Longfellow

by Charles C. Calhoun

  Now this, for all its light satirical touches, is a very sad story—and one that refuses to offer any narrative satisfaction in the end. Is the reclusive little man, with his foreign ways and (to the locals) worthless trunkload of papery “rubbish,” Longfellow himself? Had his pent-up anger at the college, at the townspeople, at the waste of his talents and experience turned inward in this little exercise in self-effacement? It would be interesting to know how many people in Brunswick read the story. Among his friends, he certainly made no secret of his feelings. Writing to James Berdan in New York, he called Maine “this land of Barbarians—this miserable Down East. I feel as if I were living in exile here.”

  Whatever his frustrations, personal or professional, he had one immediate outlet: a search for another job, which, as we have seen in his Harvard inquiries while abroad, had begun long before he took up his duties at Bowdoin. He kept feelers out in Boston and Cambridge. Word that New York University was about to appoint a professor of modern languages sparked his lively interest—and Stephen Sr.’s discouragement—as did hints of a job in 1834 at the University of Virginia. While it is not difficult to image Longfellow as a New Yorker, seeing him in slave-holding Charlottesville is another matter; how long would he have lasted? Jefferson’s splendid experiment had fizzled, other than architecturally, in the face of Southern anti-intellectualism and Presbyterian suspicion of Jeffersonian free thought. It is an indication of Longfellow’s desperation to leave Maine that he even considered establishing a “Female School in the city of New York, where I understand great things may be done in that way.” More seriously, in July of 1833, the morning he read of the death of the secretary of the U.S. Legation in Madrid, he began lobbying for the post, even asking his Democratic brother-in-law (and Bowdoin classmate) George Washington Pierce for a good word in Washington. Longfellow’s lack of enthusiasm for the Jacksonians was a liability, of course, in that age of ruthless patronage, however accurate his claim that his knowledge of Spain and its language could be matched by few Americans. In 1834, the possibility of taking over the progressive Round Hill School in Northampton, Massachusetts, was also seriously considered, and the prospect of some post editing a literary journal held perennial, if somewhat quixotic, appeal. Meanwhile, Longfellow was trying to find a job for his friend Greene, who had repatriated himself from Rome and was living in his natal Rhode Island, with his very young Roman bride. Waterville College was one possibility; even better was the notion of Greene’s succeeding Longfellow at Bowdoin.

  The most puzzling aspect of Longfellow’s five-year “exile” back in Maine is why he wrote so little poetry. He had, after all, while still an undergraduate, published more respectable work than many American writers twice his age. His Bowdoin classmate (and future social reformer) George Barrell Cheever had included several Longfellow poems in his American Common-Place Book of Poetry (Boston, 1831), adding this generous note:

  Most of Mr. Longfellow’s poetry,—indeed, we believe nearly all that has been published,—appeared, during his college life, in the United States Literary Gazette. It displays a very refined taste, and a very pure vein of poetical feeling. It possesses what has been a rare quality in the American poets,—simplicity of expression, without any attempt to startle the reader, or to produce an effect by far-sought epithets. There is much sweetness in his imagery and language; and sometimes he is hardly excelled by any one for the quiet accuracy exhibited in his pictures of natural objects. His poetry will not easily be forgotten; some of it will be remembered with that of Dana and Bryant.

  Yet even Cheever’s praise has a note of valediction. The bone-aching labor of teaching grammar in four languages to adolescents—while searching for a better job and writing and lecturing on a wide range of literary subjects—is part of the explanation; Longfellow was too exhausted to summon up the concentration required to write poetry. Moreover, his years in Europe had exposed him more directly to the powerful currents of Romanticism, a force growing stronger in his mind as his German improved and he caught some inkling of the power of poets like Novalis and Jean Paul. This was a new idiom in which his ear had not been trained, and whose rejection of self-restraint and rationalism may have thoroughly frightened him. Was there an American audience for such things? The poets anthologized by the pious Cheever would suggest not. Tellingly, the notice of Cheever’s book in the North American Review (October, 1831) speaks of Longfellow as “one of the most promising scholars in the country.” It was this side of his multifaceted talents that his admirers in the early 1830s found easiest to praise.

