Longfellow

by Charles C. Calhoun

  Then he went too far. Toward the close of Hyperion, his quasi-philosophical travel novel of 1839, his hero, Paul Flemming, falls in love, in Germany, with a young Englishwoman, Mary Ashburton, who to his great distress rejects him, despite his obvious merits as an American who understands German culture. Hyperion was widely read—Americans in 1839 were eager for someone to explain Germany to them—and on Beacon Hill it was only too obvious who “Paul” and “Mary” were. Fanny was understandably mortified and displayed a new degree of frostiness toward her hapless suitor.

  Today, Hyperion is one of Longfellow’s most obscure works, succumbing to slow acidification on the shelves of secondhand-book shops, and not chosen to be reprinted with the generous selection of Longfellow’s prose in the Library of America’s 2000 edition of his work. In truth, a modern reader would probably find its vaporous narration and its potted accounts of various German writers and thinkers heavy going. It has about it an air not so much of undergraduate earnestness as of undergraduate self-absorption, despite its touristic ramble through three German-speaking lands and innumerable German books. But whatever its obvious literary shortcomings, it did, after all, stay in print for more than half a century. As late as 1865, the great British photographer Francis Frith produced twenty-four images to illustrate a new edition; only the glimpse of a railroad track in one of them hints that anything had changed since Longfellow’s own Rhine-journey.

  We need to resist any urge to read Hyperion as autobiography, however much Mary Ashburton was Fanny in Longfellow’s mind. (By that point, “Fanny” may have been as much a figment of the author’s mind as the “dark ladye” of the story.) Hyperion is rather a book that represents a particular moment, a particular mood in its author’s life—the fall of 1838 and spring of 1839—and it draws, in his familiar Spanish tailor’s fashion, from his drawer of memories of the summer of 1836 and from his vast and eclectic reading. In writing it, Longfellow’s project turns out to have been twofold: he needed to exorcise the ghosts of that horror-filled night in Amsterdam, and he needed to get Miss Appleton out of his system. He succeeded more with the former than the latter.

  Hyperion is a difficult book to synopsize because, in its weird, almost-postmodern way, it stands the usual habits of narrative on their head. Someone is telling the story—someone in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as we discover about halfway through—a trick of detached narration Longfellow probably learned from Carlyle’s popular Sartor Resartus of 1833–34, along with Carlyle’s mix of memoir, dark humor, and mordant philosophizing. The prose lacks Carlyle’s zest, to say the least; on the other hand, the smooth tone of the writing made it more marketable to Longfellow’s contemporaries. The story has an end—the central figure rides off into a solidly American future—but it is harder to locate a beginning. This elusive hero, a bookish young American named Paul Flemming, has a history: “The friend of his youth was dead,” he has “passed many months in lonely wandering,” and now he has reached the Rhine, which he knows well from brighter days in his recent past. He suddenly plunges into a swiftly flowing river of folk tales; anecdotes; lecture-room asides on Goethe, Jean Paul, and E. T. A. Hoffmann; and long conversations with a worldly-wise baron and a bibulous Englishman. In the third chapter of the third of Hyperion’s four books, he encounters at Interlachen a soft-spoken young lady in black. He asks the Englishman about her:

  “What is her name?”

  “Ashburton.”

  “Is she beautiful?”

  “Not beautiful, but very intellectual. A woman of genius, I should say.”

  One can imagine how that was received at 39 Beacon Street. The author does try to cover his tracks by depicting his “dark ladye” as an Englishwoman traveling with her widowed mother, but no one in the know was fooled. He is captivated and pursues her, through an Alpine landscape, and finally declares his love by way of telling her a medieval romance he invents on the spot, in which he and she turn out to be characters. Her proud heart prevails, and Flemming sulks off, like a chastened puppy. His wanderings take him into the Austrian Alps, where he hears more folk tales and legends and grows delirious with fever, then starts his long journey home. But in the inn at Stuttgart, he hears through the thin walls a familiar voice—yes, Mary Ashburton!—and his heart’s “wounds began to bleed afresh.” He is too proud himself to go say hello, but she appears in a dream that night, embraces him, and vanishes. The postilion and the horses are waiting, the servant brings him his coffee. He throws himself into the carriage, casts one last look at her window, and knows he will see her no more:

  No more! Oh, how majestically mournful are those words! They sound like the roar of the wind through a forest of pines!

