Longfellow

by Charles C. Calhoun

  Henry traveled by way of Orléans to Bordeaux—“the most beautiful city I have seen in France.” Yet thoughts of his native Maine were never far from mind. From the bridge over the Garonne, he saw on either side “a thick forest of masts—the best kind of forest that a commercial city can be surrounded with.” The sandy scrub woods south of the city resembled “the pine plains which surround the village of Brunswick; which makes me wonder that the French do not place a college there—it would keep the students out of temptation!” He was soon at the “dirty little city of Bayonne,” which was redeemed in his eyes by the beauty of the sunburnt Basque women—“nut-brown maids”—who conducted travelers by horseback over the border to Irun. He tried to sum up for his father his eight months in France. He did not regret leaving, although he had found the French “a hospitable kind-hearted people.” Not particularly interested in politics, he had nonetheless noticed the tension caused by “a weak good-hearted king” and a repressive ministry—a situation that would lead in three years to another revolution and cost Charles X his throne. “I must say that I am well satisfied with the knowledge I have acquired of the french language. My friends all tell me that I have a good pronunciation. . . . I cannot imagine who told you that six months was enough for the French—he would have been more correct if he had said six years—that is—speaking of perfection in the language.”

  Longfellow was to present Spain to his American readers as a land of romance, but one of the first things that struck a traveler from France, he wrote home, was “the poverty-stricken appearance of everything around him.” The country had still not recovered from the Goyaesque horrors of the Peninsular War more than a decade earlier, and it continued to suffer from one of the worst kings in its history, Ferdinand VII, who had exiled everyone of liberal views, reinstituted the Inquisition, and surrounded himself with corrupt and incompetent advisers. Economic ruin had forced a good part of the rural population into brigandage. Writing from Madrid in March, Longfellow nonetheless assured his father that despite “the tales of all that is wild and wonderful in bloody murder and highway robbery” he had reached the capital without incident. It was important to be in Madrid, he went on, because:

  The metropolis of a country is always the great literary mart . . . literary advantages are always greater—books always more numerous and accessible:—in this country, where the art of printing itself has nearly fallen into disuse from the rigorous censorship of the press—and consequently all the editions of works whose spirit is at all liberal and elevated,—are old editions—it is important that a student should resort to the Capital; for there he will find literary fountains unsealed and flowing. There are the provincial accents, too, which cannot be too assiduously avoided—and my expenses are much less here than at Paris.

  He was delighted with the city and immediately attracted to the language. His sojourn was made more pleasant by the fact that the tiny circle of North Americans in Madrid welcomed him at once, Spain being a place few Americans visited for pleasure. This circle consisted of Alexander H. Everett, the United States minister to Spain (and later editor of the North American Review), and his wife, for whom Longfellow soon became a favorite; John Adams Smith, secretary of legation; the much admired Washington Irving, attaché; Irving’s expatriate brother Peter; the bibliophile Obadiah Rich, consul and a major conduit for Hispanic culture into the United States; and a traveling naval officer on leave who was only four years older than Longfellow, Lieutenant Alexander Slidell (who later added the family name of Mackenzie to his own, in order to obtain the legacy of a childless uncle). Longfellow had met Peter Irving in Paris, and it is possible that the chance to befriend his literary hero is what persuaded him to venture into Spain. Washington Irving, he wrote home, was “one of those men who put you at ease with them in a moment. He makes no ceremony whatever with one . . . —all mirth and good humor.” A lawyer who had turned to literature, Irving had achieved international fame in his late thirties as author of The Sketch Book and its sequel, Bracebridge Hall, each a collection of genial, rambling essays and tales. Along with Bryant and Cooper, he offered evidence that an American might achieve fame, perhaps even a tolerable living, as an author. He was at work on what was to prove a highly successful life of Columbus and would go on to write perhaps the most famous of all accounts of the Alhambra (a site Longfellow actually visited before Irving did). None of this was lost on the young Longfellow, whose first book was to be inspired by Irving and who would draw heavily on the Spanish lore he began to acquire from his new friends in Madrid.

