Longfellow

by Charles C. Calhoun

  This solved several problems within the Longfellow family. It gave Henry a profession for which he was temperamentally suited and which would allow him some leisure for literary pursuits (his brother Stephen would, according to plan, follow his father into the law). It would enhance the reputation of the infant institution, since so few American colleges at that date taught modern languages. And it would strengthen the hand of those governing-board members at Bowdoin who were alarmed at the takeover of the college by the increasingly aggressive Maine Congregationalists. (A “takeover” in this context meant controlling the presidency, appointing the professors, and setting the religious and curricular tone of the institution.) In this view of things, every professorship held by a Unitarian (or even an Episcopalian) was a bulwark against the forces of Calvinist orthodoxy. As it turned out, this defense proved hopeless, for by the late 1830s the Congregationalists had “captured” the college, for all practical purposes, though never officially. But in 1826 there was still reason for Unitarians such as Stephen Longfellow to hope that Bowdoin might follow Harvard’s lead in the direction of religious liberalism—indeed, that the new state of Maine might eventually be won over to rational religion.

  The professorship for Henry was probably conceived by his father and his family friends Parker Cleaveland (the leading professor at the college), Benjamin Orr, and the Reverend Ichabod Nichols (the Unitarian minister at the Longfellows’ First Parish Church in Portland). Nothing has survived to indicate that anything was promised in writing, but there must have been a clear understanding, at least among the more liberal trustees, that if the young man sufficiently prepared himself abroad—at his father’s expense—he would be the leading candidate once the post was officially established. (The Board of Trustees had voted to establish such a professorship in 1825, but the Board of Overseers had not yet approved it.) There was no firm commitment on Henry’s part; in the months before he sailed, he read law in his father’s office, just in case he had to find another career. While abroad, he still hoped that a teaching job at Harvard might become available, and his father also hinted at the possibility of a diplomatic posting.

  Stephen Sr. naively assumed that Henry would need about six months in France and three or four months in Spain to perfect his French and learn Spanish from scratch, after which he could devote whatever time remained to doing a brisk version of the Grand Tour in Italy, perhaps including Germany as well. He would be home again, in other words, in about a year and a half. As it turned out, Henry was to be away more than three years, and Bowdoin was to have second thoughts about the nature of the professorship. When it was all over, Stephen calculated that it had cost him $2,604.24—a huge sum in 1829—and he emphasized that this was an advance on Henry’s share of his estate. The most remarkable thing of all, however, was that Henry surpassed anyone’s reasonable expectations. When he returned, he had an excellent command of French, Spanish, and Italian, had begun to learn the far more difficult German, and seems to have been able at least to read Portuguese. The enthusiasm which this young pilgrim brought to the cultural shrines of Europe was combined with a rare ability to grasp the structure of a new language almost instantly, to memorize vast amounts of vocabulary, and to mimic the speech of the educated people among whom he traveled. Stephen’s investment was to prove gilt-edged.

  In the summer of 1826, Henry’s first task was to acclimate himself to Paris, a city far larger and more confusing than any he had visited in America. Arriving on June 18, he hurried across the Seine, after another customs inspection, in search of his cousin Ebenezer Storer, who was studying medicine. Storer had booked him a room with his own landlady, the genial Madame Potet, at 49 rue Monsieur-le-Prince, in the Faubourg St. Germain, not far from the Odéon Theater and the Luxembourg Gardens. He made the seventh American lodged there, but, he assured his father, there was little danger of hearing too much English; anyone speaking it at dinner was fined one sou. Despite the city’s filth, he was quick to assure his sisters that Paris was redeemed by the elegance of its public spaces. After a few weeks, he reported to Professor Cleaveland that he had done “little else than run from one quarter of the city to another, with eyes and mouth wide open—staring into print-shops—book-stores—gardens—palaces—and prisons.” On Cleaveland’s behalf, he called at the Jardin des Plantes, one of the premier scientific research institutions in the world, to see the mineralogist Alexandre Brongniart, who was also director of the famous porcelain manufactory at Sevres. (Brongniart’s predecessor as professor of mineralogy had been Haüy, whose collection of crystal models James Bowdoin III had bought in 1806 as part of the geological cabinet for the new college in Maine.) It was Longfellow’s first encounter abroad with the phenomenon of an international community of savants, scholars who greeted each other as colleagues across the barriers of space and political borders.

