Longfellow

by Charles C. Calhoun

  The quality of this work varies, but for all his personal troubles and the often aggravating demands of others for his time and attention, Longfellow continued until the end to experiment with poetic form and take on a daunting array of subjects. Many of the minor poems are charming and of biographical interest (notably the tributes to Parker Cleaveland, Hawthorne, and Agassiz); some are even topical, including Longfellow’s expression of shock at President Garfield’s assassination and his quick response to the massacre at Little Big Horn—“The Revenge of Rain-in-the-Face,” a poem that suggests some sympathy for the Indians’ point of view. The works that deserve to endure are his more than thirty major sonnets, all written in the Petrarchan form, most particularly the six collected as “Divinia Commedia” (originally written as introductions to his Dante translations). The series begins just as his work as a translator begins:

  FIGURE 11: Eugene L’Africain, Authors Group, 1883. The lithograph includes images of the famous American writers’ houses and was distributed by the Travelers Insurance Company. Courtesy Maine Historical Society.

  Oft have I seen at some cathedral door

  A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat,

  Lay down his burden, and with reverent feet

  Enter, and cross himself, and on the floor

  Kneel to repeat his paternoster o’er;

  Far off the noises of the world retreat;

  The loud vociferations of the street

  Become an undistinguishable roar.

  So, as I enter here from day to day,

  And leave my burden at this minster gate,

  Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray,

  The tumult of the time disconsolate

  To inarticulate murmurs dies away,

  While the eternal ages watch and wait.

  It is a poem that confirms Henry James’s observation (in William Wetmore Story and His Friends, 1903) that Longfellow is “perhaps interesting for nothing so much as for the secret of his harmony (harmony of situation and sense I of course mean) and for the way in which his ‘European’ culture and his native kept house together.”

  The other major poetic accomplishment of his later years is his meditation on the life and art of Michelangelo, which links his 1828 sojourn in Rome to his own situation as an artist facing death. The painter-poet asks:

  How will men speak of me when I am gone,

  When all this colorless, sad life is ended,

  And I am as dust? They will remember only

  The wrinkled forehead, the marred countenance,

  The rudeness of my speech, and my rough manners,

  And never dream that underneath them all

  There was a woman’s heart of tenderness;

  They will not know the secret of my life,

  Locked up in silence, or but vaguely hinted

  In uncouth rhymes, that may perchance survive

  Some little space in memories of men!

  In growing his beard, Longfellow began the transformation of himself from a distinguished citizen of Cambridge into an American icon, whose face would peer down—often between Lincoln’s and Washington’s—from the photolithographs high on the schoolroom wall, managing to convey beneath his whiskers something both patriarchal and benign. Despite the enviable productivity as poet and translator sketched above, Longfellow found himself increasingly drawn in his last two decades toward playing a public role that he both welcomed and regretted. The sheer volume of his correspondence—much of it from strangers requesting autographs (which he unfailingly sent, often in multiples) or seeking his comments on their own poems (which he politely declined to do)—consumed much of his workday. With a kind of grim determination he took on these tasks—as well as dealing with publishers and printers—on his own, not seeking secretarial help until his last years. Meanwhile, amid a steady flow of distinguished visitors (ranging from Trollope to Emperor Pedro of Brazil) and a large circle of Boston and Cambridge friends, total strangers came to the door or peeped in the windows of the Craigie House. He often invited them in. It was as if to show himself in the flesh was part of his role as the nation’s premier poet. There would have been something almost sacerdotal about it, had he not been so modest a man. He had an especially appreciative eye for handsome younger women—there are vague hints in the late 1860s and 1870s of mild flirtations, perhaps one serious flutter of the heart—and, as always, he kept an open door for children.

  When the schoolchildren of Cambridge presented him, on his seventy-second birthday in 1879, with an armchair for his study made from the remnants of the village blacksmith’s “spreading chestnut-tree,” he had achieved a degree of celebrity that went beyond merely literary fame. His influence was spilling over into other aspects of American life, most notably the decorative arts. For the next fifty years or more, there were people who sought to live in replicas of the Craigie House (in the early twentieth century, Sears Roebuck would sell scaled-down house plans for it). The tall-case clocks that had stood in eighteenth-century parlors were moved to stair landings in “correct” Colonial Revival interiors, as a result of the popularity of “The Old Clock on the Stairs,” inspired by Fanny’s mother’s family home in Pittsfield. Even more ubiquitous was the spinning wheel, Priscilla Mullins’s contribution to the antiques trade. It sat in the Colonial Kitchen, perilously close to the open hearth (which “The Hanging of the Crane” had helped to popularize) and beneath all those bundles of drying herbs and the ancestral musket (shades of Miles Standish!). It is an irony of Longfellow’s career that a writer so open to the cultures of other lands would have so profound an effect on what might seem a narrowly local (and exclusionary) historical revivalism.

  In other regards as well there is a sense that Longfellow in these years felt his reputation slipping beyond his control. He was universally well regarded, and much feted, but at the same time increasingly seen as a children’s poet. His melancholy in these years—aggravated by chronic ill health and the deaths of close friends (Hawthorne in 1864, Dickens in 1870, Sumner in 1874, Fields in 1881)—may owe something to a feeling that the world he thought was taking shape had not survived the Civil War. Darwinism and the rapid industrialization of the North, with its insatiable need for cheap foreign labor, had undermined the mental world so well represented by antebellum Unitarian professors, championing the argument for creation by design and the placid, predictable universe of the Scottish Common Sense philosophy. Longfellow never had a literary “program” that he put directly into words. Yet there emerges from his writings and from his life a certain vision of America that he hoped that he, or at least his children, would live to see realized. It was a very New England vision, indeed a distinctly Boston one, Whiggish yet cautiously progressive. In religion it was conventionally Unitarian, in politics democratic up to a point, or at least willing to judge people by their talents. It was based on a quiet belief in a hierarchical (and deferential) social order, but one imbued at the top with a strong sense of public duty and a willingness to make sacrifices for the public good. It saw the spheres of men and women as reasonably well defined but complementary. The true role of woman was not just as wife and mother but as a civilizing force on man, whose manners were to be softened while his heart was taught tenderness. There were social evils, but men and women of good will would not rest until they were assured these wrongs would be set right. There was more to life than the counting house. The role of poetry was an idealizing one, by turns celebratory and comforting, and it furnished an important tool in the civilizing mission of women. The role of the poet was public, even when his language was private. The role of the citizen was to love his country and honor its past, but to seek out other lands and cultures as well, certain that their art and literature had important things to teach him. To know foreign languages and literatures was one definition of being educated. God was benevolent, if inscrutable, and the world was a safe place, despite the terrible griefs flesh was heir to. These would be assuaged in the world to come. Heaven mig
ht very well resemble Annie Fields’s literary salon on Charles Street, with Ticknor & Fields’s authors and all one’s loved ones there.

  Longfellow had the misfortune to live long enough to see this vision begin to crumble. His country became xenophobic, fearful of strangers but quite ready to exploit their labor or conquer their lands if the chance presented itself. The government was run by spoilsmen and vulgarians. Even polite society was obsessed by moneygrubbing and the scramble for place. The streets were full of apparently unassimilable immigrants. Men were taught to harden themselves, to see gentleness as weakness, to prepare themselves for the brutal battle of life (beginning on the collegiate sports field). The pieties of both the literature and science of Longfellow’s youth were challenged from many fronts. It was a deeply unsettling world.