  The Mary Ashburton episodes take up only a small number of Hyperion’s pages, however voyeuristic their appeal even at this remove in time. Part of Longfellow’s offense was not just in creating this ghostly version of the robust Miss Appleton, but presumably in recreating with some accuracy the conversations that had passed between them at Interlachen and Thun, only three years earlier (Hyperion was published in August of 1839). Some of it is unintentionally hilarious.

  “How beautiful the Jungfrau looks this morning!” exclaimed he, looking at Mary Ashburton.

  She thought he meant the mountain, and assented. But he meant her likewise.

  Some of it is merely tedious, as when he lectures her on the poetry of Uhland.

  “He and Tieck are generally considered the best living poets of Germany. They dispute the palm of superiority. Let me give you a lesson in German, this afternoon, Miss Ashburton; so that no one may accuse you of ‘omitting the sweet benefit of time, to clothe your age with angel-like perfection.’ I have opened at random upon the ballad of the Black Knight. Do you repeat the German after me, and I will translate to you: Pfingsten war, das Fest der Freude!”

  “I should never persuade my unwilling lips to pronounce such sounds.”

  Miss Ashburton might be forgiven for running for the hills at this point, but she allows Flemming to show off with an impromptu translation. It is easy to make fun of these passages and regret that Longfellow could not temper them with the touches of satire on tourism that enliven other chapters of his romance, but they allowed the author to work through his feelings for Fanny, while giving us a glimpse of the repressed aggression against her that must have mingled with his love.

  Hyperion has other attractions, not least some passages of decent travel writing. Taking the night coach to Innsbruck, for example, the half-asleep Flemming remembers afterwards:

  . . . the climbing of hills and plunging into dark ravines; the momentary rattling of the wheels over paved streets of towns, and the succeeding hollow rolling and tramping on the wet earth; the blackness of the night; the thunder and lightning and rain; the roar of waters leaping through deep chasms by the roadside; and the wind through the mountain-passes sounding loud and long, like the indistinguishable laughter of the gods.

  Hyperion is filled with the memory of Mary Potter Longfellow as well, from start almost to finish. On the Rhine-journey that we find Flemming making in the second chapter of the first book, he travels through the early morning mists to the riverside village of Andernach. He is puzzled by a little chapel attached to its church, “only a small thatched roof, like a bird’s nest, under which stood a rude wooden image of the Saviour on the cross. . . . The face was haggard and ghastly beyond expression, and wore a look of unutterable bodily anguish . . . coarse, harsh, and revolting to a sensitive mind.” The face haunts him, however, and an old woman at the hotel, surprised he has never heard of the Christ of Andernach, tells him the story, which she assures him is true.

  There was a poor but pious old woman whose roof tiles were broken and let in the rain. One dark, windy night she heard heavy steps on her roof and loud pounding. Terrified, she prayed and prayed then ran to the window to scream for help. Suddenly all was quiet, and she saw a light streaming through the rain and the shadow of a man with a lantern coming down a ladder from
her roof. The next morning, the old broken tiles lay in the street, and her roof never leaked again. Others in town also reported nocturnal benefactions: the cooper found new hoops on his wine barrels, a windmill had been repaired, a church gate made new, a leaky and hazardous boat recaulked. Everyone had seen the man with a lantern, but he always disappeared before anyone could identify him.

  Now one stormy night a poor, sinful creature was wandering about in the streets with her babe in her arms, and she was hungry, and cold, and no soul in Andernach would take her in. And when she came to the church . . . she sat down on a stone at the foot of the cross and began to pray, and prayed until she fell asleep, with the poor little baby on her bosom. But she did not sleep long; for a bright light shown full in her face; and when she opened her eyes, she saw a pale man, with a lantern, standing right before her. He was almost naked, and there was blood upon his hands and body, and great tears in his beautiful eyes, and his face was like the face of the Saviour on the cross. Not a single word did he say to the poor woman, but looked at her compassionately, and gave her a loaf of bread, and took the little babe in his arms, and kissed it. Then the mother looked up to the great crucifix, but there was no image there; and she shrieked and fell down as if she were dead. And there she was found with her child; and a few days after they both died, and were buried together in one grave.

