Longfellow

by Charles C. Calhoun

  But its author had a price to pay. After its original appearance in an American newspaper, Longfellow was accused in the New York Atlas and Constellation of plagiarizing the story from a recent poem on a similar theme, “The Knight and the Friar,” by George Colman. As he patiently explained in reply, he had based his tale on a thirteenth-century Norman fabliau, Le Segretain Moine, which probably went back to The Arabian Nights. It had been widely imitated through the centuries, “passing through as many hands as did the body of Friar Gui.” It was a minor annoyance, having to respond to such an unfounded charge, but it was not to be the only occasion in his career when he was to be charged, unfairly, with plagiarism. Otherwise, the reviews were friendly. The Boston Mercantile Journal quickly determined that the anonymous author was “no other than a Brunswick professor, well known long since among the poets and scholars of the North.” The Eastern Argus in Portland praised Outre-Mer’s moral tone: “It is a book which may be read in the domestic circle without creating a false excitement in young minds, or reconciling them to crime by gilding it with splendor.” A review in the Literary Journal of Providence, Rhode Island—probably written by his friend George Washington Greene—praised the author’s classic style. “It has none of the mysticism that disfigures so large a portion of the works of the day: none of those labored efforts at the description of feelings, whose indistinct expression shows that they have not their source in the heart.” The author, in other words, was not to be mistaken for a Transcendentalist. Reviewing the second number, the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Gazette wished the author had chosen a “more euphonious title” but admired his “unaffected” prose and praised the quality of the printing (“the handsomest letter-press we have ever seen issued from any establishment in this country”).

  His father had also urged him to use something straightforward and English for a title, but Longfellow explained his choice in his preface: the Pays d’Outre-Mer, or Land Beyond the Sea, was what crusaders and pilgrims had called the Holy Land. “I, too, in a certain sense, have been a pilgrim of Outre-Mer; for to my youthful imagination the Old World was a kind of Holy Land, lying afar off beyond the blue horizon of the ocean; and when its shores first rose upon my sight, looming through the hazy atmosphere of the sea, my heart swelled with the deep emotions of the pilgrim, when he sees afar the spire which rises above the shrine of his devotion.” This suggestion of seeing the objects of his pilgrimage through a kind of scrim, like the gauze used to suggest fog or haze on the nineteenth-century stage, idealizes his journey, despite all his attempts at picaresque detail. (“I have traversed France from Normandy to Navarre; smoked my pipe in a Flemish inn; floated through Holland in a Trekschuit; trimmed my midnight lamp in a German university; wandered and mused amid the classic scenes of Italy; and listened to the gay guitar and merry castanet on the borders of the blue Guadalquivir.”) Although the work is styled as a pilgrimage, the actual nature of Outre-Mer is better expressed in the chapter title “A Tailor’s Drawer”—“a title which the Spaniards give to a desultory discourse, wherein various and discordant themes are touched upon, and which is crammed full of little shreds and patches of erudition.”

  The stitched-together nature of the book owes much to Longfellow’s method of prose composition at this stage of his career. He had told his father in a letter from Göttingen in 1829 that he was writing a book—“a kind of Sketch-Book of scenes in France, Spain, and Italy,” presumably based on his travel journals. In 1831, when Joseph T. Buckingham asked him to contribute to the New England Magazine, Longfellow sent him some sketches that he had written abroad, under the general title of The Schoolmaster. The narrator lives and teaches in a New England village, but his restlessness as a youth, he confesses, had sent him wandering abroad. The second sketch includes the account of travel in a Norman diligence that reappears at the start of Outre-Mer, and the third draws on Longfellow’s sojourn at the maison de santé at Auteuil. Three final sketches take “the schoolmaster” through Paris. At this point Longfellow dropped the project, telling Greene in March of 1833 that he was writing a book based on his travels, “composed of descriptions, sketches of character, tales illustrating manners and customs, and tales illustrating nothing in particular.” The persona of the village schoolmaster reminiscing about his Wanderjahre in Europe had allowed the writer to test the market. He was encouraged by the result, although he told Greene, “I find it requires little courage to publish grammars and school books; but in the department of fine writing . . . it requires vastly more.” The first number of Outre-Mer, incorporating much of The Schoolmaster, was printed in an edition of five hundred copies by Joseph Griffin in Brunswick and published by Hilliard, Gray & Co. in Boston in 1833. Longfellow assured a friend that future numbers would “appear incessantly“—he projected ten. A second number followed in 1834 from Lilly, Wait, and Co. in Boston, but publication in parts was abandoned, and in 1835 Harper & Brothers in New York published a two-volume edition containing much new material, including several of his North American Review essays on foreign literatures. A second edition was published in 1846 (with some deletions) in response to Longfellow’s growing international reputation as a poet.