  Like many other Americans, Longfellow sought refuge and solace from these changes in his own extended family, which included his children, their governess, his widowed sisters, Uncle Tom Appleton, and—when he could get away from battling his fellow Republicans in the Grant administration—Sumner. It also included in his last decade George Washington Greene, a friend from Longfellow’s first trip to Europe and one of the few people alive who remembered the poet’s first wife. After a lifetime in Rome, Greene had returned to America in poor health and a failure as a writer. He became a frequent and long-term houseguest in the Craigie House. Longfellow paid to have his work published, gave him money, and literally nursed him through a series of illnesses. Greene was a living link with his lost youth.

  As the children matured, the family circle began to loosen. Charley never settled into a career, but spent summers racing the Alice and winters at the Somerset Club. He traveled widely, pig-sticking with British Army officers in India and living from 1871–73 in Japan, where—if his photo album (recently published) is any indication—he went native and lived surrounded by geisha. To his father’s alarm, he spent heavily on Japanese art and decorative goods and finally had to come home because he was so rapidly exhausting the money his mother had left him. Ernest proved more conventional, even stuffy, and pursued a not very successful career as a painter. He and his sisters Anne and Edith married well; Alice continued in the role of chatelaine of the Craigie House, never marrying, and becoming in her later years a formidable figure in Cambridge and one of the founders of Radcliffe College. Edith’s husband was the boy next door, Richard Henry Dana III, son of the author of Two Years Before the Mast and himself a lawyer dedicated to civil service reform and other good causes. In later years, he remembered his frequent visits to the Craigie House, reflecting on how kind and ever interested a host his father-in-law invariably was, yet also struck by the impenetrable reserve of a man who exhibited a certain distance even from his own children.

  Longfellow had increasing difficulty eating in his final years, but typically tried to put a good face on things: Dana remembered him coming down to breakfast, pouring a cup of tea and buttering a piece of toast, but not consuming either; it was all a show of normality for the family. Toward the end, he lived on milk and bread. In March of 1882, the weather turned mild enough for him to walk, as had long been his custom, on the piazza, but he took chill and went to bed with severe stomach pain. He endured another six days, in the end heavily opiated for the pain. On the afternoon of Friday, March 24, after broken episodes of consciousness, he died, surrounded by family. The immediate cause of death was listed as peritonitis, but the symptoms suggest cancer of the stomach.

  On Sunday his closest surviving friends and immediate family gathered in the library, where he was laid out, not far from the spot where Fanny had suffered her fatal accident. A single line of passion flowers rested on the broadcloth covering his plain coffin. After brief remarks by his brother Samuel, the funeral cortege of seventeen carriages moved down Brattle Street to the Indian Ridge Path at Mount Auburn Cemetery, where he was interred, next to both of his wives. A much larger public memorial service was held that afternoon at Harvard’s Appleton Chapel.

  Among the mourners at the Craigie House was Emerson, erect but mentally enfeebled and himself soon to die. Looking at the coffin, he said to his daughter, “I cannot recall the name of our friend, but he was a good man.”

  AFTERMATH

  WASHINGTON IRVING ONCE CLAIMED that while other men live on through the unsteady medium of history, literary men have an advantage, for the intercourse between an author and his public is “ever new, active and immediate.” He was taking his own readers just then on a stroll through Westminster Abbey—in the pages of his Sketch Book of 1819—and had paused in Poets’ Corner. He noted that visitors to the Abbey lingered longest there, “as about the tombs of friends and companions; for indeed there is something of companionship between the author and the reader.” At the time of Longfellow’s death, this intimacy between the poet and his admirers remained an unmistakable feature of the Anglo-American literary landscape. But it was to prove as ephemeral as the historical fate that Irving assigned to the ordinary run of mortals, despite the bust of Longfellow placed in Poets’ Corner within two years of his death.

