A History of American Literature

In the glory of the sunset,In the purple mists of evening.

It is no mean achievement to write a children’s classic, but the enduring fact about “Hiawatha” is that it is a genuine epic as well.

No other poem of Longfellow’s is so well adjusted in form and content. The fact of first importance is not that Longfellow derived the measure from a Finnish epic but that the primitive epic form is perfect because it is the natural, unstudied way of telling a primitive story. The forms of literature that go back nearest to the people in their origins are simple in rhythm and built up of parallel repetitions. This marks a distinction between the epics about nations written in a later age, such as the Iliad and the Æneid and the works of Milton, and the epics of early and unknown authorship, such as the “Nibelungenlied” and “Beowulf.” It was Longfellow’s gift to combine the old material with a fittingly primitive measure, joining as only poet and scholar could

… legends and traditionsWith the odors of the forest,With the dew and damp of meadows,With the curling smoke of wigwams,With the rushing of great rivers,With their frequent repetitions,And their wild reverberations,As of thunder in the mountains.

With “The Courtship of Miles Standish” Longfellow returned to New England and told his first long story of his own district and of his own immediate people. Both “Evangeline” and “Hiawatha” were narratives that ended with themselves. The glory of the Acadians and of the Indians was departed. But “Miles Standish” was like the “New England Tragedies” in dealing with a people who were very much alive. For the early Puritan, Longfellow felt a thorough and abiding respect which was not untinged with humor. For his self-righteousness, his stridency, and his arid lack of feeling for beauty the poet showed an amused contempt, but for the essential qualities of rectitude and abiding persistence he was quite ready to acknowledge his admiration. There is a pleasant personal application in this story which he who runs is likely to overlook. Miles Standish was a worthy man, says Longfellow; he was stalwart, vigorous, practical, and when put to the test he was magnanimous, too. But he was sadly one-sided. It was not enough to be like his own howitzer,

Steady, straightforward, and strong, with irresistible logic,Orthodox, flashing conviction right into the hearts of the heathen.

He was of the sort who banished the birds of Killingworth with costly consequence. The worthier character was John Alden – “my ancestor” – who was like the Preceptor of Killingworth in his feeling for beauty in nature and in poetry and in song. “Miles Standish” is his most amiable picture of the Puritans. In “The New England Tragedies” Governor Endicott’s death is a poetic and divine retribution for his persecution of the Quakers, and Giles Corey’s sacrifice to the witchcraft mania is a horrid indictment of bigotry unbridled.

From 1863 on Longfellow continued in the various paths which he had already marked out, but his work in the main was in sustained narrative and in translation. His rendering of Dante is the preëminent piece of American translation, at once more poetic and more scholarly than Bryant’s “Iliad” or Bayard Taylor’s “Faust.” It was a labor of love, extending over many years, the fruit of his teaching as well as of his study, and in its final form the product of nightly counsels with his learned neighbors, Charles Eliot Norton and James Russell Lowell. Age, fame, and the affectionate respect of the choicest friends saw him broaden and deepen in his philosophy of life. Little psalms and ballads no longer expressed him. Life had become a great outreaching drama at which he hinted in his cyclic “Christus: a Mystery.” His last lyrics opened vistas instead of supplying formulas, and quite appropriately he left behind as an uncompleted fragment his dramatic poem on the greatest of dreamers and workers, Michael Angelo.

There is no possibility of debate as to Longfellow’s immense popularity. The evidence of the number of editions in English and in translation, the number of works in criticism, the number of titles in the British Museum catalogue, the number of poems included in scores of “Household” and “Fireside” collections, and the confidence with which booksellers stock up in anticipation of continued sales,19 tells the story. But these facts in themselves do not establish Longfellow’s claim to immortality, for there is no necessary connection between such popularity and greatness. There was little evidence in him of the genius which takes no thought for the things of the morrow. Until after the height of his career he never wrote in disregard of the public. “The fact is,” he sent word to his father, when he was but seventeen, “I most eagerly aspire after future eminence in literature.” And even earlier he had laid down his program when he wrote, “I am much better pleased with those pieces which touch the feelings and improve the heart, than with those which excite the imagination only.” He had the good sense and the honesty not to pretend to inspiration. On the contrary he was continually projecting poems and continually sitting down, not to write what he had thought but to think what he should write. He was an omnivorous but acquiescent reader, and what his reading yielded him was literary stuff rather than vital ideas. He accepted and reflected the ways of his own time and did not modify them in any slightest degree. He was never iconoclastic, rarely even fresh. He had something of Pope’s gift for well-rounded utterances on life, something of Scott’s ability to tell a good story well, and withal his own benevolent serenity.

