Longfellow

by Charles C. Calhoun

  There are some contemporary witnesses to his teaching style. For example, Edward Everett Hale—the most celebrated orator of post–Civil War Boston—was a close friend of Longfellow’s brother Samuel when both were undergraduates in the class of 1839, and he commented on the lectures in his journal for September 18, 1837:

  At 11 A.M. went to Prof. Longfellow’s first lecture on Goethe’s Faust. The lectures are to be extemporaneous translations of the German with explanations; as he called it recitations in which he recites and we hear. He made a long introduction to the matter at hand, very flowery and bombastical indeed, which appeared to me very much out of taste. I believe however that it was entirely extemporaneous and that he was carried away by the current of his thoughts. In fact he appears to say just what comes uppermost. The regular translation and explanation part of the lecture was very good.

  A more sympathetic account can be found in Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s reminiscence in Old Cambridge (1899):

  I had the good fortune to study French under him, not in the general recitation room, but in what was called the Corporation Room, where we sat round a long table as if guests at his board. His lectures, which were to us most interesting, were sometimes criticised as too flowery by our elders, who had perhaps been accustomed to gather only dried fruit; and I remember how he fixed in our memories the vivid moral of any French books that happened to be provided with that appendage, as for instance “Le Peau de Chagrin” of Balzac.

  Higginson also remembered the day in 1839 when a printer’s boy came in and laid between Longfellow and himself the proof of the title-page of Voices of the Night. “It was as if I had seen a new planet in process of making.”

  This notion of the young professor’s “floweriness,” his perhaps too European mode and manner for what was still a New England village, comes through in comments on the elegance of his clothing. Even the unconventional Mrs. Craigie thought so, declaring that he had “somewhat too gay a look.” As the Baron cautions Paul Flemming in Hyperion, “they say that your gloves are a shade too light for a strictly virtuous man.” Longfellow made a joke of this criticism of his dandyism, writing to Sumner in England, “If you have any tendency to ‘curl your hair and wear gloves,’ like Edgar in ‘Lear,’ do it before your return.”

  There was in nearby Cambridgeport one living link with Europe that he did pursue seriously. Washington Allston—once regarded by many as the closest thing to a genius the new republic had produced—had settled in a modest studio there while trying to complete work on his gigantic canvas of Belshazzar’s Feast, a project supported by subscriptions from some of Boston’s leading men. Longfellow visited him frequently. Allston was by this time a somewhat pathetic figure, but in his youth he had been the most celebrated American painter of the new century (as well as a poet). In his years in Italy, he had befriended Irving, and in 1805 had become even closer to Coleridge. The visits were an occasion for reminiscence by both travelers, but for Longfellow they represented something more. Allston had a lesson to teach: he had shown in his heyday that an American could have a transatlantic career, even a Euro-American style. In creating a body of work that assumed a high degree of cultural literacy on the part of the viewer, that idealized rather than realistically depicted, and that grew out of a strong feeling for history and mythology, the painter was showing the way to the poet. He also represented a more cautionary lesson: do not take on a project beyond your talents. He never completed Belshazzar’s Feast, despite years of promises to his patrons. When they entered his studio after his death in 1843, only a fragment remained, partly effaced by its own creator. “A melancholy ruin,” Longfellow’s friend Sumner called it.

