for its author in that magazine’s story contest. Writing under the name George F. Brown, Longfellow invented a whimsical yet somehow disturbing story about a mysterious stranger who comes to town. Drawing on both the German Märchen tradition and the sly “Down East” humor popularized by Seba Smith, the tale takes place in “Bungonuck,” which (like the real Brunswick) sits “upon the margin of one of the blue rivers that pour their tributary waters into the broad lap of Merry-meeting Bay.” It is “a drowsy land, where the rush of a waterfall lulls the inhabitants into a dreamy state of existence, leaving them neither quite asleep, nor quite awake.” The wide and sandy main street “yawns to receive the weary traveller”; the only daily event that breaks the calm is the arrival at noon of the mail coach, which stops briefly “and then wheels away again for the shadowy regions of Down East; for Down East recedes from you as you advance.” Aside from the occasional circus, the only interruptions in the village routine arise from disputes at town meeting or schisms in the church, “of as great importance to the elders of the village as was the Arian or Socinian controversy to the early Christian Fathers.” As for the inhabitants, “Having very little business of their own, they have ample leisure to devote to the affairs of their neighbors; and, it is said, that even to this day, if a Bungonucker wishes to find out what is going on in his own family, the surest and most expeditious way is to ask the person who lives next door.”

  Into this sleepy world arrives one summer day a stranger, “gentlemanly-looking,” wearing a long surtout gosling green in color, accompanied by a large nail-bound trunk. He speaks English well but with a foreign accent. He eats his dinner at the inn, lights a cigar, and rides off again in the stage, as mysteriously as he had arrived. The mild stir this caused is soon forgotten, until he appears again in the fall, at the same hour and in the sa
me clothes. Where had he been? He evades answering the townspeople directly.

  They pressed upon him close, and succeeded in tracking him as far as Owl’s Head and Clam Cove. Then he dodged them, though they contrived to get another peep at him near Cape Split, and Haycock Harbor, and fairly came up with him again among the Passamaquoddy Indians and the Blue Noses. They finally lost sight of him altogether, and gave up the pursuit. All they could gather from his evasive answers was, that though he found the place where they eat plum-cake for breakfast yet he did not get far enough to see the sun rise in the west. As for Down East, he said he could not find it. The farther he went, the farther that went; it was like trying to tread upon your own shadow.

  To the puzzlement of the Bungonuckers, he settles in the town, opening a variety store “which, like a tailor’s drawer, contained a little of everything,” and drinking brandy, smoking his pipe, evading questions as to his true identity—“a very quiet, unoffending, urbane man, [who] had evidently seen better days; but where and when was an impenetrable mystery.” Wild rumors circulate—that he is an exiled general, that he is a Jesuit. As the years pass, he falls into an irreversible decline, selling his worldly goods one by one and shutting himself away in his room over the shop. His health rapidly fails, and one day the deacon calls to determine once and for all if the rumors are true that he is an atheist. Satisfying himself that the Little Man in Gosling Green does at least believe in the Devil, the deacon reports back, and a flood of village charity sweeps down upon the starving, much misunderstood stranger. “Now he had more dinners sent to him in one week than he could eat in three. But alas! these blessings came too late.” All the local samaritans can do is to provide him an extra blanket and a feather bed, to die on. “There are some places in the world where it is easier to die than to live.” Even the mysterious trunk, when prised open, is “found to contain nothing but a Day-book and Ledger, a file of old musty accounts, and a razor, wrapped up in part of a cotton shirt.” The Little Man in Gosling Green takes his secret with him to the grave.