A History of American Literature

Many of Whittier’s apparently false rimes, however, – as the author of the “Biglow Papers” should have recognized – are perfect if uttered according to the prevailing pronunciation of his district. Lowell passes for a scrupulous dialect expert when he writes, “This heth my faithful shepherd ben,” but Whittier is derided for allowing the same final verb to rime with “Of all sad words of tongue or pen,” whereas the sole difference is that one recognized the pronunciation in his spelling and the other took it for granted. If Whittier had employed Lowell’s method, in transcribing “Barbara Frietchie,” for example, he would have written,

Quick, as it fell, from the broken sta’afDame Barbara snatched the silken sca’af,

and he would have concluded with

Peace and odda and beauty drawrReound thy symbol of light and lawr;And evva the stahs above look deownOn thy stahs below in Frederick teown!

For the ou sounds belong to Essex County, and all the others to Boston and even to hallowed Cambridge. False rimes Whittier wrote in abundance, but by no means all of the apparently bad ones should be condemned at first glance.

Until the publication of “Snow-Bound” in 1866 Whittier’s verse, though widely circulated, had brought him in but little money return. For twenty years, he later recalled, he had been given the cold shoulder by editors and publishers; but as the hottest prejudices began to wane they could no longer afford to neglect his manuscripts, for these had in them the leading characteristics of “fireside favorites,” the only sort of poetry that is always certain of the sales to which no publisher is indifferent. In the first place, their form is simple; common words and short sentences are cast in conventional rhythms with frequent rime. They are therefore easy to commit to memory. In content they are easy to understand, not given to subtleties of analysis or to philosophical abstractions. More often than not they are either narratives like the war ballads and the New England chronicles or strung on a narrative thread like “Snow-Bound.” Almost always they contain vivid pictures; mention of “Skipper Ireson” or “Telling the Bees” or “The Huskers” or “Maud Muller” recalls tableaux first and then the ideas connected with them. And finally they contain the applied moral which the immature or the unliterary mind dearly loves, the very feature which proves irksome to the bookish reader serving as an added attraction to the unsophisticated one. It is not difficult to adduce popular favorites which do not include all of these traits, but beyond doubt the great majority of poems that are beloved by the multitude contain most if not all of them. When, in addition to these features, poems are essentially and permanently true to life and to the best there is in life their vogue is likely to be lasting as well as widespread. People cherish them as they do the melodies to which some of them are fortunately set, or as they do certain bits from Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Schubert, which belong to the repertory of every pianola or talking machine. On the other hand, the intricate beauties of Browning and Wagner or the austerities of Milton and Brahms will always be “caviar to the general.”

The last third of Whittier’s life brought him the rewards he had earned and the serenity he deserved. He lived quietly at Amesbury under his own roof or with his cousins at near-by Danvers. He was on friendly terms with the eminent literary men and women of his day. A long protraction of ill-health from boyhood on had developed him into a fragile, gentle old man, a little shy and reticent and to all appearances quite without the fighting powers which he had displayed when there was need for them. If one chooses to recall Whittier from a single portrait, it should be from one taken in his middle rather than in his later life, for the earlier ones are far more rugged.

As the years passed they were marked by a succession of public tributes. At seventy the most famous of the annual “Atlantic Monthly Dinners” was arranged in his honor. At eighty his home state officially celebrated his birthday. The anniversaries that followed were recognized in the public schools of many states; and so with “honor, love, obedience, troops of friends” he came to the end in 1892.

BOOK LIST

Individual Author

John Greenleaf Whittier. Works. Riverside Edition. 7 vols. (I–IV, Poetical works; V–VII, Prose.) Standard Library Edition. 9 vols. (Includes content of the Riverside Edition plus the life by S. T. Pickard.) 1892. The best one-volume edition of the poems is the Cambridge Student’s Edition. 1914. His works appeared in book form originally as follows: Legends of New England, 1831; Moll Pitcher, 1832; Justice and Expediency, 1833; Mogg Megone, 1836; Poems written between 1830 and 1838, 1837; Ballads, Anti-Slavery Poems, etc., 1838; Lays of my Home, 1843; The Stranger in Lowell, 1845; Supernaturalism in New England, 1847; Voices of Freedom, 1849; Old Portraits and Modern Sketches, 1850; Songs of Labor, 1850; The Chapel of the Hermits, 1853; Literary Recreations and Miscellanies, 1854; The Panorama, 1856; Home Ballads, 1860; In War Time, 1863; National Lyrics, 1865; Snow-Bound, 1866; The Tent on the Beach, 1867; Among the Hills, 1868; Miriam, 1870; The Pennsylvania Pilgrim, 1872; Hazel Blossoms, 1874; Centennial Hymn, 1876; The Vision of Echard, 1878; The King’s Missive, 1881; The Bay of Seven Islands, 1883; Saint Gregory’s Guest, 1886; At Sundown, 1892.