  Longfellow’s devastating experience on his second trip to Europe in 1835–36 made further sketches in the innocent, easygoing manner of Outre-Mer impossible, and the record of that journey would take a more diffuse form. Nonetheless, in publishing his first original book, he had shown a professional writer’s skill in recycling material, and he had demonstrated the possibility of combining the scholarly and the experiential: the life of the study and the life of the road. How many of his fellow authors had risked passage through bandit-infested mountains or tracked down Lord Byron’s gondolier? At the same time, Outre-Mer is a fashionably melancholy book—how many other young travelers spent so much time in cemeteries?—given Longfellow’s penchant for meditations among the ruins. It is never as confessional as we would wish, yet it is a book of self-discovery—for the most part intellectual discovery, but occasionally something else. The heart of it is a chapter midway through called “The Village of El Pardillo.” It tells of a short stay among humble Castilian peasants, on the slope of the Guadarrama Mountains, near a ruined Moorish castle, “in that delicious season when the coy and capricious maidenhood of spring is swelling into the warmer, riper, and more voluptuous womanhood of summer.” The narrator travels there with his Madrid landlord Don Valentin and the landlord’s beautiful daughter. He paints a genre scene of village life, including an unexpectedly sympathetic account of rural Catholicism, and he is enchanted by a culture in which Sunday morning Mass can be followed by sports in the afternoon and dancing and singing at night—how far he was from old New England! In a letter home from Spain in 1827, Longfellow had told of joining in one of these dances and swinging his arms and legs so vigorously, he had knocked off one man’s hat and accidentally kicked another. The narrator of Outre-Mer skips over that lively detail, which might suggest tipsiness, and merely exclaims: “I love these rural dances,—from my heart I love them.” He was beyond the sea indeed.

  This toning down of his experience abroad, these idealizing glosses, may have reflected not only a professional writer’s calculation of his audience’s expectations, but Longfellow’s own new sense of himself as a married man of stature in the community. Whatever his disappointment with Brunswick, his time as a professor there would always be associated in his mind with his first marriage—which may explain why he so rarely returned to the college during his annual visits in later life to Portland. The details of his marriage to Mary Storer Potter are even mistier than his Outre-Mer. They had met as children when they both attended Portland Academy (she was five years younger); her father was Barrett Potter, the long-term judge of probate for Cumberland County and a close associate of Longfellow’s father. It must have pleased Stephen enormously to have both his older sons marry into the small circle of local lawyers and judges, and begin careers that would keep them within the extended fam
ily circle—in 1831, Stephen Jr. had married Marianne Preble after serving in the Netherlands as private secretary to her father, Judge William Pitt Preble, when he was U.S. Minister at The Hague.

