Longfellow

by Charles C. Calhoun

  Steadfast, serene, immovable, the same

  Year after year, through all the silent night

  Burns on forevermore that quenchless flame,

  Shines on that inextinguishable light! . . .

  What we see in his journal that summer is the shaping of a vision of the New England coast as distinctive in its own artistry as the seascapes of Fitz Hugh Lane or Winslow Homer. He is closer in poetic temperament to Lane—both are students of low tides and late afternoons—but Longfellow could paint with Homer’s realism as well:

  The sea-bird wheeling round it, with the din

  Of wings and winds and solitary cries,

  Blinded and maddened by the light within,

  Dashes himself against the glare, and dies. . . .

  We can see this coastal vision take shape in an unpublished passage of blank verse from his journal for August 18:

  O faithful, indefatigable tides.

  That evermore upon God’s errands go,

  Now sea-ward, bearing tidings of the land,

  Now land-ward, bearing tidings of the sea,

  And filling every frith and estuary,

  Each arm of the great sea, each little creek

  Each thread and filament of water-courses,

  Full with your ministration of delight!

  Under the rafters of this wooden bridge

  I see you come and go; sometimes in haste

  To reach your journey’s end; which being done

  With feet unrested ye return again,

  But recommence the never-ending task,

  Patient, with whatever burdens ye may bear,

  And fretted only by impending rocks.

  This is only a sketch, quickly put to paper, unpolished, diffuse. Its distillation would emerge more than three decades later in that bleak, chilling little masterpiece, “The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls.”

  The tide rises, the tide falls.

  The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;

  Along the sea-sands damp and brown

  The traveller hastens toward the town,

  And the tide rises, the tide falls.

  Darkness settles on roofs and walls,

  But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;

  The little waves, with their soft white hands,

  Efface the footprints in the sands,

  And the tide rises, the tide falls.

  The morning breaks, the steeds in their stalls

  Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;

  The day returns, but nevermore

  Returns the traveller to the shore,

  And the tide rises, the tide falls.

  Meanwhile, the Verandah idyll gave Longfellow further opportunity to exercise his skill as a painter of genre scenes. He was struck, for example, by Peter, the hotel driver, his omnibus, Mazeppa, and—despite its name—his un-Byronic horses.

  He is a short little fellow with a red face and one leg shorter than the other. In fair weather he wears a brown linen sack, and straw hat; in foul, a browner woolen sack and a glazed, round sailer’s hat. He seems always in great perplexity of mind; for having no regular hour of coming and going, he depends on the will of his passengers, and as some want to go, when others want to stay, he never knows what to do. And in addition to this he seems to have weighing on his mind the advertisement of the host of the Oak Grove; “The Omnibus Mazeppa is always at the depot and steamers to convey passengers to the Verandah.”

  It proved a working holiday despite the distractions, for Longfellow was correcting proofs—between a forenoon sea bath and a billiards game with Fanny—of Evangeline in late July. The popular success of his first two volumes of poems, the financial and emotional security brought by his second marriage, and the growing awareness that many of his fellow citizens looked to him as the most representative American writer had given him the artistic confidence to write more poetry. In 1845, Carey & Hart in Philadelphia had published an illustrated edition of his work to date—or most of his work. In the only deplorable act in a long and otherwise blameless literary career, Longfellow had agreed to drop the antislavery poems from this volume, called Poems, after his publisher had warned that including them would discourage sales in the slave-holding South. Many of the other works in the edition were already well known from their publication in Graham’s Magazine and elsewhere; as further evidence of his marketing skill, Longfellow had much of this new work repackaged in The Belfrey of Bruges and Other Poems, a literary landmark of 1845.

  The Belfrey of Bruges takes its title from one of his characteristic travelogue poems—a panorama of Flemish history as imagined from the famous bell tower, the kind of potted European “color” that later critics would ridicule, but that homebound Americans of Longfellow’s day read with eager devotion. (There is a companion poem about Longfellow’s day in Nuremberg and an anecdote in rhyme about the minnesinger Walther von der Vogelweide.) “The Arsenal at Springfield” represents him at his most didactic—and his most antimilitaristic—but it also has some biographical significance (rather rare in Longfellow’s work over all). On their wedding journey, accompanied by Sumner, the Longfellows had visited the United States Arsenal at Springfield, Massachusetts, where Fanny had pointed out how the stacks of gleaming gun barrels resembled the pipes of an organ and had urged him “to write a peace poem.”

  Ah! what a sound will rise, how wild and dreary,

  When the death-angel touches those swift keys!

  What loud lament and dismal Miserere

  Will mingle with their awful symphonies!

  There is much of interest in the volume, including a sonnet to Dante, and one short lyric, “The Arrow and the Song,” in which Longfellow achieves a kind of offhand mastery. He improvised the poem in October of 1845 while standing with his back to the fire, waiting to go to church. The moral is common enough—we do not know where our thoughts, not to mention our writings, may end up once we have launched them—and the conclusion is trite, but how many poets have achieved something so instantly memorizable in three short stanzas?

