Longfellow

by Charles C. Calhoun

  CASTLE CRAIGIE

  UPON RETURNING TO AMERICA, the first thing was to find a place to live. Longfellow had spent the previous two years in hotels and rented lodgings or on shipboard, and he was eager to establish himself in quarters that were both comfortable and suitable to the dignity of the Smith Professorship. His Cambridge friend and colleague Cornelius Felton, who had played a large role in bringing him to Harvard, told him of a vacancy on the third floor of Professor Stearns’s house, where he lodged, on Kirkland Street. Longfellow took it, for the 1836–37 academic year, but soon tired of boarding-house life and began looking in earnest for more spacious and private quarters. The terms of his professorship required him to live in Cambridge—his predecessor Ticknor had annoyed his colleagues by insisting on staying in his Park Street, Boston, mansion—yet did not require him to be within sight of campus. Since New England college professors who lived near their colleges frequently got pulled into nocturnal student disturbances as disciplinarians, if not targets, some distancing made sense. He strolled out along Brattle Street one day in the spring of 1837 and asked the Widow Craigie for rooms. Evidently he had not quite assumed the full dignity of Smith Professor, for she thought he was a student and turned him down. When he insisted that he was indeed one of the faculty, and author of the book Outre-Mer, the first volume of which sat on her side table, she relented, and perhaps the most famous link between an American writer and an American house began.

  The dignified Georgian house at what is now 105 Brattle Street had been built in 1759 as a country retreat by a rich merchant, John Vassall, on a raised terrace overlooking the water meadows of the Charles River, about half a mile from the center of Cambridge village. In the two decades before the Revolution, this bucolic neighborhood along the Watertown Road had proven so popular among Boston’s wealthier citizens, it became known as “Tory Row.” The Vassall House, with its broad, symmetrical, pedimented facade and commanding site, was the most imposing Brattle Street dwelling of all. Like other great merchants with family and commercial connections in Britain, Vassall remained loyal to the Crown when the Revolution erupted, and he had to flee for his personal safety in 1774. His property was confiscated, and his Cambridge estate was occupied by the Marblehead Regiment of rebel troops. In July of 1775, General Washington made the house his headquarters during the Siege of Boston. He stayed for nine months, taking command on Cambridge Common of the new and unproven Continental Army, and in December welcoming his wife Martha and her son and daughter-in-law. The house seemed safe, but Martha reported to a friend in Virginia that on “some days we have a number of cannon and shells from Boston and Bunkers Hill. . . .” According to a letter written in 1843 by the aged John Trumball, who had served on Washington’s staff, the general lived in the two eastern second-floor rooms and, on the first floor, made the southeast room his study and dining room, the rear eastern room his staff office, and the southwest room his wife’s parlor.

  Amid the rigors of war, the Washingtons managed, according to family tradition, to live there in some style. John and Abigail Adams, Henry Knox, Nathaniel Greene, Benedict Arnold, and a host of other Revolutionary War luminaries crossed its threshold. Here, Washington struggled to turn his undisciplined, ill-supplied New England troops into a real army, amid his own doubts about whether the revolution would succeed. Here, the general learned of the providential arrival, thanks to the twenty-four-year-old General Knox (a former Boston bookseller), of the cannon from Fort Ticonderoga, laboriously dragged across the mountains on the hard-packed snow. Mounted overnight on the heights of Dorchester, facing Boston from the south, the guns forced the surprised British to evacuate the city or face the destruction of their fleet.

  The general, his aides, and his family left in April of 1776. After a series of owners, in 1791 an ambitious land speculator, Andrew Craigie, bought the house. Craigie had done well in the war, as first Apothecary General of the United States, and went to some trouble and too much expense to return the estate to its pre-Revolutionary splendor. His lavish habits nearly ruined him, and his widow in 1819 found herself encumbered with debt. She managed to keep the house, however, and began taking in lodgers to pay off her late husband’s creditors. Her tenants included two future Harvard presidents, Edward Everett and Jared Sparks, and enough students to persuade her by Longfellow’s day to rent only to adults. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Craigie herself had become a local eccentric. She slept late and read well into the night; she wore a turban and loved Voltaire. She had a passion for flowers, cats, and most living things. As the Longfellows wrote in a private history of their house in the 1840s, “When the canker-worms came spinning down from the elm-trees, she would sit by the open window and let them crawl over her white turban. She refused to have the trees protected against them & said, Why, sir, they have as good a right to live as we—they are our fellow worms.” She and her new tenant became friends. At the ring of his bell, her servant, “Miriam the giantess,” brought the young professor his breakfast (Felton called her “Miriam the Profit-ess” because of her high charges) and, at 5:00 p.m., his dinner; later he shared meals with another tenant, Sarah Lowell, James Russell Lowell’s maiden aunt. He was very pleased with his new quarters. He slept in General Washington’s chamber and worked in his sitting room. He wrote to George Washington Greene in August of 1838:

  I live in a great house which looks like an Italian villa: have two large rooms opening into each other. They were once Gen. Washington’s chambers. I breakfast at seven on tea and toast: and dine . . . generally in Boston. In the evening I walk on the Common with Hillard or alone; then go back to Cambridge on foot, drinking at every pump on the way—six in number. If not very late, I sit for an hour or two with Felton or Sparks. If late, go to bed. . . . Most of the time am alone—smoke a good deal. Wear a broad-brimmed black hat—black frock-coat—boots—trousers with straps—black cane. Molest no one. Dine out frequently.