Bibliography

Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. II, pp. 436–451.

Biography and Criticism

The standard life is by Samuel T. Pickard. 1894. 2 vols.

Burton, Richard. John Greenleaf Whittier. 1901.

Carpenter, G. R. John Greenleaf Whittier. 1903. (A. M. L. Ser.)

Claflin, Mrs. Mary B. Personal Recollections of John Greenleaf Whittier. 1893.

Fields, Mrs. Annie. Authors and Friends. 1896.

Flower, B. O. Whittier, Prophet, Seer and Man. 1896.

Hawkins, C. J. The Mind of Whittier. 1904.

Higginson, T. W. Cheerful Yesterdays.

Higginson, T. W. Contemporaries.

Higginson, T. W. John Greenleaf Whittier. 1902. (E. M. L. Ser.)

Kennedy, W. S. John Greenleaf Whittier, his Life, Genius and Writings. 1882.

Lawton, W. C. Studies in the New England Poets. 1898.

Linton, W. J. Life of John Greenleaf Whittier. 1903.

Payne, W. M. Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. II, Bk. II, chap. xiii.

Pickard, S. T. Whittier Land. 1904.

Richardson, C. F. American Literature, Vol. II, chap. vi.

Stedman, E. C. Poets of America. 1885.

Taylor, Bayard. Critical Essays and Literary Notes. 1880.

Underwood, F. H. John Greenleaf Whittier: a Biography. 1884.

Wendell, Barrett. Stelligeri and Other Essays. 1893.

Whitman, Walt. Specimen Days. April 16, 1881.

TOPICS AND PROBLEMS

Read the poems in Whittier the titles of which suggest local treatment of Essex County life and scenes. Compare these with similar poems in Burns.

Read such poems as “First-Day Thoughts,” “Skipper Ireson’s Ride,” “The Garrison of Cape Ann,” “The Waiting,” “The Eternal Goodness,” and “Our Master” for evidences of Whittier’s religion.

Read Emerson’s essay on “The New England Reformers,” remembering that Whittier was one of these.

Compare the war poetry of Whittier and Freneau.

In Whittier’s controversial poetry note the different levels of “Barbara Frietchie,” “Expostulation,” and “The Waiting,” and cite other poems which may fairly be located in these three classes.

Read Whittier’s ballads with the comments on page 261 concerning his inclination to expound. Compare and contrast Whittier’s “Snow-Bound” with Burns’s “Cotter’s Saturday Night.”

Apply the tests for popular fireside poetry to those poems of Whittier’s which you regard as general favorites.

CHAPTER XVIII

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

It is a matter of common practice to mention Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) as a member of “the Cambridge group,” with the suggestion that there was some such agreement in point of view as existed between the men who lived and wrote in Concord. Yet there was no such oneness of mind among Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes as among Emerson and his younger associates. Between Longfellow and Lowell the real point of contact was their scholarship, and particularly their enthusiasm for the writings of Dante; between Lowell and Holmes there was neighborly regard but no real intimacy of feeling. The Cambridge men, to be sure, were different from the men of Concord. The fathers of all three were professional gentlemen of some distinction, all were college bred, ripened by residence abroad, and holders of professorships in Harvard College. All enjoyed and deserved social position as members of the “Brahmin caste,”17 all were frequenters of the celebrated Saturday Club, and all contributed to the early and lasting fame of the Atlantic Monthly. But as far as their deeper interests in life were concerned they went their several ways. Lowell was a representative first of New England and the North and later of the country as a whole; Holmes belonged far more to Boston than to the college town across the Charles; so that, of the three, Longfellow, the only one not born there, was most closely associated with Cambridge, less clearly allied with any other part of the world. In the literary vista, therefore, the local relationship should not loom too large. Longfellow should be considered as belonging to the same decades with Poe and Hawthorne; his greatest productive period was at its height when Poe was living, and was over before the death of Hawthorne, and his attitude toward life was similar to theirs in its sentimental fervor and in its artistic detachment. Lowell, in contrast, was a factor in the issues leading into and out of the Civil War, and Holmes’s richest years bridged the ’60’s.

Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, in 1807, the second of eight children. The matters of conventional record are that on his mother’s side he was descended from John and Priscilla Alden, and that his father was a lawyer with a good practice and a modestly well-equipped library. Able tutoring fitted the boy to matriculate as a sophomore in Bowdoin, in the class with Hawthorne, who was three years older. For a coming man of letters his record as a student was exceptionally good. Instead of being unsettled by vague dreams, he was stirred by a very definite ambition for “future eminence in literature.” His whole soul, he wrote to his father at the age of seventeen, burned most ardently for it, and every earthly thought centered in it. Then, just at the time when he was resigning himself to the law, in order not to be, like Goldsmith, “equally irreclaimable from poetry and poverty,” the trustees of Bowdoin, emulating the example of Harvard, established a professorship of modern languages, offered it to Longfellow, and set as a condition that he should prepare himself by study abroad. In the three years from 1826 to 1829 his mastering of the Romance languages was perhaps less important than his breathing the cultural atmosphere of the Old World. Life in America up to the nineteenth century had been a busy and self-centered experience. The chief consciousness of England and Europe had been a consciousness of other governments and of unsympathetic and conflicting loyalties; and now was beginning to arise an awareness not only of how other peoples were ruled but also of how they lived and what they were thinking about. Longfellow had little to say of foreign unfriendliness which was still disturbing Irving and Cooper and Bryant (see pp. 111–114). In preparing to teach foreign languages and literatures he yielded to the spell of their richly picturesque traditions; and his first work, “Outre-Mer” (1833), was an effort to expound these to his countrymen. This, too, Irving and Cooper had done, and from now on the refrain was to be taken up by most of the widely read American writers.18

As an impressionable young American he fell into the declining sentimentalism of the period and wrote characteristically to his mother: “I look forward to the distant day of our meeting until my heart swells into my throat and tears into my eyes. I cannot help thinking that it is a pardonable weakness.” He was so absorbed by all he was seeing and learning that he wrote no verse, letting the days go by until he concluded with the overwhelming seriousness of twenty-two that his poetic career was finished. As a matter of fact he was just complementing his native American feeling with a sense of the glamour of Old World civilization, and was on the way toward combining the two as poet and professor. Returning to his old college he taught there until in 1836 he was invited to succeed Professor George Ticknor at Harvard, again with the condition – implied if not imposed – that he go abroad for study. On his second sojourn he extended his knowledge to the Germanic languages, mastering them as thoroughly as he had French, Spanish, and Italian. In the end he is said to have had a fluent speaking control of eight tongues, with the power to “get along in” six more, and to read yet another six. Until 1854 he was engaged in his duties at Harvard, giving no little instruction, engaging all his assistants, and personally supervising their teaching. It was an irksome routine against which he began to rebel many years before he shook himself free. “It is too much to do for one’s daily bread, when one can live on so little,” he wrote in 1839. “I must learn to give up superfluous things and devote myself wholly to literature.” And in the same year he referred in another letter to “poetic dreams shaded by French irregular verbs.”

If the distractions of his professorship had actually prevented all writing, he would doubtless not have held it eighteen years; but in spite of handicaps his output was fairly steady throughout, and his most richly productive period – 1847–1863 – half overlapped his Harvard service. Aside from his fruitful activities in formulating books and methods for language study, and aside from his unimpressive prose volumes “Outre-Mer,” “Hyperion,” and “Kavanagh,” his poetry was abundant and in a way progressive. Most memorable among the early types was a sizeable group to which he referred in his diary and letters as “psalms.” Of these, of course, “A Psalm of Life” is best known. Like all the others of its sort, it has the traits that are sure to endear it to the multitude. It is in a conventional ballad meter, alternating lines of four and three stresses with alternating rimes, it is easy to understand, it is constructed around one vivid picture, and it conveys a wholesome moral lesson. It is a general counsel to industry and fortitude. Its message is formulated in a closing stanza of “The Light of Stars,”

And thou, too, whosoe’er thou art,That readest this brief psalm,As one by one thy hopes depart,Be resolute and calm,

and its “act in the living present” is echoed in the daily achievement of the village blacksmith.

Longfellow’s labors as a translator began early and continued throughout his career, but it is interesting to see that in the earlier efforts a sober ethical note prevails, whereas many of the later translations are marked by simple charm and some by sheer frivolity. “The Coplas de Don Jorge Manrique” is a transparently veiled homily on the vanity of human wishes; others from the Spanish are on “The Good Shepherd” and “The Image of God” and from Dante on “The Celestial Pilot” and “The Terrestrial Paradise”; there is an Anglo-Saxon passage on “The Grave” and a fragment from a German ballad in which a ribald discussion of “The Happiest Land” is interrupted by the landlord’s daughter who points to heaven and says:

… “Ye may no more contend, —There lies the happiest land!”

In January, 1840, the poet wrote to his friend George Greene:

I have broken ground in a new field; namely, ballads; beginning with the “Wreck of the Schooner Hesperus” on the reef of Norman’s Woe… I think I shall write more. The national ballad is a virgin soil here in New England; and there are great materials. Besides, I have a great notion of working on the people’s feelings.

In 1841, consequently, there appeared his “Ballads and Other Poems.” Longfellow had first intended calling the volume “The Skeleton in Armor,” but the collection grew in number until this poem was overbalanced by the weight of the whole, and until – which is more significant – the native ballads were crowded by the introduction of poems from the German and Swedish and Danish. The change of plan, though slight, was indicative of what was taking place in Longfellow’s development. He inclined, in the fashion of his day, to foster American subject matter, but he was full of the spirit and content of European literature which was unknown to his countrymen. Some years were to pass before he could hold his gaze away from “outre-mer.” Another letter to George Greene shows how he was vacillating at this time.

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 fields, 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… I do not think a “Poets’ Convention” would help the matter. In fact the matter needs no helping.

“Excelsior” is a complete poetic fulfillment of this idea. There is nothing essentially American in the aspiration of youth. Longfellow therefore “staged” the ballad in the Alps, partly because the Alps doubtless first occurred to mind and partly because in America no mountain heights were topped by the symbolic monastery from which the traveler could be found still aspiring in death. Again, lyrics like “The Day is Done,” “The Old Clock on the Stairs,” and “The Arrow and the Song” belong to no time or place but are meditative moments in the life of any thoughtful man. And finally, “The Bridge” is a representative combination of native and foreign material. The bridge with wooden piers used to stand exactly as described over the Charles River between Boston and Cambridge. It was so near the ocean that the tides swept back and forth under it as they do not under any bridge in London or Paris or on the German Rhine. Yet in the second stanza the likeness of the moonlight to “a golden goblet falling and sinking into the sea” is evidently an allusion to a picture in Schiller’s “König von Thule,” a literary allusion but not a false one, for the moonlight might well look the same on the tide-tossed Charles as on the streaming Rhine. In his “Seaweed” Longfellow seems to have been half explaining and half defending such poetic processes:

So when storms of wild emotionStrike the oceanOf the poet’s soul, erelongFrom each cave and rocky fastness,In its vastness,Floats some fragment of a song.

The one point to accept with caution from all Longfellow’s poems of self-analysis is the oft-recurring reference to heroic strife. Whatever heroism he felt or displayed “in the world’s broad field of battle” was more quietly enduring than spectacular. The real Longfellow learned “to labor and to wait”; if wild emotion ever struck the ocean of his soul he possessed himself for the tumult to subside. The finest of all his lyrics, “Victor and Vanquished,” cannot be confirmed from the visible evidences of his career. The “Poems on Slavery,” for example, attest only to the passive courage of his convictions. In 1842 it was no small matter to come out clearly in public opposition to human bondage (see p. 257). Longfellow did not hesitate to risk his growing popularity by issuing this little volume. He was, and he continued to be, the devoted friend of Charles Sumner. Yet his antislavery heroism began and ended with these seven poems, and their value lay more in the bare fact that he had written them than in any ethical or emotional appeal.