  I shot an arrow into the air,

  It fell to earth, I knew not where;

  For, so swiftly it flew, the sight

  Could not follow it in its flight.

  I breathed a song into the air,

  It fell to earth, I knew not where;

  For who has sight so keen and strong,

  That it can follow the flight of song?

  Long, long afterward, in an oak

  I found the arrow, still unbroke;

  And the song, from beginning to end,

  I found again in the heart of a friend.

  But the small masterpiece in The Belfrey of Bruges is the fifteen-stanza topographical poem “The Bridge.” It gathers all the strengths of Longfellow’s middle period: simplicity of diction, a subtle music in the meter, common yet memorable imagery. It is distinctly rooted in New England topography, yet deals with a universal theme; it is movingly biographical for those who know his personal history, yet intelligible to any reader.

  I stood on the bridge at midnight,

  As the clocks were striking the hour,

  And the moon rose o’er the city,

  Behind the dark church-tower.

  The narrator stands on the West Boston Bridge over the Charles, which Longfellow had crossed and recrossed with such desperation in his days of rejected courtship; the church is the Old West, on Cambridge Street. Unlike the massively buttressed Longfellow (or “Pepperpot”) Bridge now on that site, the nineteenth-century bridge had “long, black rafters” that allowed the tide and the seaweed to surge into the channel, in the days before damming produced the lakelike Charles Basin.

  How often, oh how often,

  In the days that had gone by,

  I had stood on that bridge at midnight

  And gazed on that wave and sky!

  How often, oh how often,

  I had wished that the ebbing tide

  Would bear me away on its bosom

/>   O’er the ocean wild and wide!

  For my heart was hot and restless,

  And my life was full of care,

  And the burden laid upon me

  Seemed greater than I could bear.

  This burden he carries no longer, but the pain and despair he once felt on that site have made him better aware of the tragic lot of his fellow man. Whenever he crosses the bridge’s wooden piers and smells the odor of brine, he sees the eternal procession, in an image that goes back to Dante and his amazement at how many men are in Hell, and forward to T. S. Eliot, who expresses the same amazement at the spectral crowd crossing London Bridge in The Waste Land. In Longfellow’s words:

  . . . I think of how many thousands

  Of care-encumbered men,

  Each bearing his burden of sorrow,

  Have crossed the bridge since then.

  I see the long procession

  Still passing to and fro,

  The young heart hot and restless,

  And the old subdued and slow!

  Yet the poem does not end on the expected bright, upbeat note that brings so much of Longfellow’s work to a crashing halt. Water brings out the best in this poet, not least for its refusal to remain fixed in place.

  And forever and forever,

  As long as the river flows,

  As long as the heart has passions,

  As long as life has woes;

  The moon and its broken reflection

  And its shadows shall appear,

  As the symbol of love in heaven,

  And its wavering image here.

  EVANGELINE

  LONGFELLOW’S POETIC PRODUCTION in the late 1840s still gave evidence of a writer who did not want to confine himself to short lyrics and souvenirs of European travel. Not long before his marriage, he had even written a play. The Spanish Student (1843) is not very stage-worthy (there is record of one performance, in a German translation, in 1855), but as a closet drama it has a certain charm. The plot, which owes something to Cervantes’s tale La Gitanilla, is creaky, with enough romantic students, Spanish hidalgos, and gypsy brigands to fill several light opera libretti. But the mood of the piece reflects Longfellow’s warm memories of his Spanish sojourn in 1827, particularly in his portrayal of the gypsy girl Preciosa. Her dance in front of the archbishop and cardinal assigned to examine her for alleged indecency literally ends with their throwing their hats into the air in lubricious excitement, a touch of Protestant satire at the expense of the Church, or at least a triumph of art over dogma. The following year, Longfellow produced a small anthology of verses mostly by other writers, under the title The Waif, followed in 1845 by the first of his ambitious anthologies of literature in translation, The Poets and Poetry of Europe. Many of the translations were his own—by this point, there was no other American who was so good at such things—with Felton contributing scholarly introductions. In a sense, the book was the outgrowth of his comparative literature classes at Harvard, but it embodied his broader, Goethean ambition of making Americans, even those who could not read foreign languages, aware of the possibilities of a Weltliteratur.

  He was ready for a very long poem. The British Romantics, notably Southey, had championed such narratives a generation earlier, but no American poet to date had found a subject that matched his or her talents, given that the subject had to be of epic proportions. (There was a list of honorable failures, going back to Barlow’s clunky Columbiad.) Longfellow’s particular project was to be seven years in the making.