  But, in the short run, it was Lieutenant Slidell who had the greater impact. He was a character out of a Patrick O’Brian novel: a daring young naval officer with strong literary interests and sharp powers of observation. He was exactly the sort of resourceful, energetic companion the bookish Longfellow needed in order to take on as hazardous a country as Spain. Longfellow was to stay in Spain from March through November of 1827, but the most vivid part of the visit was the trip through the mountains to Segovia, which he made with Slidell, who later wrote:

  Nor was I doomed on this occasion to travel without a companion. Fortune, in a happy moment, provided one in the person of a young countryman, who had come to Spain in search of instruction. He was just from college, full of all the ardent feeling excited by classical pursuits, with health unbroken, hope that was a stranger to disappointment, curiosity which had never yet been fed to satiety. Then he had sunny locks, a fresh complexion, and a clear blue eye, all indications of a joyous temperment. We had been thrown almost alone together in a strange and unknown land, our ages were not dissimilar, and, though our previous occupations had been more so, we were, nevertheless, soon acquainted, first with each other, then with each other’s views, and presently after we had agreed to be companions on the journey.

  Longfellow spared his family many of the harsher details of his months in Spain, filling his long letters instead with local color, but Slidell left behind a graphic account of his own experiences, published anonymously in 1829 under the title A Year in Spain, by a Young American. It is a very readable book, attesting to his powers as a reporter: he is one of the first Anglo-American writers to appreciate the primitive. Slidell describes being robbed in a mountain pass by bandits, who tortured and almost killed his guides; he describes in sickening detail a public hanging in Madrid; he gives the first detailed account in American literature of a bullfight. (He does the bullfight so well that the more squeamish Longfellow, in Outre-Mer, could say that it had been done before and pass over it.) He loves Spain, but does not pretend to understand its abrupt juxtapositions of beauty and horror.

  In one of his letters after they had parted company, Slidell teases Longfellow a bit about the wonderful Florencia, the daughter of the family in whose house they lived in Madrid, in the Calle de la Montera. She had married a Cuban, he had heard, which he hoped was true (so he could visit her by ship someday) and which was probably a good thing, for she would otherwise “run a great risque of becoming either a nun or a prostitute, two evils between which there is little choice.” In A Year in Spain he elaborates on this theme, possibly even describing Florencia Gonzalez:

  The Spanish woman is, indeed, a most fascinating creature. Her complexion is usually a mellow olive, often russet, rarely rosy . . . Her skin smooth and rich—face round, full, and well proportioned, with eyes large, black, brilliant . . . when she moves, every gesture becomes a grace and every step a study. Her habitual expression is one of sadness and melancholy; but when she meets an acquaintance and makes an effort to please, opening her full-orbed and enkindling eyes, and parting her rich lips to make room for the contrasting pearl of her teeth, or to give passage to some honied word, the heart must be more than adamant that can withstand her blandishments.

  There is, however—let us show the whole truth—one female virtue, which, though it may belong to many in Spain, is yet not universal—and this is chastity. . . . I know not whence this decline of morals, if not from the
poverty of the country; which, while it checks marriages and the creation of families, cannot check the passions enkindled by an ardent clime.

