One very uncertain test of a man of genius is his “table-talk.” Surrounded by a group of men who were such masters of this gift as Lowell, Holmes, and T. G. Appleton, Longfellow might well be excused from developing it to the highest extent, and he also “being rather a silent man,” as he says of himself, escaped thereby the tendency to monologue, which was sometimes a subject of complaint in regard to the other three. Longfellow’s reticence and self-control saved him from all such perils; but it must be admitted, on the other hand, that when his brother collects a dozen pages of his “table-talk” at the end of his memoirs, or when one reads his own list of them in “Kavanagh,” the reader feels a slight inadequacy, as of things good enough to be said, but not quite worth the printing. Yet at their best, they are sometimes pungent and telling, as where he says, “When looking for anything lost, begin by looking where you think it is not;” or, “Silence is a great peace-maker;” or, “In youth all doors open outward; in old age they all open inward,” or, more thoughtfully, “Amusements are like specie payments. We do not much care for them, if we know we can have them; but we like to know they may be had,” or more profoundly still, “How often it happens that after we know a man personally, we cease to read his writings. Is it that we exhaust him by a look? Is it that his personality gives us all of him we desire?” There are also included among these passages some thoroughly poetic touches, as where he says, “The spring came suddenly, bursting upon the world as a child bursts into a room, with a laugh and a shout, and hands full of flowers.” Or this, “How sudden and sweet are the visitations of our happiest thoughts; what delightful surprises! In the midst of life’s most trivial occupations, — as when we are reading a newspaper, or lighting a bed-candle, or waiting for our horses to drive round, — the lovely face appears, and thoughts more precious than gold are whispered in our ear.”
The test of popularity in a poet is nowhere more visible than in the demand for autographs. Longfellow writes in his own diary that on November 25, 1856, he has more than sixty such requests lying on his table; and again on January 9, “Yesterday I wrote, sealed, and directed seventy autographs. To-day I added five or six more and mailed them.” It does not appear whether the later seventy applications included the earlier sixty, but it is, in view of the weakness of human nature, very probable. This number must have gone on increasing. I remember that in 1875 I saw in his study a pile which must have numbered more than seventy, and which had come in a single day from a single high school in a Western city, to congratulate him on his birthday, and each hinting at an autograph, which I think he was about to supply.
At the time of his seventy-fourth birthday, 1881, a lady in Ohio sent him a hundred blank cards, with the request that he would write his name on each, that she might distribute them among her guests at a party she was to give on that day. The same day was celebrated by some forty different schools in the Western States, all writing him letters and requesting answers. He sent to each school, his brother tells us, some stanza with signature and good wishes. He was patient even with the gentleman who wrote to him to request that he would send his autograph in his “own handwriting.” As a matter of fact, he had to leave many letters unanswered, even by a secretary, in his latest years.
It is a most tantalizing thing to know, through the revelations of Mr. William Winter, that Longfellow left certain poems unpublished. Mr. Winter says: “He said also that he sometimes wrote poems that were for himself alone, that he should not care ever to publish, because they were too delicate for publication.” Quite akin to this was another remark made by him to the same friend, that “the desire of the young poet is not for applause, but for recognition.” The two remarks limit one another; the desire for recognition only begins when the longing for mere expression is satisfied. Thoroughly practical and methodical and industrious, Longfellow yet needed some self-expression first of all. It is impossible to imagine him as writing puffs of himself, like Poe, or volunteering reports of receptions given to him, like Whitman. He said to Mr. Winter, again and again, “What you desire will come, if you will but wait for it.” The question is not whether this is the only form of the poetic temperament, but it was clearly his form of it. Thoreau well says that there is no definition of poetry which the poet will not instantly set aside by defying all its limitations, and it is the same with the poetic temperament itself.
CHAPTER XXIV. LONGFELLOW AS A MAN
Longfellow always amused himself, as do most public men, with the confused and contradictory descriptions of his personal appearance: with the Newport bookseller who exclaimed, “Why, you look more like a sea captain than a poet!” and a printer who described him as “a hale, portly, fine-looking man, nearly six feet in height, well proportioned, with a tendency to fatness; brown hair and blue eyes, and bearing the general appearance of a comfortable hotel-keeper.” More graphic still, and on the whole nearer to the facts, is this description by an English military visitor who met him at a reception in Boston in 1850. I happened upon the volume containing it amid a pile of literary lumber in one of the great antiquarian bookstores of London: —
“He was rather under the middle size, but gracefully formed, and extremely prepossessing in his general appearance. His hair was light-colored, and tastefully disposed. Below a fine forehead gleamed two of the most beautiful eyes I had ever beheld in any human head. One seemed to gaze far into their azure depths. A very sweet smile, not at all of the pensively-poetical character, lurked about the well-shaped mouth, and altogether the expression of Henry Wordsworth [sic] Longfellow’s face was most winning. He was dressed very fashionably — almost too much so; a blue frock coat of Parisian cut, a handsome waistcoat, faultless pantaloons, and primrose-colored ‘kids’ set off his compact figure, which was not a moment still; for like a butterfly glancing from flower to flower, he was tripping from one lady to another, admired and courted by all. He shook me cordially by the hand, introduced me to his lady, invited me to his house, and then he was off again like a humming bird.”