  A woman in the village heard the scream, went to her window, saw the figure hang his lantern, climb up the ladder, and nail himself to the cross, where he remains. The story, we are told, made “a painful impression on [Flemming’s] sick and morbid soul.”

  An image not unlike a fetus appears in the next chapter, although this time it is the ruined castle at Stolzenfels that mysteriously tells the tale. An archbishop who had dwelt there delved into magic and hermetic philosophy, spending a fortune on a failed attempt to create a homunculus in a glass bottle, and died poor and childless for all his efforts.

  And toward the end of the fourth book of Hyperion, in “The Tale of Brother Bernardus,” a widow’s child dies suddenly in the night.

  Flemming saw a light in her chamber, and shadows moving to and fro, as he stood by the window gazing into the starry, silent sky. But he little thought of the awful domestic tragedy which was even then enacted behind those thin curtains!

  The child’s funeral follows in Hyperion’s penultimate chapter; Flemming attends and is strangely buoyed by the experience. He undergoes an epiphany of sorts. He goes forth strengthened, determined “that he would no longer veer with every shifting wind . . . no longer to waste his years in vain regrets . . . but to live in the Present wisely, alike forgetful of the Past and careless of what the mysterious Future might bring.”

  In titling his “romance,” Longfellow was not alluding to the Hyperions of Keats or Hölderlin, but to its more Miltonic usage as “the child of the morning.” Flemming—despite a name taken from medieval German literature—himself becomes such a renewed being, and it is implied that his real life will take place far removed from the misty, legend-haunted Rhine or the picturesque Alpine valleys. He is the first in a line of American literary heroes who repatriate themselves, after their Wanderjahre abroad. He will return, bright as the morning sun, to a scene not unlike the one Longfellow sketches in one of Hyperion’s most abrupt narrative lurches. It is the view from the author’s upstairs study window at the Craigie House:

  The elms reach their long, pendulous branches almost to the ground. White clouds sail aloft, and vapors fret the blue sky with silver threads. The white village gleams afar against the dark hills. Through the meadow winds the river,—careless, indolent. It seems to love the country, and is in no haste to reach the sea.

  THE WATER CURE

  CRITICS WERE NOT QUITE SURE what to make of Hyperion, but reaction to Voices of the Night continued overwhelmingly positive, with a few exceptions (notably Edgar Allan Poe, who was beginning his campaign against what he saw as Longfellow’s inflated reputation), and Ballads and Other Poems brought even louder praise from most of the country’s newspapers and journals. Despite this obvious success, Longfellow continued to struggle with his demons, which included the array of chronic ailments that plagued him all his adult life—eyestrain, neuralgia, headaches, influenza—as well as what would now be diagnosed as chronic depression. It did not help that after thirteen years he was very tired of “teaching boys” when he would rather be “talking with men,” as he put it. The usual aggravations of departmental work and intramural quarreling took their toll as well. Add to this what was presumably a large element of sexual frustration, and a feeling of deflation after finally admitting to himself that his quest for Fanny’s hand had been a quixotic waste of effort, and you had a man almost in a state of nervous collapse.

  “I am reluctantly compelled by the state of my health to ask leave of absence from the College for six months from the first of May next,” he wrote to the Corporation on January 24, 1842. “In this time I propose to visit Germany, to try the effect of certain baths, by means of which, as well as by the relaxation and the sea-voyage, I hope to reestablish my health.” Realizing the seriousness of his friend’s plight, Felton had generously agreed to take over his supervisory duties at no extra expense to the college. The request was granted.