The period from 1847 to 1863 was, all things considered, quite the most fruitful for Longfellow; and this contained no five titles to rival “Evangeline” (1847), “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855), “The Courtship of Miles Standish” (1858), “The New England Tragedy” (first form, 1860), and “Tales of a Wayside Inn” (1863). Thus, although he by no means abandoned Europe and the thoughts of Europe, he came at last and altogether naturally to the development of American tradition and the American scene. The immediate success of “Evangeline” (for five thousand copies were sold within two months) is easy to understand. The material was fresh and the story was lovely. Longfellow’s reading-public, accustomed to certain charms and qualities in his work, found these no less attractively displayed in the long story than in his brief lyrics. The pastoral scene at the start, the dramatic episode of the separation, the long vista of American scenes presented in Evangeline’s vain search, and the final rounding out of the story plot, all belong to a “good seller”; and as it happened there was in America in 1847 no widely popular novelist. The field belonged to the author of “Evangeline” even more completely then a half century earlier it had belonged to the author of “Marmion,” on the other side of the sea.

In the journal of 1849 appears the entry, “And now I hope to try a loftier strain, the sublimer Song whose broken melodies have for so many years breathed through my soul in the better hours of life.” This was a reference to “The Golden Legend,” which appeared in 1851, and which was in the end to become part of “Christus,” completed not until 1872. In a sense this was the most ambitious and least effective of all his undertakings. It was too scholastic for the public; it was not a fit avenue to the feelings of “the people” whom in 1840 he had resolved to stir. By 1854 Longfellow entered in the journal, “I have at length hit upon a plan for a poem on the American Indians, which seems to me the right one and the only.” This was to do with the traditions of the red man what Malory had done with the Arthurian story and what Tennyson was soon to be reweaving into the “Idylls of the King.” Schoolcraft’s Indian researches put the material into his hands, and the Finnish epic “Kalevala” supplied the suggestion for the appropriate measure. It appeared in 1855 and was demanded by the public in repeated printings.

“Hiawatha” has a double assurance of wide and lasting fame in the fact that it appeals to young and old in different ways. It appeals to children because it is made up of a succession of picturesque stories of action. Their lack of plots is no defect to the youthful reader – nothing could be more plotless then the various parts of “Gulliver’s Travels” – and on the other hand few children detect or care for the scheme underlying them as a whole. They are as vivid and circumstantial as “Gulliver” or as “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Furthermore they deal with human types which belong to all romantic legend: Hiawatha, the hero; Minnehaha, the heroine; Chibiabos, the sweet singer, or artist; Kwasind, the strong man, or primitive force; Pau-Puk-Keewis, the mischief-maker, or the comic spirit, – any child will recognize them for example in Robin Hood, Maid Marian, Allan-a-Dale, Will Scarlet, and Friar Tuck. Again, these human types are extended over into the animal world and even to the forces of nature, the latter, by the way, supplying frequently the place of the indispensable villain or obstacle between the hero and the achievement of his purposes.

Unhappily the average adult who has read it in early life assumes that he has advanced beyond “Hiawatha,” that he can put it away with other childish things, not realizing how much more than meets the eye resides within its lines. Moreover, some grown-ups who do attempt a second reading are dissatisfied because their minds have stopped between childhood and maturity, stunted by too heavy a diet on obvious fiction and the daily newspapers. For the later reading of “Hiawatha” demands the kind of intellectual maturity that can cope with “Paradise Lost” or “Sartor Resartus” or “In Memoriam” or the classics which are quite beyond the child. The genuinely mature reader appreciates that the legends and the ballads of a people are never limited to external significance and that, whoever may happen to be the hero, it is the people who are represented through him. So the epic note emerges for him who can hear it. A peace is declared among the warring tribes; Hiawatha is sent by Mudjekeewis back to live and toil among his people; he is commended by Mondamin because he prays “For advantage of the nations”; he fights the pestilence to save the people; he divides his trophies of battle with them; and he departs when the advent of the white man marks the doom of the Indian. And so the ordering of the parts is ethnic, tracing the Indian chronicle through the stages that all peoples have traversed, from the nomad life of hunting and fishing to primitive agriculture and community life; thus come song and festival, a common religion and a common fund of legend, and finally, in the tragic life of this people, come the decline of strength, in the death of Kwasind, the passing of song with Chibiabos, and the departure of national heroism as Hiawatha is lost to view,