A later picture by another English observer is contained in Lord Ronald Gower’s “My Reminiscences.” After a description of a visit to Craigie House, in 1878, he says: “If asked to describe Longfellow’s appearance, I should compare him to the ideal representations of early Christian saints and prophets. There is a kind of halo of goodness about him, a benignity in his expression which one associates with St. John at Patmos saying to his followers and brethren, ‘Little children, love one another!’... Longfellow has had the rare fortune of being thoroughly appreciated in his own country and in other countries during his lifetime; how different, probably, would have been the career of Byron, of Keats, or of Shelley, had it been thus with them! It would be presumptuous for me, and out of place, to do more here than allude to the universal popularity of Longfellow’s works wherever English is spoken; I believe it is not an exaggeration to say that his works are more popular than those of any other living poet. What child is there who has not heard of ‘Excelsior,’ or of ‘Evangeline,’ of ‘Miles Standish,’ or of ‘Hiawatha’? What songs more popular than ‘The Bridge,’ and ‘I know a maiden fair to see’? Or who, after reading the ‘Psalm of Life,’ or the ‘Footsteps of Angels,’ does not feel a little less worldly, a little less of the earth, earthy? The world, indeed, owes a deep debt of gratitude to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.... Bidding me note the beauty of the autumnal tints that make America in the ‘fall’ look as if rainbows were streaming out of the earth, Longfellow presented me with a goodly sample of the red and golden leaves of the previous autumn, which, although dry and faded, still glowed like gems; these leaves I brought away with me, and they now form a garland round the poet’s portrait; a precious souvenir of that morning passed at Craigie House.”
Lord Ronald Gower then quotes the words used long since in regard to Longfellow by Cardinal Wiseman, — words which find an appropriate place here.
“‘Our hemisphere,’ said the Cardinal, ‘cannot claim the honor of having brought him forth, but
he still belongs to us, for his works have become as household words wherever the English language is spoken. And whether we are charmed by his imagery, or soothed by his melodious versification, or elevated by the moral teachings of his pure muse, or follow with sympathetic hearts the wanderings of Evangeline, I am sure that all who hear my voice will join with me in the tribute I desire to pay to the genius of Longfellow.’”
“We have but one life here on earth,” wrote Longfellow in his diary; “we must make that beautiful. And to do this, health and elasticity of mind are needful, and whatever endangers or impedes these must be avoided.” It is not often that a man’s scheme of life is so well fulfilled, or when fulfilled is so well reflected in his face and bearing, tinged always by the actual mark of the terrible ordeal through which he had passed. When Sydney Dobell was asked to describe Tennyson, he replied, “If he were pointed out to you as the man who had written the Iliad, you would answer, ‘I can well believe it.’” This never seemed to be quite true of Tennyson, whose dark oriental look would rather have suggested the authorship of the Arab legend of “Antar” or of the quatrains of Omar Khayyám. But it was eminently true of the picturesqueness of Longfellow in his later years, with that look of immovable serenity and of a benignity which had learned to condone all human sins. In this respect Turgenieff alone approached him, in real life, among the literary men I have known, and there is a photograph of the Russian which is often mistaken for that of the American.
Indeed, the beauty of his home life remained always visible. Living constantly in the same old house with its storied associations, surrounded by children and their friends, mingling with what remained of his earlier friends, — with his younger brother, a most accomplished and lovable person, forming one of his own family, and his younger sister living near him in a house of her own, — he was also easily the first citizen of the little University City. Giving readily his time and means to all public interests, even those called political, his position was curiously unlike that of the more wayward or detached poets. Later his two married daughters built houses close by and bore children, and the fields were full of their playmates, representing the exuberant life of a new generation. He still kept his health, and as he walked to and fro his very presence was a benediction. Some of his old friends had been unfortunate in life and were only too willing to seek his door; and even his literary enterprises, as for instance the “Poems of Places,” were mainly undertaken for their sakes, that they might have employment and support.
