The great literary lesson of Longfellow’s life is to be found, after all, in this, that while he was the first among American poets to create for himself a world-wide fame, he was guided from youth to age by a strong national feeling, or at any rate by the desire to stand for the life and the associations by which he was actually surrounded. Such a tendency has been traced in this volume from his first childish poetry through his chosen theme for a college debate, his commencement oration, his plans formed during a first foreign trip, and the appeal made in his first really original paper in the “North American Review.” All these elements of aim and doctrine were directly and explicitly American, and his most conspicuous poems, “Evangeline,” “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” “Hiawatha,” and “The Wayside Inn,” were unequivocally American also. In the group of poets to which he belonged, he was the most travelled and the most cultivated, in the ordinary sense, while Whittier was the least so; and yet they are, as we have 259 seen, the two who—in the English-speaking world, at least—hold their own best; the line between them being drawn only where foreign languages are in question, and there Longfellow has of course the advantage. In neither case, it is to be observed, was this Americanism trivial, boastful, or ignoble in its tone. It would be idle to say that this alone constitutes, for an American, the basis of fame; for the high imaginative powers of Poe, with his especial gift of melody, though absolutely without national flavor, have achieved for him European fame, at least in France, this being due, however, mainly to his prose rather than to his poetry, and perhaps also the result, more largely than we recognize, of the assiduous discipleship of a single Frenchman, just as Carlyle’s influence in America was due largely to Emerson. Be this as it may, it is certain that the hold of both Longfellow and Whittier is a thing absolutely due, first, to the elevated tone of their works, and secondly, that they have made themselves the poets of the people. No one can attend popular meetings in England without being struck with the readiness with which quotations from these two poets are heard from the lips of speakers, and this, while not affording the highest test of poetic art, still yields the highest secondary test, and one on which both these authors would doubtless have 260 been willing to rest their final appeal for remembrance. In looking back over Longfellow’s whole career, it is certain that the early criticisms upon him, especially those of Margaret Fuller, had an immediate and temporary justification, but found ultimate refutation. The most commonplace man can be better comprehended at the end of his career than he can be analyzed at its beginning; and of men possessed of the poetic temperament, this is eminently true. We now know that at the very time when “Hyperion” and the “Voices of the Night” seemed largely European in their atmosphere, the author himself, in his diaries, was expressing that longing for American subjects which afterwards predominated in his career. Though the citizen among us best known in Europe, most sought after by foreign visitors, he yet gravitated naturally to American themes, American friends, home interests, plans, and improvements. He always voted at elections, and generally with the same party, took an interest in all local affairs and public improvements, headed subscription papers, was known by sight among children, and answered readily to their salutations. The same quality of citizenship was visible in his literary work. Lowell, who was regarded in England as an almost defiant American, yet had a distinct liking, 261 which was not especially shared by Longfellow, for English ways. If people were ever misled on this point, which perhaps was not the case, it grew out of his unvarying hospitality and courtesy, and out of the fact vaguely recognized by all, but best stated by that keen critic, the late Mr. Horace E. Scudder, when he says of Longfellow: “He gave of himself freely to his intimate friends, but he dwelt, nevertheless, in a charmed circle, beyond the lines of which men could not penetrate.... It is rare that one in our time has been the centre of so much admiration, and still rarer that one has preserved in the midst of it all that integrity of nature which never abdicates.”[100]
It is an obvious truth in regard to the literary works of Longfellow, that while they would have been of value at any time and place, their worth to a new and unformed literature was priceless. The first need of such a literature was no doubt a great original thinker, such as was afforded us in Emerson. But for him we should perhaps have been still provincial in thought and imitative in theme and illustration; our poets would have gone on writing about the skylark and the nightingale, which they might never have seen or heard anywhere, rather than about the bobolink and the humble-bee, which they knew. It 262 was Emerson and the so-called Transcendentalists who really set our literature free; yet Longfellow rendered a service only secondary, in enriching and refining it and giving it a cosmopolitan culture, and an unquestioned standing in the literary courts of the civilized world. It was a great advantage, too, that in his more moderate and level standard of execution there was afforded no room for reaction. The same attributes that keep Longfellow from being the greatest of poets will make him also one of the most permanent. There will be no extreme ups and downs in his fame, as in that of those great poets of whom Ruskin writes, “Cast Coleridge at once aside, as sickly and useless; and Shelley as shallow and verbose.” The finished excellence of his average execution will sustain it against that of profounder thinkers and more daring sons of song. His range of measures is not great, but his workmanship is perfect; he has always “the inimitable grace of not too much;” he has tested all literatures, all poetic motives, and all the simpler forms of versification, and he can never be taken unprepared. He will never be read for the profoundest stirring, or for the unlocking of the deepest mysteries; he will always be read for invigoration, for comfort, for content.