  Despite the frustrations of teaching and his sense of loneliness, which at times seemed almost unbearable, Longfellow found considerable comfort in the society of a small group of other young men who gathered in his rooms at the Craigie House or dined with him in the chop houses and oyster bars of Boston. They were so frequently in each other’s company, they were dubbed the “Five of Clubs,” in a sort of Pickwickian way. The organizing spirit seems to have been Cornelius Conway Felton, whom Longfellow had met on Boston visits while teaching at Bowdoin and who had recently become Eliot Professor of Greek. Chubby and effervescent, Felton combined good humor and a keen sense of academic politics (he later became president of Harvard). Another regular was Henry Cleveland, whose health was poor but who had married well and lived on an estate at Brookline. Less prosperous yet already a central figure in the Boston literary world, and later a great supporter of Hawthorne, was a young lawyer named George Hillard. His partner in Court Street was the fifth member of the club, another Harvard-educated lawyer with strong literary inclinations and not many clients, Charles Sumner, who was to play a role in Longfellow’s life over the next thirty years that went far beyond these convivial early soirees and oyster-feasts. His immense talents as an orator and political organizer not yet formed, Sumner was an awkward, gangly, highly intelligent young man. He had grown up on the edge of elite Boston (his father was sheriff of Suffolk County, a respectable though not well paid position), yet had so strong and independent a mind that he soon found himself at odds with much of Beacon Hill society, especially on the troubling question of slavery. Abrupt to the point of rudeness, Sumner was ill fitted for a conventional legal career—until a visit to Europe in 1841 made him into a minor local celebrity. Deferential to his British hosts without betraying his New England reformer’s idealism, Sumner enjoyed a stunning social success with a long series of aristocrat hosts and hostesses. News of this back home boosted his reputation overnight; however much Bostonians complained about Britain, the good opinion of its ruling social and intellectual elite was of immeasurable importance to them. (Throughout the nineteenth century, a palpable tremor of excitement ran through Boston each week when the packet ship with British letters and journals arrived.) Sumner was well on his way to the political career that would make him a founder of the Republican Party and one of the most powerful figures in the Civil War–era U.S. Senate.

  From the start, Longfellow exercised a moderating influence on his easily angered, hypersensitive friend. Sumner in turn kept Longfellow well informed of both national politics and the great reform movements of the day, and also shared his interests in poetry and the visual arts. Astonishingly self-absorbed, almost totally devoid of a sense of humor, Sumner nevertheless was a loyal and generous friend. Longfellow answered his deep emotional neediness. What developed between them was a romantic male friendship of a type not at all uncommon in nineteenth-century America. (Lincoln, Webster, Emerson all experienced such friendships with other males.) We lack the vocabulary to define such attachments, which probably were rarely sexual but which, in the years before one of the two friends married, satisfied emotional needs with an intensity that went far beyond mere comradeship. Sumner probably was gay, if you will excuse the anachronism: or, rather, the biographical record seems to show that he formed his most meaningful relationships with other males, and certainly his attempt late in life to marry proved a disaster. It is highly unlikely that he acted on these feelings overtly (a man with so many political enemies after 1850 had every aspect of his public and private life scrutinized for faults), and both his intense absorption in reform politics and his compulsive art collecting suggest a sublimation of the erotic side of his pysche. Longfellow, on the other hand, was an uxorious man with a well-documented eye for female beauty, yet in this period of his life he found himself once again experiencing the frustrations and disappointments of bachelorhood, and he was clearly emotionally vulnerable.

  The friendship of Sumner and the three other young men did more than lift Longfellow’s spirits. They provided him as a writer with his first real audience outside of his family—real in the sense of immediate, supportive, intelligent, and quick to criticize, the sort of sounding board he had never found in the distant editors to whom he mailed his poems and stories. Their feasting and drinking involved not only literary goss
ip but impromptu poetry, irrepressible punning, sexual innuendo, and a mild degree of skepticism toward those in authority, especially those at Harvard. It was a reprise of Longfellow’s evenings with Preble at Göttingen, possibly of student days for all of them.

  Is it a coincidence that his first major poetry appears in these early years at the Craigie House? The traditional biographical explanation is that the shock of Mary’s death forced him into purging his grief through poetry. There may be some truth to that, but the existence of an audience of his peers may explain why some of these poems are so good. Voices of the Night (1839) included the best first line yet written by an American poet. It opens the poem “Hymn to the Night”:

  I heard the trailing garments of the Night

  Sweep through her marble halls!