  This may all be shipboard fantasy, but Slidell does describe a physical type of woman that appealed to Longfellow all his life, and it raises the question of whether Longfellow’s own infatuation with Spain was linked with a sexual awakening. He was, after all, an attractive young man far from home with money in his pocket—in a country where people killed for bread. He lived an extraordinarily well documented life, but those documents were thoroughly sorted through in his own lifetime, and further edited by his heirs, and no hint of sexual adventure survives. He had grown up in a busy port that certainly had its demimonde, but it was a small place where everyone knew everyone else’s business (to Stephen Jr.’s loss), and where he had gone to some effort to set himself apart from his rakish older brother. Bowdoin College had been built in a quiet country town to spare its students temptations. But when Longfellow arrived in Europe, there was nothing to restrain him other than his own inhibitions—and some anxiety about what rumors might reach home. Certainly every pleasure was procurable for a price in Restoration Paris; Madrid would have required a greater degree of circumspection, but even less money. All of this is speculative. Yet Longfellow was to prove in years to come a highly sensual man, addicted to the pleasures of wine, cigars, good food, music, and beautiful and luxurious objects, and with a well-documented eye for handsome, dark-haired women. There is no reason to assume that by 1828 he was sexually inexperienced.

  What we do know that he found in Spain was a country virtually unknown to other North Americans, with a rich and unexplored literature, written in a language that was both beautiful to his ear and comparatively easy to learn and pronounce. He was reasonably fluent in Spanish by the time he left, an extraordinary accomplishment in nine months of travel. For reasons he never explained, he never returned there (Slidell, on the other hand, would reappear in his life, in tragic circumstances, some fifteen years later). But Longfellow’s fascination with Hispanidad—Spanishness, both as a literary tradition and a worldview—enriched his work for the rest of his life. His very last poem, written a few weeks before he died in 1882, he entitled “The Bells of San Blas.”

  The Italian part of Longfellow’s first European trip seems by comparison the most conventionally Grand Tour in character of all his travels. He had left Madrid in September of 1827 and by way of Seville and Cadiz reached Gibraltar, where he spent a month amid the British garrison, followed by visits to Malaga and Granada. He took ship for Marseilles in mid-December, and by Christmas Eve had reached Genoa. He spent January of 1828 in Florence, then proceeded south, reaching Rome in time for carnival and staying there for the rest of the year, with an excursion to Naples and the ruins of Pompeii in April and a summer retreat to L’Arricia, in the hills above Rome. A flirtation with his Roman landlord’s daughter seems to have helped the days pass quickly. By Christmas of 1828, he was in Venice, en route via Trieste, Vienna, and Prague to Germany.

  In retrospect, the Italian year had a deep influence on Longfellow’s life and career; after all, he was to become the most famous translator of Dante in nineteenth-century America, and in his final years he was to become fascinated by the life and poetry of Michelangelo. More immediately, he formed a deep bond with another young American, whom he met while traveling from Toulon to Pisa. George Washington Greene was, like Longfellow, the grandson of a famous Revolutionary War general—in his case, Nathaniel Greene of Rhode Island—and he shared Longfellow’s literary and historical interests. Having moved to Rome for his health, he also spoke fluent Italian and knew a great deal about both classical antiquities and contemporary art. He was, in other words, as perfect a companion in his own way as Slidell had been in Spain. Their friendship was to last for fifty-four years. In his old age, when Greene was to depend emotionally and financially on Longfellow’s continuing good will, he frequently recalled for him “our fairy life at Naples, our moonlight strolls in the Forum, our morning excursions in the Campagna” and their Christmas together at Genoa—“her splendid Cathedral with the imposing midnight service of the Catholic Church, our little terrace with the ‘tideless Mediterranean’ spreading in majesty before us.”

  Longfellow picked up Italian quickly, finding its only complication being that so many words were only a letter or two different from the same words in Spanish. By the end of 1828, he could boast to his father that “all at the Hotel, where I lodge took me for an Italian, until I gave them my passport, and told them I was an American.” He may have mistaken flattery for frankness, but his achievement was real. Yet somehow Italy did not move him as deeply as Spain had—possibly because its tourist routes had been so well traveled. He took his tourism seriously, though—sketching the ruins on the Appian Way, taking detailed notes on the Roman carnival for future use, managing to arrive at Venice by boat in the moonlight, even befriending Lord Byron’s favorite gondolier (himself a poet who wrote a sonnet for Longfellow). For much of the summer, however, Longfellow felt ill, recovering only after a retreat to the hill town of L’Arricia. Perhaps it was “Roman fever” (malaria), perhaps it was simply fatigue after so many inns, so many irregular verbs.