It is a curious but indisputable fact that no house in Cambridge, even in the tenfold larger university circle of to-day, presents such a constant course of hospitable and refined social intercourse as existed at Craigie House in the days of Longfellow. Whether it is that professors are harder worked and more poorly paid, or only that there happens to be no one so sought after by strangers and so able, through favoring fortune, to receive them, is not clear. But the result is the same. He had troops of friends; they loved to come to him and he to have them come, and the comforts of creature refreshment were never wanting, though perhaps in simpler guise than now. It needs but to turn the pages of his memoirs as written by his brother to see that with the agreeable moderation of French or Italian gentlemen, he joined their daintiness of palate and their appreciation of choice vintages, and this at a time when the physiological standard was less advanced than now, and a judicious attention to the subject was for that reason better appreciated. His friends from Boston and Brookline came so constantly and so easily as to suggest a far greater facility of conveyance than that of to-day, although the real facts were quite otherwise. One can hardly wonder that the bard’s muse became a little festive under circumstances so very favorable. His earlier circle of friends known as “the five of clubs” included Professor Felton, whom Dickens called “the heartiest of Greek professors;” Charles Sumner; George S. Hillard, Sumner’s law partner; and Henry R. Cleveland, a retired teacher and educational writer. Of these, Felton was a man of varied learning, as was Sumner, an influence which made Felton jocose but sometimes dogged, and Sumner eloquent, but occasionally tumid in style. Hillard was one of those thoroughly accomplished men who fail of fame only for want of concentration, and Cleveland was the first to advance ideas of school training, now so well established that men forget their ever needing an advocate. He died young, and Dr. Samuel G. Howe, a man of worldwide fame as a philanthropist and trainer of the blind, was put in to fill the vacancy. All these five men, being of literary pursuits, could scarcely fail of occasionally praising one another, and were popularly known as “the mutual admiration society;” indeed, there was a tradition that some one had written above a review of Longfellow’s “Evangeline” by Felton, to be found at the Athenæum Library, the condensed indorsement, “Insured at the Mutual.” At a later period this club gave place, as clubs will, to other organizations, such as the short-lived Atlantic Club and the Saturday Club; and at their entertainments Longfellow was usually present, as were also, in the course of time, Emerson, Holmes, Lowell, Agassiz, Whittier, and many visitors from near and far. Hawthorne was rarely seen on such occasions, and Thoreau never. On the other hand, the club never included the more radical reformers, as Garrison, Phillips, Bronson Alcott, Edmund Quincy, or Theodore Parker, and so did not call out what Emerson christened “the soul of the soldiery of dissent.”
It would be a mistake to assume that on these occasions Longfellow was a recipient only. Of course Holmes and Lowell, the most naturally talkative of the party, would usually have the lion’s share of the conversation; but Longfellow, with all his gentle modesty, had a quiet wit of his own and was never wholly a silent partner. His saying of Ruskin, for instance, that he had “grand passages of rhetoric, Iliads in nutshells;” of some one else, that “Criticism is double edged. It criticises him who receives and him who gives;” his description of the contented Dutch tradesman “whose golden face, like the round and ruddy physiognomy of the sun on the sign of a village tavern, seems to say ‘Good entertainment here;’” of Venice, that “it is so visionary and fairylike that one is almost afraid to set foot on the ground, lest he should sink the city;” of authorship, that “it is a mystery to many people that an author should reveal to the public secrets that he shrinks from telling to his most intimate friends;” that “nothing is more dangerous to an author than sudden success, because the patience of genius is one of its most precious attributes;” that “he who carries his bricks to the building of every one’s house will never build one for himself;” — these were all fresh, racy, and truthful, and would bear recalling when many a brilliant stroke of wit had sparkled on the surface and gone under. As a mere critic he grew more amiable and tolerant as he grew older, as is the wont of literary men; and John Dwight, then the recognized head of the musical brotherhood of Boston, always maintained that Longfellow was its worst enemy by giving his warm indorsement to the latest comer, whatever his disqualifications as to style or skill.
Holmes said of him in a letter to Motley in 1873: —
“I find a singular charm in the society of Longfellow, — a soft voice, a sweet and cheerful temper, a receptive rather than aggressive intelligence, the agreeable flavor of scholarship without any pedantic ways, and a perceptible soupçon of the humor, not enough to startle or surprise or keep you under the strain of over-stimulation, which I am apt to feel with very witty people.”
And ten years later, writing to a friend and referring to his verses on the death of Longfellow, printed in the “Atlantic Monthly,” he said: “But it is all too little, for his life was so exceptionally sweet and musical that any voice of praise sounds almost like a discord after it.”
Professor Rolfe has suggested that he unconsciously describes himself in “The Golden Legend,” where Walter the Minnesinger says of Prince Henry: —
“His gracious presence upon earth Was as a fire upon a hearth; As pleasant songs, at morning sung, The words that dropped from his sweet tongue Strengthened our hearts; or, heard at night, M
ade all our slumbers soft and light.”
He also points out that this is the keynote of the dedication of “The Seaside and the Fireside,” the volume published in 1849.
“As one who, walking in the twilight gloom, Hears round about him voices as it darkens, And seeing not the forms from which they come, Pauses from time to time, and turns and hearkens;
“So walking here in twilight, O my friends! I hear your voices, softened by the distance, And pause, and turn to listen, as each sends His words of friendship, comfort, and assistance.
Delphi Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Delphi Poets Series Book 13) Page 221