  Meanwhile, Longfellow’s spirits were lifted by the arrival, amid great public excitement, of the thirty-year-old Charles Dickens and his wife on the first stage of an American lecture tour. “He is a glorious fellow,” Longfellow told his father.

  He has not a moment’s rest;—calls innumerable—invitations innumerable;—and is engaged three deep for the remainder of his stay, in the way of dinners and parties. He is a gay, free and easy character;—a fine bright face; blue eyes, long dark hair, and withal a slight dash of the Dick Swiveller about him.

  It is a tribute to Longfellow’s charm and growing reputation that Dickens took so readily to him, when so many others were vying for the novelist’s attention. Longfellow and Sumner took Dickens to the North End to hear the famous Edward Taylor—the inspiration for Melville’s Father Mapple in Moby-Dick—preach to the sailors. Their tour then took them past the Old North Church to Copps Hill, where the British had placed their guns in 1775, and on through Charlestown, which those guns had destroyed, to Bunker Hill, where New Englanders some twenty years earlier had erected a granite obelisk to commemorate the battle. A few days later, Dickens breakfasted with Longfellow, Felton, and the theologian Andrews Norton before embarking on his lecture tour.

  Despite his unhappy memories of the Rhine, Longfellow determined to try the new style of “water cure” offered at Kloster Marienberg, a former convent overlooking the vineyard town of Boppard. His friends were reluctant to lose him but relieved that he had been awarded the leave. Sumner was particularly hard hit. He wrote to Longfellow in New York:

  Dear Henry,

  Will this parting note reach you? I write, not knowing; but the chance of again uttering a word to yr soul, before you descend upon the sea, is enough.—We are all sad at your going ; but I am more sad than the rest; for I lose more than they do. I am desolate. It was to me a source of pleasure & strength untold, to see you, &, when I did not see you, to feel that you were near, with your swift sympathy & kindly words. I must try to go alone; hard necessity in this rude world of ours! For our souls always in this life need support, & gentle beckonings, as the little child when first trying to move away from its mother’s knees. God bless you! my dearest friend, from my heart of hearts! You know not the depth of my gratitude to you. My eyes overflow as I now trace these lines. May you clutch the treasure of health; but, above all, may you be happy! . . .

  Your ever loving friend,

  Charles Sumner

  Longfellow did receive the letter: “. . . it made my heart swell into my throat.” He assured Sumner, “I treasure your kind, parting words in my inmost soul; and will read your letter over again far out at sea, and hear in it friendly voices from the shore.”

  Arriving at Le Havre,
he revisited Paris then took the train sightseeing by way of Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges, Brussels, Aix-la-Chapelle, and Cologne, where he embarked for the short boat ride to Boppard, a walled medieval town with Roman ruins at a great bend in the river. By June 6 he was ready for his first “plunge” at Marienberg, an eighteenth-century convent whose nuns had been evicted during the Napoleonic occupation.

  The best thing to be said for the water cure is that it probably did no one who submitted to it any harm, unless they got caught in a draft. The rationale was perfectly logical, in a medieval sort of way: disease often “broke” when the body experienced a very high fever. If the conditions of this fever could be replicated—for example, by turning the skin bright red and causing shivers—a healing effect would necessarily follow. This method was recommended by its practitioners for any ailment from gout to impotence to paralysis. It may actually have worked with certain psychological conditions in which the patient felt cleansed or purged or made new by the constant application of water over the body.

  The routine, as Longfellow explained to several correspondents, was this: You are awakened at 4:00 a.m. by a servant who wraps you in blankets and quilts. You lie for an hour or more until you perspire freely. You are wheeled in an armchair to the bathing room, where you plunge into a large bath of running water and splash about. You dress, walk in the garden, drink the local spring water, breakfast on bread, butter, and milk, possibly strawberries. Another walk, an 11:00 a.m. shower under a spout, then another hour’s walk, then a flowing Sitzbad for half an hour, another walk, followed by a frugal dinner at 1:00 p.m. (no wine or spices). Walk, sit, or play billiards until 5:00, when there’s another Sitzbad, then a long walk uphill to the neighboring village for a bread-and-butter supper. At 10:00, to bed.