  Longfellow said later that he had composed the poem one summer night “while sitting at my chamber window, on one of the balmiest nights of the year. I have endeavored to reproduce the impression of the hour and the scene.” Among the more insistent of these voices, however, was a poem he had written in a deep depression, had kept in his desk for some time, then read to his class at the end of a Goethe lecture, before publishing it in the Knickerbocker Magazine. “A Psalm of Life” has achieved a level of fame that lifts it beyond poetry into the realm of cultural artifact; it quickly became one of the most ridiculed and the most frequently memorized poems in the language, and it popularized more common phrases than any other short American poem imaginable (“footprints on the sands of time” being the most notorious). The resounding exhortation at its end has been taken to be Victorian cheeriness at its worst, but in the context of Longfellow’s own life it has a certain poignance:

  Let us, then, be up and doing,

  With a heart for any fate;

  Still achieving, still pursuing,

  Learn to labor and to wait.

  FIGURE 5: Illustration for “The Wreck of the Hesperus” from Carey & Hart’s 1846 edition of The Poems of Henry W. Longfellow.

  That slim volume—nine new poems, eight reprints of poems he had written in college, and a brief envoi—persuaded much of the literary establishment that the country had finally produced a major poet. America in 1839 knew that one was overdue. The Boston Quarterly Review spoke of its “genuine poetic feeling”; the New-Yorker declared Longfellow “one of the very few in our time who has successfully aimed in putting poetry to its best and sweetest uses.” Willis’s Corsair gave it “an elevated place in the library of American classics.” The Southern Literary Messenger placed Longfellow “among the first of our American poets.”

  Three years later, Longfellow proved that his first volume was not an anomaly. Ballads and Other Poems included two instant classics—“The Wreck of the Hesperus” and “The Village Blacksmith”—as well as perhaps the worst poem he ever published, “The Rainy Day.” It also introduced what was to be his highly successful antiquarian vein, represented by the fast-paced Viking ballad “The Skeleton in Armor.”

  The quickness with which the public not only bought this book but memorized the poems (several of which had been originally printed, and widely reprinted, in newspapers and magazines) was without parallel in U.S. publishing history. (Readers of a certain age may recall, by way of parallel, the speed with which some Beatles tunes—say, from The White Album in 1969—were being sung everywhere in the country.) “The Wreck of the Hesperus” has suffered too many tub-thumping recitals, but even its author could not resist its galeforce rhythms. As he later explained, he was sitting by his fire, smoking past midnight, “when suddenly it came into my mind to write [it], which I accordingly did. Then I went to bed, but could not sleep. New thoughts were running in my mind, and I got up to add them to the ballad. It was three by the clock. I then went to bed and fell asleep. I feel pleased with the ballad. It hardly cost me an effort. It did not come into my mind by lines, but by stanzas.” Longfellow had it printed originally as a broadside, to guarantee a popular audience. The poem was the Perfect Storm of its day—almost literally so, for it takes place at the mouth of Gloucester harbor, on the reef of Norman’s Woe. Longfellow was having fun with the traditional ballad form revitalized by Burns, and he produced a poem that tapped that deep-seated human urge to hear about disasters at sea. Some years ahead of Little Nell, it also exploits the pathos of a young girl’s death. To a modern, to whom the whole thing may at first seem to define kitsch, the poem offers another reading: it is the first hint in his work that Longfellow was going to challenge, in his own quiet way, the gender standards of his time. Living in a patriarchal age, he nonetheless sketches a sea-captain father who is a dolt, the original male-who-never-asks-for-directions. As a result of the father’s arrogance, he, his daughter, his crew, and his ship are destroyed on the reef, in a ballad whose insistent “folk” rhythms are linked with a strong sense of fatality.

  “The Village Blacksmith” of 1839 is another performance piece that brings back the days, now widely regretted, when young people were expected to memorize poetry. Most readers associate it with the Brattle Street smithy whose spreading chestnut tree was a landmark of mid-nineteenth-century Cambridge, but Longfellow told his father it was a tribute to their seventeenth-century ancestor, the first Stephen Longfellow, who had a blacksmith’s shop at Newbury. (The famous tree, incidentally, was removed in 1876, over the protests of Longfellow and others; the Cambridge town fathers had decided it was an impediment to traffic.) “The Village Blacksmith” is a genre scene, a nostalgic evocation of the age of the citizen-artisan, proud, independent, pious, productive—a New England myth-in-the-making as the small towns began to become industrialized and much of the yeomanry moved west in search of better rewards for their labor. It is also an allegory of the poet’s craft, as Longfellow saw it, if he did not always experience it quite that way in practice. The suggestion that writing might be as valid a form of work as any other still needed making, and he made it with his characteristic quiet note of resignation:

  Toiling, —rejoicing, —sorrowing,

  Onward through life he goes;

  Each morning sees some task begin,

  Each evening sees it close;

  Something attempted, something done,

  Has earned a night’s repose.

  And then there is “Excelsior,” a poem that was so loved by Longfellow’s contemporaries, so loathed by following generations, that it is in a category all its own. He scribbled it on the back of a letter from Sumner at half past three in the morning on September 28, 1841. “Now to bed,” he noted. He got the idea from a scrap of a New York newspaper that bore the state seal, a rising sun with the motto “Excelsior,” a word of dubious Latinity as used in his poem, translated as “higher.”

  FIGURE 6: Illustration for “Excelsior” from the 1846 edition of the collected poems.

  The shades of night were falling fast,

  As through an Alpine village passed

  A youth, who bore, ’mid snow and ice,

  A banner with a strange device,

  Excelsior!

  The setting recalls his Alpine summer with the Appletons; the youth’s sad fate—he ends up in even more ice than crusted the maid of the Hesperus—may be a faint projection of his own foolhardiness as a suitor. Whether the poem was in the least autobiographical, its ballad quality caught the imagination of the mid-nineteenth-century public and, in the next century, the eye of James Thurber, who produced a famously whimsical cartoon on the subject. “Excelsior” was also the first Longfellow poem to be widely parodied, a compliment in the sense that it indicated virtually everyone knew the original.

  For all his new fame as a poet (which was quickly spreading across the Atlantic as well) and his sustaining circle of intimates in Cambridge, Longfellow’s journal entries for these years present a self-portrait of a man who frequently is miserable and almost always a little depressed. He hid this from all but his closest friends, and it is difficult to know how literally to take the journal, which is rarely confessional in any deep sen
se and may have had its own mild therapeutic effect just as a record of his moods. His grieving for Mary had long since been diffused, but there is reason to believe—given his chronic complaints about bad health in this period—that he had internalized an overwhelming sense of guilt over exposing her to such danger and over his subsequent failure, as a husband, to protect her. If he wished to punish himself by his pursuit of Fanny Appleton, he had found a perfect vehicle for doing so. This is not to say that his passion for Fanny Appleton was not sincere. But he pursued it so doggedly and in the face of so much rejection and even humiliation (for his plight was well known in Boston and Cambridge) that it goes beyond a mere unreciprocated romance.

  The details are sketchy—some presumably relevant entries in the journals have been inked over or even cut out—but he had fallen obsessively in love with Miss Appleton. His feeling of isolation as a young widower surely contributed to his emotional vulnerability at that time. Upon the family’s return to their town house at 39 Beacon Street, Longfellow called, as he habitually did on a number of Beacon Hill families. He invented occasions to see Fanny (he was under the misapprehension that she very much wanted to learn German), and at some point in 1837 declared his intentions to her, only to be firmly turned down. Retreating briefly to lick his wounds, he soon returned to the pursuit, always taking care not to be so obvious that the Appletons would decline to see him, but obvious enough to expose himself to some good-natured ridicule in Boston society. He became something of a fixture among the extended Appleton family and remained on very good terms with Fanny’s sister Mary and her brother Tom as well as various uncles and aunts. Fanny herself treated him with mildly satirical contempt—he was “the Prof” to her and her intimates—but never totally ignored him. His puppyish devotion took the form, for example, of long walks on the Common (which the Appleton house faced) in hopes of catching a glimpse of his “dark ladye” (a bit of poeticizing on his part, for her hair was actually brown).