  Thanks to his Madrid friend Alexander H. Everett, the pages of the prestigious North American Review—the intellectual voice of Unitarian Boston and a national forum for literary discussion—were opened to Longfellow’s essays. In April of 1831, his “Origin and Progress of the French Language” appeared, a sketch of the progress of that language from its rustic roots to its age of refinement. “Its chief characteristics,” Longfellow told his readers, “are ease, vivacity, precision, perspicuity and directness. It is superior to all the other languages in colloquial elegance.” Visitors to the theater in France “must have been struck with the vast superiority of the French language to the English in its adaptation to the purposes of conversation and the refinement of its familiar dialogue . . . But in the higher walks of tragic and epic poetry it but feebly seconds the high-aspiring mind.”

  The October issue introduced readers to “Anglo-Saxon Language and Literature.” (“To Englishmen, and their offspring in every land, the Anglo-Saxon is precisely what the Latin is to the Italians, Spaniards, and Portuguese, or the Icelandic to the modern inhabitants of Denmark, Norway and Sweden.”) It told them, in words that would echo through English Ph.D. programs in the century to come, that the study of Anglo-Saxon was “essential to a complete knowledge of modern English,” and it at least introduced many American readers to the possibility that Beowulf was a very great poem. In April of 1832, Longfellow turned to a subject close to his heart, “Spanish Devotional and Moral Poetry”—a genre “strongly marked with the peculiarities of national character.” He made this point even more strongly in the October issue, in tracing the “History of the Italian Languages and Dialects,” for “the language of a nation is the external symbol of its character and its mind.”

  Longfellow admitted that these were merely general surveys of the literatures in question, not scholarly essays, even by the undemanding standards of his time and place, since much of his commentary consisted of translations or paraphrases of European sources. But it would be unfair to underestimate his accomplishment. In the early 1830s, Longfellow more or less invented the discipline of comparative literature in the American college. (Ticknor had attempted something similar at Harvard, but his range was narrower.) His vision of foreign languages not as something “given” but as complex organisms that have grown out of earlier tongues (and, by implication, will continue to develop) may be a pale reflection of German philology, but it was news to most of his American readers. His view that poetry in particular had served as a refining force in this development would have longrange influence on his own work. The continuing link between national character and national language—the idea that the word shapes the action, and the action the word—introduced a note of historicism that would not be thoroughly examined by scholars until much later in the century. He summed up this new mode of knowledge near the start of his encyclopedic essay on the seventeen most important Italian dialects:

  To learn, then, how other nations have thought, and felt, and spoken;—to observe how the language of a people is influenced by its character, customs and government; and to trace it in its gradual development, as it spreads and unfolds itself, like a broad banner, above the march of civilization . . . this is a study worthy the best and noblest mind.

  Longfellow’s most important North American Review essay, however, dealt with a subject linguistically closer to home. In January of 1832 he reviewed a new edition of Sir Philip Sidney’s sixt
eenth-century The Defence of Poesy. He pays quick tribute to Sidney’s achievements and then launches an energetic appeal of his own. Longfellow has a poetics before he has a poetry. He sets out the program that his own best work in the 1840s and 1850s will seek to fulfill. He begins on a note of jeremiad, a ritualistic appeal to the fallen to mend their ways:

  With us, the spirit of the age is clamorous for utility,—for visible, tangible utility,—for bare, brawny, muscular utility. We would be roused to action by the voice of the populace, and the sounds of the crowded mart, and not “lulled asleep in shady idleness with poet’s pastimes.” We are swallowed up in schemes for gain, and engrossed with contrivances for bodily enjoyments, as if this particle of dust were immortal,—as if the soul needed no aliment, and the mind no raiment. We glory in the extent of our territory, in our rapidly increasing population, in our agricultural privileges, and our commercial advantages. We boast of the magnificence and beauty of our natural scenery. . . . We boast of the increase and extent of our physical strength, the sound of populous cities, breaking the silence and solitude of our Western territories,—plantations conquered from the forest, and gardens springing up in the wilderness. Yet the true glory of a nation consists not in the extent of its territory, the pomp of its forests, the majesty of its rivers, the height of its mountains, and the beauty of its sky; but in the extent of its mental power,—the majesty of its intellect,—the height and depth and purity of its moral nature. . . . True greatness is the greatness of the mind;—the true glory of a nation is moral and intellectual preeminence.

  He warns that we are led astray by this word “utility”—“We are too apt to think that nothing can be useful, but what is done with a noise, at noonday, and at the corners of the streets.” Yet in a commercial-minded democracy, too many associate the name of scholar and man of letters with “effeminacy and inefficiency.” Poetry in particular is singled out for contempt and denounced because, it is said, “it unfits for the common duties of life, and the intercourse of this matter-of-fact world.” But none of this is necessary. “On the contrary, it may be made, and should be made, an instrument for improving the condition of society, and advancing the great purpose of human happiness. Man must have his hours of meditation as well as of action.” Poetry has moral force because “the natural tendency of poetry is to give us correct moral impressions, and thereby advance the cause of truth and the improvement of society.”

  Back in his role of championing comparative literature, Longfellow points out that “a great and various literature is . . . the most valuable possession of which any nation can boast,” and he cites the Nibelungenlied, the Poema del mio Cid, and the Songs of the Troubadours to prove his point. Great poetry often has this intensely national tone, he assures his readers, but “to effect this, it is not necessary that the war-whoop should ring in every line, and every page be rife with scalps, tomahawks and wampum.” It should be national in that it bears “the stamp of national character.” In writing of nature in particular, let it be an American nature. “Let us have no more sky-larks and nightingales. For us they only warble in books. A painter might as well introduce an elephant or a rhinoceros into a New England landscape.” In creating an American imagery, we even might look, he notes, at the language of our North American Indians.

  Why, then, did his public have to wait twenty-three more years for The Song of Hiawatha? There is a clue in an almost parenthetical remark Longfellow makes toward the end of his long essay: “Another circumstance which tends to give an effeminate and unmanly character of our literature, is the precocity of our writers. Premature exhibitions of talent are an unstable foundation to build a national literature upon.” The concept of the “unmanly” was to be so coarsened later in the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth, that we need to try to figure out what Longfellow meant by it in 1832. “Irresponsible” and “self-indulgent” perhaps come closer to the connotation of that word for his generation, with “effeminacy” evoking a world in which masculine duty is neglected. Precocious he had been, but he was trying to make up for it.

  As for his own life, there appeared two unmistakable indices of his new sense of maturity. He produced a substantial prose work that earned him an international audience, and he got married.

  The success in 1833 of Longfellow’s first extensive work in prose, Outre-Mer, A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea, is a reminder that his career as a writer might have taken a very different turn—for example, into the field of memoir, travel narrative, and literary journalism that was being industriously tilled in the 1830s by his fellow Portlander Nathaniel Parker Willis. The success of the book may perplex a modern reader, however, because Outre-Mer seems so lacking in immediate “felt” response to the landscapes and cultures its narrator is discovering, it could almost have been written by someone who had never been to Europe at all, but who had the run of a very good library. Yet Longfellow’s contemporaries relished the work. It was even reprinted in Britain, where people notoriously asked, “Who reads an American book?” There are two possible explanations for this reception, at least among American readers. The first can be found in his father’s reply in May of 1827 to Henry’s letter written from Bordeaux three months earlier:

  You can have no idea how much pleasure your descriptions afford us. Being extremely happy in the manner in which you paint these scenes, they are presented to the mind’s eye in vivid colours, & leave a lasting & pleasing impression. And, to us who have not an opportunity of visiting them personally, it affords a pleasure which I cannot describe—You must therefore recollect that you gaze on these wonders, not merely for your own gratification, but for the pleasure & instruction of others who are far distant.

  There is a note of parental pride here—perhaps also an attempt to maximize the return, so to speak, on his hefty investment in his son’s travels—but other book-buying Americans were also eager for descriptions of lands beyond the sea. The increasing “refinement” of America in the 1830s, which Richard Bushman and others have chronicled, involved more than domestic comforts and stylish furnishings; it implied a familiarity with the European cultures that still largely supplied the model for such improvements. Unable to visit such places themselves with much security or ease until the arrival of the transatlantic steamers in the 1850s, middle-class American readers had to rely on the personal narratives of naval officers and merchants, or on the historical and literary work of such writers as Willis and Irving.

  Washington Irving is the key figure; Outre-Mer is an obvious attempt to emulate the success in 1819 of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., with which Irving had proved that an American could attract even a British audience if he mastered the cool, urbane, slightly bemused voice of the Augustan essayists. This was a successful career move away from the earthier, more burlesque “Dutch” style of Irving’s Salmagundi days. The Sketch Book contained two classic stories—“Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”—and a nostalgic account of the traditional British Christmas that was to be a powerful influence on how that holiday was perceived in the English-speaking world (not least by Charles Dickens when he came to write “A Christmas Carol” in 1843). These were mixed with miscellaneous essays, in Irving’s smooth conversational tone, offering a traveler’s thoughts on Westminster Abbey, Stratford-on-Avon, British inns, and John Bull’s character, among other odds and ends from his travel notebooks. (An embryonic tourist industry was taking shape before the reader’s eyes.) The book was a hit—in England as well as at home—and Irving quickly cloned it in Bracebridge Hall (1821) and the less successful Tales of a Traveller by Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1824).

  Longfellow extends Irving’s geographic range. “Beyond the sea” meant for Longfellow the Mediterranean South, even though his book starts in northern France, lingers there for some seventy pages, and ends with its narrator en route to German-speaking lands. The Bowdoin professor took a step backward as well, by publishing Outre-Mer anonymously (most readers would have known who “Geoff
rey Crayon” was)—a demurral more typical of the eighteenth century than of the nineteenth in its implied assumption that a gentleman did not write for a living, and most especially did not indulge in fiction and travel writing, if he wished to be taken seriously as a college professor. Both Irving’s and Longfellow’s books owe much to Goldsmith’s moralizing poem The Traveller (1765), but Longfellow adds a Byronic note—a faint one, for he is Childe Harold with a Puritan conscience. And Outre-Mer is genuinely a travel book, sticking to an itinerary that matched Longfellow’s own in 1826–29, rather than a miscellany of essays in the Irving manner. A very odd travel book, to be sure. With Slidell’s A Year in Spain in hand, you might be able to find your way across the country even today. With Longfellow’s, you would soon be lost in a thicket of anecdotes and tales, entangled with surveys of medieval literature.

  Some of these tales are entertaining. The best is “Martin Franc and the Monk of Saint Anthony,” a mildly racy story about a leering, redfaced, comic friar who attempts, in a dimly-lit chapel, to buy the favors of the beautiful wife of Martin Franc, a merchant who has fallen on hard times. She decides to teach the old reprobate a lesson and restore her worthy husband’s fortunes with the friar’s purse, by luring him to her house while her husband is said to be away. Franc of course beats the lecherous friar over the head and shoulders—a little too soundly, for he kills him. The pleasure of the tale arises from the efforts to dispose of the friar’s body by a succession of innocent parties, each of whom accidentally comes into possession of the corpse and thinks he is the one who killed him. (With its quick, nocturnal movement, it would make a good one-act opera, in the Gianni Schicchi manner.) The narrator of Outre-Mer distances himself from this cheerfully amoral tale by saying he heard it from another guest at the Golden Lion at Rouen, and he makes it even more acceptable to his Protestant readers by confirming their suspicions about the corruption of the Church.