  After five weeks in Paris, he wrote a jauntier letter to his brother Stephen.

  I have settled down in something half-way between a Frenchman and a New Englander:—within, all Jonathan—but outwardly a little of the Parlez-vous. That is to say, I have good home-feelings at heart—but have decorated my outward man with a long-waisted thin coat—claret-colored—and a pair of linen pantaloons:—and on Sundays and other fete days—I appear in all the glory of a little hard French hat—glossy—and brushed—and rolled up at the sides. . . . In this garb I jostle amongst the crowds in the Luxembourg, which is the favorite promenade in St. Germain.

  It was the affirmation of a lifelong penchant for fine clothes.

  His father read the letter with alarm. He was already worried by his son’s everyday expenses in the great capital, his own notion of an adequate per diem having been acquired from frugal New England sea captains doing business in European ports. “It seems that you have changed your costume to that of a Parisian,” he quickly wrote from Portland. “You will allow me to doubt the expediency of confirming your dress to the fashion of the country in which you may reside for a short term. You will find it expensive to you, as your french dress would be useless to you in Spain, or any other country; for an American in Spain, Italy, or Germany decked out in the dress of a frenchman will exhibit a very singular appearance. You should remember that you are an American, and as you are a visitor for a short time only in a place, you should retain your own national costume.” Longfellow hastened to reply that he had been joking; “what clothes I have had made was all after the English model.”

  Nonetheless, his parents—faced, for the first time, with a child effectively beyond their supervision—expressed continual anxiety about his well-being, even his whereabouts. He was hardly out the door—on the stage for Boston, en route to New York and his ship—when his mother had written, “I will not say how much we miss your elastic step, your cheerful voice, your melodious flute. . . . I feel as if you were going into a thousand perils, you must be very watchful & guard against every temptation.” She took up the theme of vigilance again in a letter to Paris in December 1826:

  Your parents have great confidence in your uprightness, and in that purity of mind which will instantly take alarm, on coming in contact with any thing vicious or unworthy. We have confidence, but you must be careful, & watchful and always on your guard, that you may never be led to take one step—no not one step in forbidden paths. Virtue allows no deviation from duty. One cannot sin and return with an unsullied mind to the place they left, in every aberation they lose ground which can never be regained. But enough, I do not mistrust you, and here come the girls to change the subject.

  Stephen Sr. added to these moral injunctions a note of practicality:

  Your tour is one for improvement rather than pleasure, and you must make every exertion to cultivate and improve your mind, consistent with the preservation of your health. . . . Be careful not to take any part in opposition to the religion or politics of the Countries through which you pass, or in which you reside. They are local concerns in which a stranger has no right to interfere.

  Th
at was not bad advice for an inexperienced young man entering the territory of the reactionary regimes of Metternich’s Europe. Later in 1826, Stephen added:

  Your expenses are much more than I had been led to expect; and though I wish you to appear respectably you will recollect the necessity of observing as much economy as you can with propriety. And as your great object is to acquire a knowledge of the modern languages, the importance of great diligence will strongly impress your mind and influence your conduct. You are surrounded with temptations and allurements and it will be necessary for you to set a double guard upon yourself; and a close attention to your studies will be one of the most effectual securities against dissipation—Go but little into Company, & be careful to associate with none but the wise & virtuous. Such is your youth & inexperience that I feel great solicitude for your safety. . . .

  France, to a good Federalist, was the seat of iniquity. But to nineteen-year-old Henry it was very like heaven. The boulevards—a series of broad, tree-shaded, café-lined avenues across the northern edge of the city—were the place to be on a warm summer’s evening to eat ice-creams, he told his brother.