No man is always consistent, and it is not to 263 be claimed that Longfellow was always ready to reaffirm his early attitude in respect to a national literature. It is not strange that after he had fairly begun to create one, he should sometimes be repelled by the class which has always existed who think that mere nationality should rank first and an artistic standard afterwards. He writes on July 24, 1844, to an unknown correspondent:—
“I dislike as much as any one can the tone of English criticism in reference to our literature. But when you say, ‘It is a lamentable fact that as yet our country has taken no decided steps towards establishing a national literature,’ it seems to me that you are repeating one of the most fallacious assertions of the English critics. Upon this point I differ entirely from you in opinion. A national literature is the expression of national character and thought; and as our character and modes of thought do not differ essentially from those of England, our literature cannot. Vast forests, lakes, and prairies cannot make great poets. They are but the scenery of the play, and have much less to do with the poetic character than has been imagined. Neither Mexico nor Switzerland has produced any remarkable poet.
“I do not think a ‘Poets’ Convention’ would 264 help the matter. In fact, the matter needs no helping.”[101]
In the same way he speaks with regret, three years later, November 5, 1847, of “The prospectus of a new magazine in Philadelphia to build up ‘a national literature worthy of the country of Niagara—of the land of forests and eagles.’”
One feels an inexhaustible curiosity as to the precise manner in which each favorite poem by a favorite author comes into existence. In the case of Longfellow we find this illustrated only here and there. We know that “The Arrow and the Song,” for instance, came into his mind instantaneously; that “My Lost Youth” occurred to him in the night, after a day of pain, and was written the next morning; that on December 17, 1839, he read of shipwrecks reported in the papers and of bodies washed ashore near Gloucester, one lashed to a piece of the wreck, and that he wrote, “There is a reef called Norman’s Woe where many of these took place; among others the schooner Hesperus. Also the Sea-Flower on Black Rock. I must write a ballad upon this; also two others,—‘The Skeleton in Armor’ and ‘Sir Humphrey Gilbert.’” A fortnight later he sat at twelve o’clock by his fire, smoking, when suddenly it came into his mind to write the 265 Ballad of the Schooner Hesperus, which he says, “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.” A few weeks before, taking up a volume of Scott’s “Border Minstrelsy,” he had received in a similar way the suggestion of “The Beleaguered City” and of “The Luck of Edenhall.”
We know by Longfellow’s own statement to Mr. W. C. Lawton,[102] that it was his rule to do his best in polishing a poem before printing it, but afterwards to leave it untouched, on the principle that “the readers of a poem acquired a right to the poet’s work in the form they had learned to love.” He thought also that Bryant and Whittier hardly seemed happy in these belated revisions, and mentioned especially Bryant’s “Water-Fowl,”
“As darkly limned upon the ethereal sky,”
where Longfellow preferred the original reading “painted on.” It is, however, rare to find a poet who can carry out this principle of abstinence, at least in his own verse, and we know 266 too surely that Longfellow was no exception; thus we learn that he had made important alterations in the “Golden Legend” within a few weeks of publication. These things show that his remark to Mr. Lawton does not tell quite the whole story. As with most poets, his alterations were not always improvements. Thus, in “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” he made the fourth verse much more vigorous to the ear as it was originally written,—
“Then up and spoke an old sailór
Had sailed the Spanish Main,”
than when he made the latter line read
“Sailed to the Spanish Main,”
as in all recent editions. The explanation doubtless was that he at first supposed the “Spanish Main” to mean the Caribbean Sea; whereas it actually referred only to the southern shore of it. Still more curious is the history of a line in one of his favorite poems, “To a Child.” Speaking of this, he says in his diary,[103] “Some years ago, writing an ‘Ode to a Child,’ I spoke of
‘The buried treasures of the miser, Time.’
What was my astonishment to-day, in reading for the first time in my life Wordsworth’s ode ‘On the Power of Sound,’ to read
‘All treasures hoarded by the miser, Time.’”
267
As a matter of fact, this was not the original form of the Longfellow passage, which was,—
“The buried treasures of dead centuries,”
followed by
“The burning tropic skies.”
More than this, the very word “miser” was not invariably used in this passage by the poet, as during an intermediate period it had been changed to “pirate,” a phrase in some sense more appropriate and better satisfying the ear. The curious analogy to Wordsworth’s line did not therefore lie in the original form of his own poem, but was an afterthought. It is fortunate that this curious combination of facts, all utterly unconscious on his part, did not attract the attention of Poe during his vindictive period.
It is to be noticed, however, that Longfellow apparently made all these changes to satisfy his own judgment, and did not make them, as Whittier and even Browning often did, in deference to the judgment of dull or incompetent critics. It is to be remembered that even the academic commentators on Longfellow still leave children to sup............