  Whether Henry and Mary corresponded during his 1826–29 trip we do not know; after her death, he burned all of her papers in his possession. At any rate, he must have seemed a very eligible young man upon his return to Maine—travel in Europe being a source of much prestige back home—and their courtship proceeded rapidly, even given the well-known protectiveness shown by Judge Potter, a widower, toward his three daughters. The couple was engaged by September of 1830 and married on September 14, 1831, in Portland, then immediately moved to Brunswick. What we know of Mary comes from a poorly painted portrait—a copy of a lost original—a handful of letters to her family, a friend’s diary, and an occasional reference to her in other people’s correspondence. In a letter to Judge Potter thanking him for his daughter’s hand, Longfellow praised her “pure heart and guileless disposition.” He added: “I have never seen a woman in whom every look, and word, and action seemed to proceed from so gentle and innocent a spirit. Indeed, how much she possesses of all we most admire in the female character!” (It is one of the rare references to her in any of his surviving correspondence.) On her part, Mary wrote to one of his sisters in June of 1831 that she bore being separated from him for three weeks “with the spirit of a martyr, always having in view the time when I shall never be separated from him. The high opinion I had of him before I knew him so well has been increased, and every time we meet I see some new point in his character, for which I love him better, if possible, than before. I certainly never imagined that I could find in this world so good and affectionate a person, and one who would love me so much. He answers much better to a being of my imagination than one of real life.” Zilpah wrote to a friend that she was “much pleased with this engagement also, far more, so, than if Henry had introduced us to a city lady of fortune, with her airs & graces & expensive habits, as our future daughter in law.” The marriage seemed to her a success—Stephen and Marianne already having shown signs of strain in theirs—and in 1835, after the couple had sailed for Europe, she described Mary as “a very lovely woman, very affectionate and amiable.”

  The young professor and “little Mary,” as he often referred to her, set up housekeeping in a “cape” (a one-and-a-half-story New England house) on what is now Potter Street in Brunswick, a few minutes’ walk from the Bowdoin campus. The house still exists, remarkably transmogrified: it forms the second story of the General Joshua L. Chamberlain House, the medieval-revival landmark on Maine Street where the Civil War hero (and sometime professor of modern languages) spent much of his adult life, including his time as governor of Maine and president of Bowdoin. The Longfellows’ front door can still be recognized above the portico of Chamberlain’s house. (It was a common practice in New England to move wooden-framed houses, with the aid of teams of oxen, and an occasional practice to raise them and build a new floor underneath.) Visiting the young couple’s house in July of 1833, Zilpah described it as so “surrounded by shrubbery, you would almost think they lived in a garden—it is a charming quiet place.”

  Mary had the same problem that many of her other married friends faced—finding a suitable servant. Zilpah reported that a “black girl” had been engaged (like many coastal New England towns, both Portland and Brunswick had small communities of African Americans, most of them descendants of sailors or locally owned eighteenth-century slaves). “I should not think Mary would care for the color of her skin if her conduct was fair,“ she added. Zilpah did wonder if the young woman would be allowed to ride to Brunswick in the public stage. There had just been a public debate in Portland, which some of the Longfellow family had attended, between colonizationists and abolitionists. The colonizationists—who favored returning the slaves, and possibly all people of African descent, to Africa—overwhelmingly prevailed. Attempts to debate slavery publicly in Brunswick throughout the early 1830s had been discouraged for fear of riot; as in other small ship-building and ship-owning towns on the Maine coast, many of the leading citizens had a vested interest in the cotton trade between the Southern ports and Europe. The Bowdoin faculty itself was split between fervent abolitionists and people who just wished the problem would go away.

  An awareness of the problem of slavery on Longfellow’s part is documented as early as 1834. In an incomplete journal, he sketches out an idea for “a wild drama, a tale of this world and of Fairyland,” specifically of the malicious fairy Robin Goodfellow of old English romance. “The subject of the drama will be some of the evil deeds done in the world by the supposed agency of these fairy personages.” There would be three parts:

  Part 1. The Elixir of Life.—Paracelsus searching for this elixir discovers alcohol. The effects, which ensue, are the subject of this portion of the tale.

  Part 2. Witchcraft. The fairy troop sail over the sea to New England. The Salem Tragedy; and all the scenes of persecution which arose from a belief in witchcraft.

  Part 3. The Slave. The idea of slavery supposed to have been a suggestion of the spirits of evil. Scenes of slavery portrayed.