This was not a supreme endowment, but it was a very large one, and he developed it to a lofty degree. There will always be a case for Longfellow in the hands of those who value the inspirer of the many above the inspirer of the wise. There are ten who read Longfellow to every one who reads Whitman or Emerson. His wholesomeness, his lucidity, his comfortable sanity, his very lack of intense emotion, endear him to those who wish to be entertained with a story or soothed and reassured by a gentle lyric. Edmund Clarence Stedman wrote finely of him: “His song was a household service, the ritual of our feastings and mournings; and often it rehearsed for us the tales of many lands, or, best of all, the legends of our own. I see him, a silver-haired minstrel, touching melodious keys, playing and singing in the twilight, within sound of the rote of the sea. There he lingers late; the curfew bell has tolled and the darkness closes round, till at last that tender voice is silent, and he softly moves unto his rest.”

BOOK LIST

Individual Author

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Works. Riverside Edition. 1886. 11 vols. Poetry, Vols. I–VI, IX–XI. Prose, Vols. VII, VIII. Standard Library Edition. 14 vols. (Includes content of Riverside Edition plus the life by Samuel Longfellow.) The best single volume is the Cambridge Edition. His work appeared in book form originally as follows: Miscellaneous Poems from the United States Literary Gazette (with others), 1826; Coplas de Manrique, 1833; Outre-Mer, Vol. I, 1833, Vol. II, 1834; Hyperion, 1839; Voices of the Night, 1839; Ballads and Other Poems, 1842; Poems on Slavery, 1842; The Spanish Student, 1843; Poems, 1845; The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems, 1846; Evangeline, 1847; Kavanagh, 1849; The Seaside and the Fireside, 1850; The Golden Legend, 1851; Hiawatha, 1855; Prose Works, 1857; The Courtship of Miles Standish, 1858; The New England Tragedy, 1860; Tales of a Wayside Inn, 1863; Flower-de-Luce, 1867; Dante’s Divina Commedia (translated), 1867; The New England Tragedies, 1868; The Divine Tragedy, 1871; Three Books of Song, 1872; Aftermath, 1873; The Masque of Pandora, 1875; Kéramos, 1878; Ultima Thule, 1880; In the Harbor, 1882; Michael Angelo, 1883.

Bibliography

A bibliography of first editions compiled by Luther S. Livingston. Privately printed 1908. See also Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. II, pp. 425–436.

Biography and Criticism

The standard life is by Samuel Longfellow. 3 vols. These first appeared as The Life, 1886 (2 vols), and Final Memorials, 1887 (1 vol).

Austin, G. L. Longfellow: his Life, his Works, his Friendships. 1883.

Carpenter, G. R. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 1901.

Davidson, Thomas. H. W. Longfellow. 1882.

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

Gannett, W. C. Studies in Longfellow, etc. 1898. (Riv. Lit. Ser., No. 12.)

Henley, W. E. Views and Reviews. 1890.

Higginson, T. W. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 1902.

Howells, W. D. My Literary Friends and Acquaintances. 1900.

Howells, W. D. The Art of Longfellow. North American Review, March, 1907.

Kennedy, W. S. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 1882.

Lawton, W. C. A Study of the New England Poets. 1898.

Lowell, J. R. A Fable for Critics, passim. 1848.

NORTON, C. E. H. W. Longfellow: a Sketch. 1907.

Perry, Bliss. Park Street Papers, The Centenary of Longfellow. 1908.

Poe, E. A. In Literati: Mr. Longfellow and Other Plagiarists; Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Willis, and the Drama; Longfellow’s Ballads.

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

Robertson, E. S. Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 1887.

Rossetti, W. M. Lives of Famous Poets. 1878.