  Although he had no reason to believe that he could stay at “Castle Craigie” indefinitely, the house was clearly more than just a dwelling to him. The Washington connection was a powerful one; a large part of Longfellow’s self-fashioning drew on his family’s experience in the Revolution. Despite Washington’s Virginia origins, he was nowhere more revered than in New England—not only as a tribute to his historical accomplishments, but as an iconic reminder of how far the nation had fallen politically as a result of Jacksonian democracy. Federalism had withered as a political force, but not as a part of the consciousness of genteel New Englanders. Longfellow’s own family was a case in point in its sacralization of the Father of the Country. An engraving of “The Apotheosis of Washington” hung in a place of honor over the parlor mantel in Portland. When Longfellow’s grandfather Wadsworth had been in Congress, Zilpah’s sister Eliza had begged for a lock of the late General Washington’s hair. Martha Washington obliged, and the hair became a Longfellow family heirloom, passed down upon Eliza’s early death to Zilpah, then to Henry (who had it encased in a gold locket), and then to his daughter Alice, who gave it to the Maine Historical Society, thereby returning it to the family home. In a similar spirit, Stephen Longfellow, when in Congress in 1825, sent to his sons at Bowdoin a fragment of cedar from the site of Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon.

  That same letter in which Longfellow described the house to Greene went on to express a vague sense of malaise, even in such august surroundings. “Do not like this sedentary life,” he wrote. “Want action—want to travel—am too excited—too tumultous inwardly—and my health suffers from all this.” To some extent, he had not recovered from the events of 1835, the memory of which lingered as a kind of chronic ache. His daily experience as a Harvard professor soon contributed to his unhappiness. He had certainly expected to flourish there on a larger scale than at Bowdoin, and he had not been disappointed. His social circle was far wider, far more worldly and learned, than what he had known in Brunswick or Portland. Yet his expectations of the teaching profession, and his insistence that it could be pu
rsued in tandem with a literary career, found less sympathy among the Harvard faculty, not to mention the Boston worthies who served on the Harvard Corporation. Literature was respected, he found, without being particularly esteemed.

  FIGURE 4: The procession of the alumni in Cambridge, honoring Harvard University’s two-hundredth birthday, September 8, 1836, from Josiah Quincy’s History of Harvard University, Vol. II (1840).

  Harvard College’s reputation in the antebellum years has never quite recovered from Henry Adams’s account of his student days in the 1850s:

  For generation after generation, Adamses and Brookses and Boylstons and Gorhams had gone to Harvard College, and although none of them, as far as known, had ever done any good there, or thought himself the better for it, custom, social ties, convenience, and, above all, economy, kept each generation in the track. Any other education would have required a serious effort, but no one took Harvard College seriously. All went there because their friends went there, and the College was their ideal of social self-respect. . . . Four years of Harvard College, if successful, resulted in an autobiographical blank, a mind on which only a water-mark had been stamped.

  Adams’s sardonic remarks are meant by way of contrast to the post–Civil War Harvard of President Eliot—and briefly Professor Adams—when German learning had finally reached these shores, and the graduate seminar and well-stocked laboratory had become the defining feature of higher education. But Adams was right, right about all the early New England colleges, and their desire to socialize the local elite and send them back into the world “with all they needed to make respectable citizens, and something of what they wanted to make useful ones.” Far more deflating of antebellum Harvard’s self-esteem is Nietzsche’s alleged remark: What a philosopher Emerson would have made, if only he had had an education.

  As a teacher of modern European languages and their literatures, Longfellow might seem to confirm both writers’ disparaging view of the college. He could not press his young gentlemen too hard, except in grammatical drills, and if he had—what could he have offered them? For all his love of the arcana of languages, he was not a trained philologist in the German-university mold. If he could not really teach his students in any rigorous way, he knew that he could charm them, within limits entertain them, perhaps even inspire in them the love of foreign literature that had so enriched his own inner life. In 1837, this was far more difficult than it might sound. His chief obstacle was Harvard College itself. Ticknor had exhausted himself in a long battle with the institution over the teaching of modern languages. Each small victory had been followed by a new defeat. Coming into this quarrel with his idealism still intact, Longfellow found that most of his energies were quickly dissipated simply in running his department, which depended for basic instruction on the poorly paid labors of four European emigres, one each for Spanish, French, Italian, and German. As Smith Professor, Longfellow was supposed to oversee this labor, but, as the result of the vagaries of hiring and firing, he ended up doing much of the basic language drill himself, in some years. If this was not wearisome enough, he had to engage in what almost always proved losing battles with the tight-fisted Corporation for small sums to purchase books for the College Library, and in only slightly less demoralizing arguments with his own colleagues over the curriculum.