  It would have overstretched the imagination of the young Bowdoin student daydreaming over Irving’s travel essays to consider that he himself would someday join Shakespeare and Milton in that pantheon. It would have surprised most Americans at the height of Longfellow’s fame in the 1860s, when relations between upper-class Britain and pro-Unionist Americans had turned sour. But by the 1880s, Longfellow’s substantial reputation among the British reading public and a desire—not unrelated to the racial politics of Empire—to seek ways of affirming the transatlantic tie had persuaded the British establishment to honor him by so grand a gesture. In March of 1884, in the presence of two of his daughters and the American Minister, James Russell Lowell, the idealized bronze bust was unveiled, making Longfellow the first American to be so honored. (And to this date, the only native-born, lifelong American poet: Auden was a naturalized citizen, and Eliot gave up his U.S. citizenship.) The sculptor Thomas Brock had crafted it on the basis of photographs of the elderly poet. The Prince of Wales had served as Honorary Chairman of the four-hundred-member Longfellow Memorial Committee, and Gladstone had written a letter of support. But much of the cost had been raised by contributions from “ordinary” readers. The Honorary Secretary, W. C. Bennett, expressed hope that Lowell might see “in the presence of his friend in our Poets’ Corner how dearly we cherish the thought of the unity of the two great communities of our race.” Lowell replied that he hoped that “the Abbey might become the Valhalla of the English-speaking race.”

  Back home, similar commemorations took shape. A replica of the bust was unveiled at the Portland City Hall in 1885 as a hundred members of the Haydn Association sang “Excelsior.” Franklin Symonds’s handsome neoclassical seated figure of the bearded poet appeared three years later at a busy intersection that Portland renamed Longfellow Square. Meanwhile, various institutions—the Alumni Association of Bowdoin College, the Massachusetts and the Maine Historical Societies, Harvard University—had published generous memorial tributes. In Washington in 1909, in the presence of Chief Justice Melville Fuller and the U.S. Marine Band, the poet’s youngest grandchild, Erica Thorp, pulled a silken cord to unveil William Couper’s Longfellow statue at the intersection of Connecticut Avenue and M Street N.W., a space also named Longfellow Square. The statue was the gift of the Longfellow Memorial Association, for which Theodore Roosevelt served as Honorary Regent.

  More popular demonstrations of that “companionship between author and reader” also took place. In 1883, for example, tableaux vivants representing Longfellow’s works were staged in several American cities. Sixteen hundred tickets at two dollars each (to benefit the East Side Library) were sold for the New York spectacle at Chickering Hall. Later that year, almost two hundred men, women, and children appeared in costume at the Music Hall in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, in a similar production called Longfellow’s Dream. “Childe Henry” falls asleep in Deering’s Woods and i
s visited by the Spirit of Poetry. She shares her harp, and the youth slips into a dream. “Various characters glide past an opening in the wood, the creations he is to embody in his future verse. They are introduced by Chorus,” as the program explains. From Hiawatha’s “Puk-Wudj’ies” to the Slave Singing at Midnight, from Giles Corey of the Salem Farms to Vittoria Colonna of the Michelangelo poem, from Sallie Manchester in Kavanagh to the poet’s three daughters in “The Children’s Hour,” the tableaux touched upon every aspect of his poetical career, closing with Longfellow’s meeting with Queen Victoria. What is impressive is not only the scale of the production, but the close familiarity with the poet’s work, including his prose, that the producers could assume among their local audiences. This notion of Longfellow celebration as a communal event also had its British manifestation: in the late 1890s, performances of the Hiawatha settings by the Afro-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor became increasingly popular, culminating in a 1900 production at the Royal Albert Hall, with the Royal Choral Society. Coleridge-Taylor’s rousing “Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast” became a special favorite, inspiring huge choral performances in the early twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic. It remains the best vocal setting of any of his works. Meanwhile, an even greater composition reflected the Longfellow legacy. In 1892, Antonin Dvorák composed his Ninth Symphony, From the New World—his most popular work—with a copy of Longfellow’s poetry on his music stand. The symphony (above all its Largo movement) owed an even greater debt to African American music, particularly slave songs, but the composer gave credit to Hiawatha above any other American literary source. He did not quote black or Native American music, he was insistent on pointing out. “I have simply written original themes embodying the peculiarities of the music.”