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

Trent, W. P. Longfellow and Other Essays. 1910. Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. II, Bk. II, chap. xii.

Underwood, F. H. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: a Biographical Sketch. 1882.

Winter, William. Old Friends. 1909.

TOPICS AND PROBLEMS

Read fifty pages at random from “Outre-Mer.” Compare them in tone and style with a passage of equal length from the essays on English life in “The Sketch Book” or from “Innocents Abroad” or from Howells’s “London Films.”

Apply the tests for popular fireside poetry referred to on pages 263 and 270 to the poems of Longfellow which you regard as general favorites.

Read from three to six of Longfellow’s ballads and compare them with a similar number by Tennyson or Dante Gabriel Rossetti or Whittier.

What was there in Longfellow’s education and profession to lead him to the contention in 1840 that there was no difference in the characters and modes of thought of Englishmen and Americans?

See Whitcomb’s “Chronological Outlines of American Literature” for the years 1845 to 1850 for the absence of any strikingly popular fiction in the period when “Evangeline” was published.

Read “Hiawatha” for the broad view of ethnic life which naturally escapes the attention of the child reader. Compare in general the measures of “Hiawatha” and of “Beowulf” (in the original or in metrical translation).

Note Longfellow’s characterizations of the Puritans in the poems mentioned on page 277 and compare these with Hawthorne’s.

Read “The Prelude,” “The Day is Done,” “Seaweed,” and “Birds of Passage” for Longfellow’s comments on the poet and the poetic art.

CHAPTER XIX

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) was born in Cambridge, the youngest of six children. His father, the Reverend Charles Lowell, a Harvard graduate, was pastor of the West Church in Boston, three miles away. Elmwood was an ample New England mansion with the literary atmosphere indoors that is generated by the presence of good books and good talk. The boy was one of a few day scholars at an excellent boarding school in town, from which he entered college in the class of 1838. Like many another man of later distinction in letters, he was more industrious than regular as a student, wasting little time in fact, but often neglecting his assigned work and sometimes lapsing into mild disorder to the extent of falling under college discipline. Toward the end of senior year he was actually “rusticated” for a combination of petty offenses. Under this form of punishment the boy, who was for a time suspended from college, was assigned to a clergyman in some country town and required to keep up in his studies until his reinstatement. It happened that Lowell was sent to Concord, and that here (while in charge of a clergyman with the ominous name of Barzillai Frost) he was fretting over the class poem, in which he commented with youthful cynicism on Carlyle, Emerson, the abolitionists, and the champions of total abstinence and of woman’s rights. It was an outburst on which he looked back with quiet amusement in later years:

Behold the baby arrows of that witWherewith I dared assail the woundless Truth!Love hath refilled the quiver, and with itThe man shall win atonement for the youth.

And the proof that the boyish gibes were hardly more than a result of the impatience at his ungrateful weeks in Concord is contained in his record of the inspiration which he owed in student days to Emerson the lecturer (see p. 211).

In the first years out of college, from which he graduated in 1838, he passed through the oft-trod vale of troubled indecision as to what he should do with his life. He rejected at once his father’s profession of preaching and abandoned thoughts of the law after he had earned his LL.B. degree in 1840. And then, following a brief and frustrated romance, he entered upon an acquaintance which culminated in his marriage to Maria White and resulted in his becoming a soberer and a wiser man. She was already deeply interested in the social movements toward which his mind was maturing. His devotion to her took permanent form in his first volumes of poems, “A Year’s Life” (1841) and “Poems” (1843), and her influence on him is shown in his zeal for the very reforms which he had derided in his class poem three years earlier. He founded a new magazine, The Pioneer, which lived for three months in 1843; he contributed copiously to The Boston Miscellany, Graham’s Magazine, and Arcturus; and, what was much more momentous, he threw in his lot with the abolitionists by becoming a regular contributor to The Pennsylvania Freeman. In the meanwhile, also, in addition to his purely poetic work and to his reform enthusiasm, he took his first step toward scholastic achievement with his “Conversations on Some of the Old Poets,” which appeared in a volume of 1844. From now to the end of his life Lowell continued to distribute his energies among the fields of poetry, civics, and scholarship.

In 1845, 1846, and 1847 he wrote abundantly, widening his relations with the magazines of the day and apparently finding no trouble in marketing his wares. One piece of verse is preëminent in this period for both immediate and lasting appeal – “The Present Crisis.” It was Lowell’s way of protesting at the national policy in the war with Mexico and, in its contrast with Thoreau’s method (see p. 224), throws light on the reformer’s later strictures upon the recluse. It was repeated on every hand during the next twenty years and was given special emphasis through its frequent use by such orators as Wendell Phillips and Charles Sumner. It was in 1848, however, that he came to the fullness of his powers, contributing some forty articles to four Boston periodicals and publishing four books “Poems (Second Series),” “A Fable for Critics,” “The Biglow Papers,” and “The Vision of Sir Launfal.” He was only ten years out of college, and at that was only twenty-nine years old, but he showed secure taste, confident judgment, and a seasoned ease of humor which belong to middle life. In the first and last, the more literary volumes, there is perhaps more evidence of youth. It appears in the effusive grief on the loss of his little daughter, and in “Sir Launfal” Lowell seems to be working too clearly after the somewhat confused formula laid down in the introduction to The Pioneer. Americans were to attempt a natural rather than a national literature. They were to remember that “new occasions teach new duties.” “To be the exponent of a young spirit which shall aim at power through gentleness … and in which freedom shall be attempered to love by a reverence for all beauty wherever it may exist, is our humble hope.” So in order not to be too aggressively national, he derived a theme from the literature of chivalry and adorned it with a democratic, nineteenth-century moral.

“A Fable for Critics” is less consciously ambitious and more mature. Just how remarkable a piece of discrimination it was can be seen from a comparison of the writers criticized in it with those in Poe’s “Literati” of two years earlier. Lowell’s subjects are familiar to the modern general reader; he omitted no man of permanent reputation and included almost no one who has been forgotten. Poe’s selections, on the other hand, are quaintly unfamiliar as a whole to all but the professed student of literary history. His judgments on them are mostly sound, but his judgment in choosing them for treatment is open to one of two criticisms: either that he could not recognize permanent values or that, for personal and editorial reasons, he preferred to ignore them. In the “Fable” Lowell for the first time put to public use his ready command of impromptu verse. His pen was a little erratic, but when it would work at all, it was likely to work with happy fluency. The jaunty treatment of his contemporaries was quite literally a series of running comments, trotting along in genial anapæstic gait, stumbling sometimes on a pun, scampering with light foot across extended metaphors, and taking the barriers of double and triple rime without a sign of exertion. In point of method the “Fable” was a single exercise in writing the journalistic verse of which Lowell proved himself master in the two series of “Biglow Papers” (1846–1848 and 1862–1866). It was exactly deserving of Holmes’s friendly comment, “I think it is capital – crammed full and rammed down hard – powder (lots of it) – shot – slugs – very little wadding, and that is guncotton – all crowded into a rusty-looking sort of a blunderbuss barrel, as it were – capped with a percussion preface – and cocked with a title-page as apropos as a wink to a joke.” Different as it is from “The Literati” in scale, tone, individual subjects, and method of circulation, the two deserve mention together as antidotes both to Anglomania and to wholesale praise of everything American.

With “The Biglow Papers” Lowell returned to the attack which he had begun in “The Present Crisis.” He wrote in 1860:

I believed our war with Mexico (though we had as just ground for it as a strong nation ever has against a weak one) to be essentially a war of false pretences, and that it would result in widening the boundaries and so prolonging the life of slavery… Against these and many other things I thought all honest men should protest. I was born and bred in the country, and the dialect was homely to me. I tried my first “Biglow Paper” and found that it had a great run. So I wrote the others from time to time in the year which followed, always very rapidly, and sometimes (as with “What Mr. Robinson Thinks”) at one sitting.

He wrote the nine numbers of the series not only in the dialect of the countryside but from the viewpoint of a forthright, hard-headed, Puritan-tinged Yankee; and he put them out as the compositions of Hosea Biglow under the encouragement of Parson Wilbur, without the use of his own name. He was surprised by the cordial reception of the volume, fifteen hundred copies of which were sold in the first week. If he had put on the cap and bells to play fool to the public, he said, it was less to make the people laugh than to win a hearing for certain serious things which he had deeply at heart. “The Biglow Papers” were undoubtedly Lowell’s great popular success. They carried the fight into the enemies’ camp in the abolition struggle, they were resumed with new success with the outbreak of the Civil War, and they widened the reading public for his more sober political prose and for his more elevated verse.

However, Lowell was not satisfied to be only a fighter. In a letter of January, 1850, he wrote to a friend:

My poems hitherto have been a true record of my life, and I mean that they shall continue to be… I begin to feel that I must enter on a new year of my apprenticeship. My poems thus far have had a regular and natural sequence. First, Love and the mere happiness of existence beginning to be conscious of itself, then Freedom – both being the sides which Beauty presented to me – and now I am going to try more wholly after Beauty herself… I have preached sermons enow, and now I am going to come down out of the pulpit and go about among my parish… I find that Reform cannot take up the whole of me, and I am quite sure that eyes were given us to look about us with sometimes, and not to be always looking forward… I am tired of controversy.

Out of such a mood as this came the natural decision to make his first and long-deferred trip to Europe, a sojourn of fifteen months in 1851–1852 with his wife and children. His wide reading of foreign literatures gave the keys to an understanding of the peoples among whom he traveled, and especially to an understanding of Roman culture. His comments from Rome furnish an interesting contrast with Emerson’s (“Written at Rome,” 1833). The reaction of the Concord philosopher had been wholly personal. Lowell’s was wholly national.

Surely the American (and I feel myself more intensely American every day) is last of all at home among ruins – but he is at home in Rome… Our art, our literature, are, as theirs, in some sort exotics; but our genius for politics, for law, and, above all, for colonization, our instinct for aggrandizement and for trade, are all Roman. I believe we are laying the basis of a more enduring power and prosperity, and that we shall not pass away until we have stamped ourselves upon the whole western hemisphere.

On his return to America he plunged eagerly into writing, but the springs of utterance were soon sealed by the death of his wife. Following on the losses of his mother and two of his children this was the fourth and most crushing bereavement within a very few years. His recovery of working powers was aided by the distraction that came from an invitation to deliver the distinguished Lowell Lecture Series in Boston in the winter of 1854–1855. These were to be twelve in number, on poetry in general and English poetry in particular. The task appealed to him as combining the beauty and truth to which he inclined to turn after his years of conflict. He threw himself whole-heartedly into the preparation and delivery of the lectures and succeeded admirably with his hearers; but the greater result was an indirect one. While they were in progress Longfellow offered his resignation of the Smith Professorship “of the French and Spanish Languages and Literatures … and of Belles Lettres in Harvard College,” a post he had filled since 1836. Seven candidates of no mean ability presented themselves for the vacant position, but the appointment was offered to Lowell, who had not applied for it, in preference to them all. He spent another year abroad before undertaking the work in the autumn of 1856, and held the position actively until 1877 and as emeritus professor until his death in 1891. In this work he was a scholar and a critic rather than a teacher. He gave almost no elementary instruction in the languages, and his methods with his classes were casual to the neglect of the usual college traditions. What he did for his students was to share with them his own broad experience of life and letters and to show them how the study of foreign literatures was one with the study of history and philosophy.

Lowell’s course of life, however, could never be restricted to any single channel. If he had found in 1850 that reform could not take up the whole of him, he now discovered that scholarship was not all-absorbing. As early as 1853 the question of establishing a new Boston magazine had been in the air. When its chief promoter, Francis H. Underwood,20 had made certain of its start, Lowell was secured as first editor and carried it through the most critical period, until in 1861 it passed into the publishing hands of Ticknor and Fields and under the editorship of the junior member of that firm, James T. Fields. In the editorial office, as at Cambridge, Lowell was relieved from the heaviest humdrum labor (especially of correspondence) and was enabled to give his best energies to creative planning, yet it is interesting to see how effective were some of the detail criticisms accepted by poets like Emerson and Whittier and how vigilant he was in his reading of manuscripts and proof sheets. Throughout it all he kept up a spring-flow of boyish jollity, no different in spirit from that in his letters of college days.