  During Longfellow’s eighteen years as a Harvard professor, the consensus of the Corporation remained virtually unassailable: classical languages were the essence of a liberal arts education; modern languages, merely a social accomplishment or a diversion. There was a rationale for this: at a time when virtually every educator believed in “faculty psychology”—the notion that the brain comprises various “faculties,” for each human attribute or skill—studying Latin and Greek was considered difficult; hence, it “exercised” the various faculties of memory and understanding, in a way that French or Spanish did not. It did not matter that in all the “classical seminaries” in America, there was scarcely a classicist of any real accomplishment teaching. It was the drill, the mental exertion, the gymnastics of the mind that mattered. But this generally unexamined belief hid a greater anxiety. If colleges began experimenting with their curricula, allowing greater choice of electives or replacing the traditional recitations with real teaching, who knew where it might lead? Whether run by Unitarians or Congregationalists or Presbyterians, colleges remained bastions of orthodoxy in their thinking.

  Longfellow managed, nonetheless, to make a few small improvements. He is said to have been the first Harvard professor to address his students as “Mr. __.” This gesture of respect seems to have been appreciated; again, as at Bowdoin, his relative youth made him seem more approachable than some of his colleagues. His greatest innovation, however, was to introduce a new kind of course (though Ticknor had touched on it, at least in regards to Spanish literature), one in which foreign languages were not an end in themselves but a way of understanding a culture. In the 1830s this was a radical pedagogical notion. Drawing on his own experience of several European cultures, Longfellow offered advanced language courses as well as more general lectures in which, for the most part, he read significant passages from a European author, translating as he went along, and offering his own opinions on their literary merits as well as enough historical context to help his students comprehend what they were hearing. These were a prototype of the “survey of Western culture” courses which, until a generation ago, formed the backbone of liberal education in most American colleges, but they were also ventures in comparative literature, a very new field on either side of the Atlantic.

  Longfellow’s notes for many of his lectures survive; the most interesting and complete are those for a series on Goethe in 1837–38. Here, as elsewhere, the degree of preparation he invested in his teaching was unusual for an antebellum college. The lectures are written out, although with many pauses for him to refer to the text of, say, Faust (his well-annotated copy of which also survives at the Houghton Library). Knowing that Goethe is only a name, if that, to many of his students, he takes a slow biographical approach, stopping to sketch each important work and assuring his New England audience that reports of Goethe’s immorality are exaggerated. Faust Part I he champions as a work of world-class importance; Faust Part II he admits he really does not understand. Goethe’s many-sidedness makes him difficult to pin down, he admits, but this should not frighten off readers.

  It seems to me very strange that anyone should deny to Gothe the attribute of great genius. Yet this has been done. Persons have not been wanting, who would fain have dethroned the monarch of Letters. Friend and foes have waged fierce war together: and so great is the dust of battle, that we cannot see clearly how the victory goes. And here, it seems to me, lies the difficulty of estimating justly the character of this extraordinary man. There is such a din in our ears and such a smoke before our eyes, that we are blinded and confused. From the midst of the battle we hear the shouts and war-cries of the combattants—on one side;

  “The dear, dear Man”—

  “The Life-enjoying Man”—

  “The All-Sided One”—

  “The Representative of Poetry on earth”—

  “The Many-Sided Master-mind of Germany”.

  And on the other side the fierce epithets of

  “Old Humbug” and

  “Old Heathen”

  “Magnificent Impostor”

  which hit like pistol-bullets.

  Thus are opinions divided. Some think him a charlatan—others “the greatest man that ever lived.”

  This is as close as we can get to the actual voice of Professor Longfellow in the lecture hall. He presents his evidence, over the course of several lectures, and allows his auditors to make up their own minds. What emerges, amid the literary and touristic detail, is his portrayal of Goethe as a citizen of the world who nonetheless encapsulates every aspect of his own nation’s culture. It was a model he always held before him (literally: a statuette of Goethe stood on his writing desk). Many of Long
fellow’s comments in these lectures on Goethe, as well as the ones on Dante and Cervantes and Molière, read today like a crib; he certainly never displayed the intuitive grasp of post-Kantian idealism that Emerson and Margaret Fuller enjoyed, and he had no taste for academic philosophy. But, once again, he made a pioneering effort to popularize writers and ideas that had been hitherto appreciated by only a handful of Americans. In the context of the old-fashioned college, this was an extraordinary achievement; characteristically, the Corporation discouraged his efforts to open up the lectures to the general public, as was the practice in some European universities.

  It is hard to judge the effect of this teaching on the eighteen classes of Harvard men Longfellow taught between 1836 and 1854. Surely some became better readers. Perhaps a detail here or there stuck. He mentioned, in passing, for example, that Goethe liked to write with a pencil. Attending those lectures in 1837 was a young man from Concord, the son of a pencil manufacturer. His name was Thoreau. Goethe became one of the great intellectual influences in his life as a result of Longfellow’s lectures.