  You cannot conceive what ‘carryings on’ there are there at all hours of the day and evening! Musicians singing and playing the harp—jugglers—fiddlers,—jewish cymbals and cat-calls—blind beggars and lame beggars,—and beggars without any qualifying term, except importunity,—men with monkeys—raree shows—venders of toothpicks and cheap wares—Turks in the oriental costume—Frenchmen with curling whiskers, and round-plated straw hats—long skirted coats and tight wrinkled trousers—real-nankeen-ers—coblers—book-sellers with their stalls—little boutiques where no article is sold for more than 15 sous. . . .

  The carnivalesque tone of all this probably alarmed his father more than the claret-colored coat. It was the world of Les Enfants du Paradis, and Henry, too, became enraptured with the stage. He wrote excitedly, for example, to his Portland friend Patrick Greenleaf of the ageless Mademoiselle Mars, a star at the Comédie Française, and of her half-dozen lovers (“for all French women are naughty women:—as a general rule”). He began a lifelong passion for the opera, particularly after hearing the sopranos Giuditta Pasta and Henrietta Sontag (the latter of whom he would meet years later in Boston).

  Learning French was another matter. Like many Americans studying abroad, he found himself too easily falling into the habit of associating only with his compatriots, or with the thousands of Englishmen filling up “every chink and cranny.” Since Paris more or less closed down for the month of August, with the help of one of the Frenchmen from the Cadmus he found lodgings in the village of Auteuil, in those days three miles out of town, on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. The extraordinary quiet of the place owed something to its being a maison de santé, a sort of convalescent home, but one of its inmates tried too incessantly to practice his English. Longfellow was soon happy to find a totally French-speaking family back in the Faubourg St. Germain, at 5 rue Racine, who rented him winter quarters. Yet the month at Auteuil produced a pang of homesickness. The village’s dark streets and unfriendly stone walls, he wrote his mother, reminded him too much of the city. He missed New England villages, “fresh and cheerful and breezy.” In a reverse image of Henry James’s famous catalogue of America’s deficiencies, Longfellow lamented that in France there were “no corn-fields garnished with yellow pumpkins—no green trees, and orchards by the road side—no slab-fences—no well-poles—no painted cottages, with huge barns and outhouses,—ornamented in front with monstrous piles of wood for winter-firing:—nothing in fine to bring to the mind of an American a remembrance of the beautiful villages of his native land.”

  Before winter set in, he hiked—his flute in his knapsack—during the vendange, through the Loire Valley, which he found “one continued vineyard:—on each side of the road as far as the eye could reach—there was nothing but vines save here and there a glimpse of the Loire and the turrets of an old chateau or of a village church.” He explored the deserted Château de Chambord, commemorating his visit “by breaking off the head of a little stone dragon”—one of François I’s heraldic salamanders—“which I found amongst other ornaments upon the principal staircase—which I shall bring home as a trophy of my journey” (the one self-confessed crime in a long and blameless life). He got as far as Amboise and Tours and Savenièrres, a route filled for him with thoughts of Sir Walter Scott’s recently published Quentin Durward and of Madame de Staël’s exile during Napoleon’s reign. The historical and literary significance of what he saw moved him deeply, but Gothic architecture itself was a taste he had yet to acquire—he passed through Chartres on his return to Paris without a comment.

  “French comes on famously,” he reported to his brother in November. He blamed his earlier difficulties on having been taught in Portland in 1825 by a Monsieur D’Eon, a Swiss or Alsatian whose pronunciation he now realized had been so incorrect that he found himself “speaking French with a German as well as an English accent.” This embarrassment may explain why he did not call sooner on the Marquis de Lafayette—a friend of both his father and his grandfather Wadsworth—who in June had given him tickets to debates in the Chamber of Deputies and had invited him to his house at LaGrange. He eventually encountered the general on the street that fall. “He was alone—on foot—and nobody seemed to notice him particularly! What a difference from what it was in America! He gives a great dinner to all the Americans in Paris on the Anniversary of his return to France.” With his surer command of French, Longfellow was beginning to feel at ease in Paris and looked forward to a productive winter. To his consternation, his father wanted him to move on to Spain, which Stephen Sr. had the notion could only be comfortably visited in winter.