  We know that Hawthorne, Hillard, and Felton dined at Longfellow’s rooms in the Craigie House on April 5, 1840, and there is reason to believe that Hawthorne had brought as his guest a Salem friend, political ally, and Episcopal priest, the Reverend Horace Conolly. After dinner Conolly told a story he said he had heard from a French-Canadian woman. He had urged Hawthorne on several occasions to turn this tale into a novel; the writer had considered it, but finally declared: “It is not in my vein: there are no strong lights and heavy shadows.” The story told the tragedy of a young Acadian couple who had been separated, on their marriage day, by British troops in the course of the expulsion of the French-speaking Acadians from Nova Scotia in 1755. She wandered for years throughout New England searching for him, only to find him on his deathbed—a shock that killed her as well, although they were united at last in a shared grave. Hawthorne once again declined to adapt the tale as a novel. Longfellow, according to Conolly in an account written many years later, “followed my narrative with great attention and apparently very deep interest.” At its conclusion, Conolly reports, Longfellow declared it “the best illustration of faithfulness and the constancy of woman that I have ever heard of or read.” Longfellow asked Hawthorne, “If you have really made up your mind not to use it for a story, will you give it to me for a poem?” Hawthorne agreed.

  Conolly adds that Hawthorne soon had second thoughts and, on the way home, broke into a profane tirade over the loss of such good material. This is surely an exaggeration, for Hawthorne had had ample opportunity to use the story, had it appealed to him; when he did write an essay on the Acadian expulsion a year later, he made no mention of it. It is interesting to speculate what Hawthorne might indeed have written, had he taken up what turned into Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie—perhaps a story in which, out of some obscure sense of guilt, the bridegroom deliberately avoids his bride during all those years of her obsessive searching, only to be caught at his next to last moment?

  Longfellow took a different approach, capitalizing on the pathos of the Acadian expulsion but giving his heroine a far larger field of action. In the Harvard library he found out what he could about the exiled Acadians. Some of them had slipped back into Nova Scotia, but most of their descendants were still scattered along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, including a large settlement in southern Louisiana and a tiny one in northern Maine’s St. John Valley. He learned the basic facts of le Grand Dérangement, as the Acadians call their exile, from T. C. Haliburton’s scholarly History of Nova Scotia, augmented by the Abbé de Reynal’s eighteenth-century depiction of Acadie—or maritime Canada—as a pastoral paradise. A great wrong had been done against an innocent people, Longfellow concluded, and he was stirred both by this injustice and by the ambivalent feelings he had always had toward Britain (although, in fairness, he recognized that New Englanders, particularly Massachusetts governor William Shirley, had played a large role in the expulsion and the subsequent seizure of Acadian farmland).

  The Acadians offered a tragic example of innocent people caught in the middle of distant European power politics. By the 1750s there were somewhere between twelve and eighteen thousand of them, living on farms their ancestors had cleared a century earlier, and vastly outnumbering the English-speaking Nova Scotian settlement centered on Halifax. They were devoutly Catholic but had tried to maintain their neutrality in the conflict between France and Britain (not easily done, given the fact that Nova Scotia had already changed hands ten times in the wars for North America). Traditionally on good terms with the indigenous Micmac Indians, the Acadians were suspected by the British, fairly or not, of aiding the Micmacs in their raids. While nominally subjects of the British king, most of the Acadians had declined, with what seemed to the British a kind of peasant obstinacy, to abjure their oath of loyalty to his French rival. In 1754 a new governor, Major Charles Lawrence, decided to crack down, first by confiscating the Acadians’ weapons and then by conducting, between 1755 and 1760, a massive deportation of these unreliable subjects to other parts of the Empire.

  The effort proved more difficult than expected, and only an estimated six thousand Acadians were in fact exiled, about a third of that number from the fictional Evangeline’s district of Grand Pré alone. Le Grand Dérangement became the defining event in Acadian ethnic identity, a tribal memory preserved among exiles scattered as far as the Falkland Islands and West Africa. But amid the far more dramatic events that followed in British North America in the 1770s, the Acadians were largely
forgotten in the English-speaking world. Longfellow’s Evangeline was to put them back on the map. As with the case of the Greeks, the Poles, and the Hungarians, mid-nineteenth-century Americans felt indignant upon learning the stories of such exiles, perhaps because these tragedies seemed so foreign to the spirit of progress among civilized peoples. (In 1847, only a radical would have drawn any parallel with American expropriation of Indian lands or the wholesale kidnapping of Africans into slavery.) It is one of the great ironies of Longfellow’s epic poem that while writing about what already seemed a distant, more primitive past, he was unwittingly anticipating the horrors of the twentieth century’s ethnic “cleansings.”

  Was there a real Evangeline or Gabriel? Not that anyone has discovered. It would be more accurate to say that they were a composite, a representative type, whose story subsumes and renders mythic the stories of hundreds of families separated, often forever, amid the chaos of the poorly organized expulsion. (The ease with which the Evangeline legend has been rewritten for their own purposes by various Acadian authors in the generations since Longfellow attests to its versatility.) The British had attempted to break up the Acadian settlement by scattering its members wherever ships could take them, but no one really wanted them, or had the resources to house and feed them, and probably hundreds of them died of starvation, exposure, and disease in the years immediately after 1755. As was his poetic practice, once Longfellow had briefed himself on the factual background, he used his material with a very free hand. He was a bard, not a historian; what mattered was the basic human truth of his story, not its particulars. He was not even sure what to call his heroine. “Gabrielle” was his first choice. “Celestine” was also considered. Rather late in the day, he settled on Evangeline, an uncommon name which he made world famous.