  There is some anachronism here. No matter. I will arrange that in the detail of the piece.

  Longfellow was to return to some of this subject matter—to the plight of the slave in a group of poems in 1843 and to the Salem witch scare in his New England Tragedies of the 1860s. In another 1834 journal, he contemplated a tragedy on the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Haitian revolutionary. “As soon as I can find or make leisure, I intend to write one upon that topic; thereby doing what my feeble talent enables me in the cause of slave-emancipation.” Meanwhile he pondered material closer at hand. “Fate seems to decree that my next book after Outre-Mer shall be the Schoolmaster of Bungonuck.” In his journal, he sketched its contents, which drew on a great deal of material he already had in his tailor’s drawer:

  1. The Table Book—being sundry sentences and sketches, and scraps of erudition, such as creep into my mind unawares, or are noted down from my reading. Critical remarks on Modern Literature etc.

  2. Down East—a history of that land of shadows—more pleasant than authentic.

  3. The Wondrous Tale of the Little Man in Gosling Green.

  4. Essays on various topics.

  The Defense of Poetry.

  Mary was aware from the start of her husband’s overwhelming desire to quit “that land of shadows.” Her own opinions on the subject are sketchy (she was definitely not keen on his taking the school mastership in Northampton), but when the opportunity arose for Longfellow to travel again to Europe, to prepare himself to succeed the great scholar George Ticknor as Smith Professor of Modern Languages and of Belles Lettres at Harvard University, she proved a good sport—and a better sailor than her frequently seasick husband. She could easily have stayed with her family in Portland (as did the wives of many shipmasters) for the year or more he needed to spend abroad, but she determined to go with him (as some shipmasters’ wives did, too). She was considered frail, and Longfellow thought the long sea voyage might strengthen her health, a common nineteenth-century notion. She had already suffered at least one miscarriage. Longfellow’s ever-anxious father thought the trip an unnecessary extravagance, not to mention a peril, and Mary may have shared some of his doubts, but the young professor’s urge to taste again the cultural riches of Europe after his five years of “exile” in Brunswick overrode any objections. This time it would be not a Mediterranean journey, but rather a venture into the North—not just through Germany, but into the Nordic cultures of Scandinavia, a part of Europe known to very few Americans.

  THE JOURNEY NORTH

  LONGFELLOW’S PREVIOUS TRIP to Europe had had a dreamlike quality: he was an imaginative young man with ample resources, a flexible (indeed ever-changing) schedule, and an urgent desire to master languages and survey whole cultures, in whatever circumstances best suited him. His second trip found him laden with m
ore baggage. He knew that his success at Harvard depended on his mastering German—by 1835, the language of scholarship in almost every field—and in buying the most useful books for its library. Unlikely ever to surpass Ticknor as a student of Spanish history and literature, he knew he could create a scholarly presence of his own if he returned to America with some familiarity with Danish, Swedish, and possibly Icelandic—languages virtually unknown in the United States. What little he knew of their literatures, especially the early medieval Norse sagas, struck a deep romantic chord in him. More practically, he was not traveling alone. In addition to his twenty-three-year-old wife, who had never ventured beyond the circle of her Portland and Boston family and friends, Longfellow had agreed to escort (at their own expense) two of Mary’s friends, Mary Goddard and Clara Crowninshield. A few months after their arrival in Europe, a writer they had met in Stockholm summed up the party:

  [Longfellow] was an exceedingly agreeable man. . . . He had . . . a couple of young ladies with him, of whom one was a pleasant little thing, not exactly beautiful but with an expression of kindness that was very pleasing. The other [Mary Goddard], who owned half a million dollars, was a large, Juno-like figure with a beautiful face and a fine skin. Her complexion was as white as a slice of fresh, boiled ham. Neither could speak a word of anything but English until they obtained a French teacher here. Mrs. Longfellow . . . was the most beautiful and the most agreeable of all three of Longfellow’s ladies.