  Actually, Longfellow was not certain what his father wanted him to do. The transatlantic mails had proven slow and erratic. Around the first of October he received a letter that his father had written in August, the first letter he had received from home since arriving in France in June. His letters to Portland took nearly three months to reach his family. A dutiful son, Longfellow wanted to honor his father’s intentions. But what were they? He also wanted to make sure that the funds he needed for his travels arrived in a timely fashion. His father had established a letter of credit with Dodge & Oxnard in Marseilles—Thomas Oxnard was a Portlander, further evidence of that city’s long commercial reach. They in turn had set up an account for the Longfellows with the fashionable Paris banker Samuel Welles, who also received and forwarded Henry’s mail.

  The chief question was what to do about Germany. Stephen’s original idea had been for his son to perfect his French—a language any civilized person should know—and to learn as much Spanish as possible, for more practical reasons. “Your ulterior objects cannot be accomplished unless you obtain an accurate knowledge of the French & Spanish languages,” he wrote in December. “The situation you have in view cannot be obtained unless you qualify yourself to teach both these languages correctly. Such are the relations now existing between this country & South America that a knowledge of the Spanish is quite as important as the French.” If travel to Spain seemed too hazardous, he told him, find a Spanish instructor in France or even Germany.

  Permit me however to say that I consider the knowledge of the Spanish of more importance to you than German & Italian both. These latter languages are very desirable, but are by no means so important to you as the French & Spanish. Indeed if you neglect either of them your whole object will be defeated, and you may be sure of not obtaining the station which you have in view. And I should never have consented to your visiting Europe, had it not been to secure that station.

  The emphasis says it all: a tightening of the reins, across three thousand miles. Yet it was not an unfriendly letter. Stephen begged for more details of Henry’s sightseeing, on behalf of those who could not visit such places themselves. And he admitted that his son would need two full years abroad.

  Germany, however, had grown ever larger on Hen
ry’s intellectual horizon. Before leaving America back in the spring, he had consulted with George Ticknor in Boston—probably the most learned man in New England and a great champion of the new German scholarship—and with George Bancroft and Joseph G. Cogswell at their progressive Round Hill School in Northampton, Massachusetts. They urged him to go to the university town of Göttingen, where Ticknor and Bancroft had studied, even if it meant giving up Italy. In a long letter home in October, Longfellow argued for skipping Spain, passing the winter in Paris, and spending the following year in Germany. Even if he could not learn German perfectly in that time, he would be able to read it and understand the lectures on literature. Moreover, his Portland friend and neighbor Edward Preble was planning to be in Göttingen in the spring. This perplexed his parents. The new German critical scholarship—with its emphasis not on belles lettres or moral improvement but on the rigorous examination of texts, with the aid of increasingly sophisticated philological tools—had scarcely reached Boston, much less Brunswick. Indeed, his mother wondered why he needed to learn to speak German fluently, since there would be no one in New England to converse with him. She also feared that he would be drawn into the German student vice of dueling. His father saw the Bowdoin professorship slipping away. It was only after Stephen’s Harvard classmate, the distinguished jurist Joseph Story, endorsed the idea of a term at Göttingen that the family began to come around.

  Meanwhile, Henry had decided to go to Italy instead. To learn German in a year was impossible, after all. He had hinted darkly that it was dangerous to travel in a country so infested with bandits as Spain. So Italy it would be—“the sunny regions of the south.” He had grown disgusted, he told his mother, with French manners and customs and would leave for Italy early in the new year, in time for carnival. Then, in February 1827, without a word of explanation, he announced that he was leaving for Spain after all. Stephen, meanwhile, had written him, suggesting he study Spanish in Paris or even Göttingen, rather than venture into a country so torn by civil strife. Henry’s abrupt change of plans strengthened Stephen’s regret that his son lacked “some judicious companion” to advise him. But what was to be done?