  Like most Protestant Americans visiting the south of Europe, he was both fascinated and repulsed by Catholicism. France, at least in Paris, had seemed a secular culture; Spain, so darkened by the Church that a first-time visitor could not begin to delve into its mysteries. But Italy—with its colorful feast days, its churches which seemed museums, and its citizens’ apparent nonchalance about religious observance—offered an easier study. In September of 1828, for example, Longfellow wrote to his sisters:

  You would be shocked at the misery of the people—especially in the Pope’s dominions:—but their element seems to be in rags and misery—and with the mummery of their religion and the holidays of the church—which average nearly three a week, they are poor—and lazy, and happy—I mean happy in their way:—for the negro slaves within the precincts of the Southern States are their equals in liberty, and infinitely their superiors in every comfort:—so you may judge what happiness is among the poorer classes of Italians.

  This was a stereotypical Anglo-American view of Italian peasants (and Longfellow at this point knew little about the lives of Southern slaves) but “the mummery of their religion” did make an impression on him. He saw it as a stage of civilization that his own society had long progressed beyond, yet he did not fear or despise it (as so many New Englanders did) but rather identified it with a medievalism in which he discovered much of value. In 1847, the Acadian peasant Evangeline—Longfellow’s greatest creation—arose from that “mummery” and found in it her deepest satisfaction. And in The Golden Legend (1851) and many shorter works, the poet was to borrow again from Catholicism’s rich treasury of narratives.

  News from his family began to catch up with him. In the spring of 1828, one of the people he heard from, surely to his surprise, was his Aunt Lucia. She was not by nature a letter writer, preferring to add a line at the end of Zilpah’s letters, if at all, but she had played a large role in Henry’s childhood, as the aunt on whom much of the burden of running the busy Portland household had fallen. The few glimpses we get of her from others reveal a woman who certainly knew her own mind. Her letter to her nephew deserves to be quoted in full, for it is one of the very few times we hear her actual voice:

  Portland, April 26, 1828

  Dear Henry,

  I am unwilling to be the only member of the family who does not express, in form of a letter, the affection they feel for you, still I am aware that a letter from a maiden aunt cannot afford you much amusement, for to be written in character, it must contain sage maxims and advice, cautions against the temptations to which you are so constantly exposed, against dissipation of every kind, urgent entreaties to take special care of your health, recipes for colds, coughs, &c and tho’ much age will entitle me to do all this, yet I am not so thoroughly initiated into th
e mysteries and privileges of a “state of single blessedness,” as will induce me to undertake it, therefore I cannot pursue this course. all useful and necessary counsel you will receive from your parents, all domestic information from others, of the family, all accounts of matters and things in general, from your numerous correspondents, and from the mouth of Edward [Preble] himself. flights of imagination, sentiment and all that, you know I never attempt a letter on science and literature is altogether out of my line, so what remains for me, but to assure you that I love you as well as any of your friends do, that I feel as great an interest in your welfare and happiness, and shall rejoice as much, when the objects of your tour are attained, and you return again to your friends.

  Your aunt

  L W.

  A sly note of satire on his parents’ admonishing letters comes through.

  A more alarming letter from Stephen Sr. reached him in Rome, apparently in the first week of December of 1828. The letter is lost, but it informed him that Bowdoin College would not offer him the professorship (at an annual salary of one thousand dollars) but only a tutorship in modern languages (salary: six hundred dollars). The rationale for this is uncertain—possibly some belt tightening on the college’s part, but more likely the result of a squabble between the two boards, perhaps encouraged by President Allen and exacerbated by Maine politics and religious factionalism (Stephen did not lack enemies). At any rate, Longfellow was outraged. Having brooded for two weeks, he exploded in a letter from Venice on December 19: