Longfellow

by Charles C. Calhoun

  I assure you—my dear father—I am very indignant at this. They say I am too young! Were they not aware of this three years ago? If I am not capable of performing the duties of the office, they may be very sure of my not accepting it . . . [F]or my own part I do not in the least regard it as a favor conferred upon me. It is no sinecure: and if my services are an equivalent to my salary,—there is no favor done me:—if they be not, I do not desire the situation. If they think I would accept the place they offer me,—as I presume they do,—they are much mistaken in my character. No Sir—I am not yet reduced to this. I am not a dog to eat the crumbs, that fall from such a table. . . .

  Stephen, while regretting that his son had expressed himself “with quite so much warmth,” admitted that his own feelings were quite similar. But he counseled moderation. The tutorship could be seen as a probationary year, he suggested, after which the college would surely give him the professorship. They would discuss it when he returned. In August of 1829, amid the debate over whether to spend the funds for the professorship of modern languages on a new chapel instead, trustee William Pitt Preble suggested a motive for Bowdoin’s action in a letter to his fellow trustee Reuel Williams: “There is a project on foot I am assured from a source that cannot be mistaken,” wrote Preble, “to defeat the appointment of Mr. Longfellow on account of his supposed Unitarianism.”

  Henry meanwhile had reached Trieste, “so very melancholy and down-hearted,” uncertain whether to spend the winter in Dresden or Göttingen. Washington Irving, who had been a great success at the Saxon court a decade earlier, had given Longfellow letters of introduction that would have guaranteed him a brilliant social life in the capital. Dresden—with its glorious architecture, superb opera and orchestras, royal collections, and great libraries—represented one of the pinnacles of European civilization. Yet he spent a listless, homesick month there. In February he decided he could wait no longer to see his old friend Preble and rushed off by way of Leipzig, through the Thuringian forests, and on to the famous Hanoverian university town. He arrived in Göttingen on February 22, five days short of his twenty-second birthday.

  Göttingen was the first choice of the handful of Americans in the 1820s who had heard or intuited that something was going on in the German universities quite different from the experience offered by their French or British counterparts. Founded in 1737 by George II of England, in his role as Elector of Hanover, it had proven particularly hospitable to English-speaking students. It had also cultivated an aristocratic tone, with all that implied in the way of reckless behavior. As Henry’s mother fretted in a letter in 1826, “In one account of the University in that place the students are represented as being very numerous, very licentious, unrestrained by the government; extremely addicted to duelling. Dear Henry such associates would be neither pleasant or profitable to you, and if they were unprincipled, they would not scruple to use any means, however unjustifiable, to entangle you in their schemes.”

  In truth, the enticements a young New Englander might face at Göttingen were more intellectual than sensual. The university had already produced, in the late eighteenth century, a circle of poets—the Göttinger Hain (“grove”)—who prefigured German Romanticism. In Longfellow’s own day, scholars at Göttingen were engaged in one of the great intellectual upheavals of the nineteenth century—the close, philological examination of Biblical texts, a line of inquiry that would eventually undermine many an intelligent Christian’s belief in the literal truth of scripture. (In the early twentieth century, Göttingen was to produce another great intellectual thunderbolt: the discoveries in physics associated with Max Born and Werner Heisenberg.) It is unclear how much Longfellow, with his beginner’s German, could understand of what was going on in the lecture halls, but, in contrast to the conventional education he had received at Bowdoin, he suddenly found himself in one of the most intellectually advanced communities in Europe. He was to sit in on lectures and study the language with a distinguished Germanist, Hofrat Benecke.

  FIGURE 3: Longfellow’s sketch My Book and Friend, Gottingen, 1829.

  Edward Preble (right) reads The Old Dominion Zeitung. Courtesy

  National Park Service, Longfellow National Historic Site.

  His first instinct, though, was to find Ned Preble and catch up on the news from home. He arrived by post chaise at 2:00 a.m., too late to call, so he slept at “The Crown” and hurried in the morning to Judengasse 462 (or, as Longfellow wrote, “Jew Alley”). Preble was out, but Longfellow insisted on waiting inside.

  In the antichamber stood a sofa with crimson plush covering: opposite hung a portrait of Napoleon, and in a corner a four-stringed guitar. I entered Ned’s room—his sitting room—study room. Splendidly lodged—thought I. In one corner stood a writing table and book-case, and in another the stove, in another a sofa, with a round table before it—and in the fourth a clock ticked from a mahogany bureau. A checkered morning gown hung against the wall—here was a map of Germany, and there sundry long-stemmed porcelain pipes with a tobacco-pouch made of a bladder. . . .

  I shall not attempt to describe my feelings when at length Ned came in. I had taken him completely by surprise. . . . What talk of old times! With three numbers of the Yankee before us—half an Eastern Argus—and an old Eastport [Maine] Sentinel!

  Edward Deering Preble had grown up next door to the Longfellows in Portland. His father, who had died when Edward was one year old, was the Commodore Preble of Barbary war fame. Edward, an only child, had graduated in the Longfellow brothers’ class at Bowdoin and had tried his hand at business. But literature appealed to him more, and by 1828 he had found his way to Göttingen. Urbane and cultivated, he was never to amount to anything, by the standards of his tribe, although for a few years he did read law in Portland. As his Bowdoin memorialist made certain to point out, upon his early death in 1846, “What many young persons consider a favorable circumstance in life was to Mr. Preble . . . its greatest evil. He was born to a fortune which, however, he did not live to possess; but the expectation of it, and the gratification of every desire, paralyzed exertion, rendered him versatile, morbid, and unhappy. With talents capable of high achievement . . . he failed of accomplishing anything useful by irresolution and want of a settled purpose of action.” All this was in the future, but the example set by Preble’s decision to turn his back on the Deering family’s lucrative business connections in favor of travel and literature surely had given Stephen Longfellow Sr. some moments of anxiety.

  Henry could not have been more delighted, on the other hand, and seems to have spent most of his time at Göttingen in Preble’s company. The student cloak and cap, the broad swords, the deerskin dueling gloves to be seen on and about Preble suggest a rapid if superficial assimilation in the local culture. Neither young man had lived before in a society in which university students were so privileged and so visually distinctive, and the arcana of Burschenschaft life—the ceremonial duels, the heroic beer drinking, the “medieval” songs—enthralled them, at least from a distance. Longfellow found rooms in what is now the Rote Strasse, a few steps from the old Town Hall and the famous modern statue of “The Little Goose Girl.” The house is much altered, but the roof line still looks sixteenth-century, and a small marble plaque indicates that Henry W. Longfellow lived there in 1829. (In the late nineteenth century, such markers were put up to commemorate the residences of several famous Americans who had studied at Göttingen.)

  Somewhat cut off from everyday German student life, Longfellow and Preble diverted themselves by producing their own four-page, quarto-sized, handwritten newspaper, five issues of which (and part of a sixth) survive. Mildly ribald in tone and full of student jokes, it was intended not for their families but for a small circle of male Portland intimates. Longfellow did most of the writing and drew the many illustrations, and Preble added comments or filled in the blank spots. The “Prospectus” parodied both the political newspapers that Stephen Sr. spent so much time reading and the rather earnest American liter
ary reviews:

  A Journal, that should be at once a vehicle of amusement and of Foreign Intelligence, has long been a desideratum in the literary world. It is to fill up this hiatus, that the Editors of the Old Dominion Zeitung have determined to issue this Journal. In making it worthy of themselves and of their subscribers, no time nor pains will be spared them —they are resolved to “go the whole hog.”—. . . . Coming from the University Press we hope it may be an acceptable offering to the Public. There is a literary atmosphere about the walls of Gottingen which breathes new life into the nostrils that inhale it. . . . The Old Dominion Zeitung will be published once a week at Gottingen and forwarded to subscribers at the moderate rate of their kind remembrance—“payable in advance!!”

  Their painstakingly produced Zeitung, or newspaper, had nothing to do with Virginia; the “Old Dominion” probably referred to the United States more generally, as suggested by Longfellow’s large drawing of an American eagle dominating the globe in the fourth issue, which declared itself “Published every Saturday evening at the corner of Rothen and Weender Strasse—Gottingen.” Much of the text—snippets from their reading in several languages, allusions to politics back home, odds and ends of student lore—has lost its bite, but the illustrations reveal Longfellow’s unsuspected gift for caricature. Many of them are visual souvenirs of German student life: elaborately carved pipes (“Ned says he never feels so philosophical, as when he has a pipe in his mouth”), dueling gear, the interior of Preble’s room, and a complicated tableau depicting the “burial” of a Bursch (or student) by way of illustrating a local tale. But a surprising amount of space is devoted to an extended lampoon of Bowdoin College, and particularly of its militantly orthodox president, the Reverend William Allen. The first issue has over the masthead a tag from Thompson—“A little round, fat, oily man of God” and a drawing from the rear of just such a personage, with Bowdoin College in the distance. The second depicts an ass labeled “B. Coll.” ridden backwards by a large man holding on to its tail in a sexually suggestive fashion. A figure labeled “Public Opinion” snaps a whip; in the distance, the sun—a symbol of the college—rises in the east (Maine). A line from Wordsworth completes the caricature: “The long-drawn see-saw of his horrible bray!” The fifth issue depicts one of the Gadarene swine (Matthew 8:28) racing down into the sea, with a little man with an umbrella sticking out of its rump. A gloss in Preble’s hand explains: “The Devil (Gul.)[= Gulielmus, or William, as in Allen] entered in to the swine (B Col) and straightaway they ran violently down a steep place (public opinion) in to the sea (where they ought to have been ten years ago) and were drowned.” The sixth issue includes a very graphic cartoon (“Public Opinion in the East”) of a butcher slaughtering hogs (“Professors of the Dead languages”).

  Finally, an undated page—perhaps all that survives of the third issue—includes a cartoon labeled “Bowdoin College” and “The March of the Mind in the East!” It depicts an ass bearing baskets on each side, Spanish style, one of which is labeled “Northern Darkness.” The beast tramples on a copy of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Paine’s Rights of Man, and the Laws of Bowdoin College, while kicking over a tub out of which spills the “Professorship of Modern Languages.” Lawrence Sterne provides the caption: “—a poor ass—who had just turned in with a couple of panniers upon his back to collect eleemosynary turnip-tops, and cabbage leaves.” A further drawing depicts a view of the college, with a road sign pointing to it with the words “Road To Ruin.”

  “We have been creditably informed,” the Old Dominion Zeitung goes on to say, “that a professorship being offered to a young man by the government of Bowd. Coll. on condition of his passing two years in Europe—at his own expense—at the expiration of that time the situation of Tutor was offered him, with little more than half a professor’s salary!—we are happy to add—that such a proposition has been treated with all the contempt it deserved!” These verses in Longfellow’s hand followed:

  Said the old Professor to the young professor,

  Thou shalt be Tutor now!—

  Said the young professor to the old professor—

  I can teach as well as thou!

  Said the Old Trustee to the young professor,

  Will make a cheap bargain with you—

  Said the young professor to the Old Trustee—

  No—I’ll be ____ if you do.

  The satire is coarse, the humor sophomoric, the anger real. The Old Dominion Zeitung could have cost Longfellow any opportunity to be employed at Bowdoin, had it fallen into the wrong hands. Yet it enabled him to vent his aggressions, doubtless with the encouragement of Preble, who had nothing to lose, and the zestiness of the whole production suggests that his Dresden depression had lifted.

  It is unlikely that even Longfellow, as quick a study as he was, had learned much German in two and a half months at Göttingen, or comprehended very much of the lectures he attended there. But the seed was planted. Meanwhile, spring vacation stirred him to see more. He spent a month traveling down the Rhine (“a noble river: but not so fine as the Hudson”) and via Brussels and Calais to England, where he spent a week in London (which seemed to make little impression on him), returning by way of Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and Utrecht. His father was willing to finance several more months of study in Germany (as long as his son sailed home before the seas turned rough), but Longfellow was ready by the first week of June to begin his journey back to America. There were alarming reports of his sister Elizabeth’s health, and he had been away from his family far longer than anyone had anticipated. Still trying to sort through the personal and cultural experiences of three years abroad, he was nonetheless ready for a confrontation with the president and governing boards of Bowdoin.

  BUNGONUCK DAYS

  THE EXCITEMENT OF HENRY’S RETURN to Portland after more than three years abroad was tempered by the tragedy that had struck his family in May of 1829. After nine months of illness, the last three of them marked by great suffering and depression, Henry’s favorite sister, Elizabeth, aged twenty, had died of tuberculosis. The long and affectionate letter he had written her from Göttingen in March reached Portland three weeks too late. Her cough had worsened in the spring, and her family and fiancé, the promising young lawyer William Pitt Fessenden, drew near to bid her farewell. Her mother, her younger sister Ann, and her Aunt Lucia nursed her as best they could. Like many young people dying of consumption in the nineteenth century, she had a sudden flush of strength, physical and mental, at almost the last moment. Thought nearly dead on a Sunday, on the following Tuesday she pulled herself together, and in her father’s words, “with the firmness & composure of a true christian, she took an affectionate leave of all her friends, not forgetting her dear absent brother. She had often expressed a wish to see you once more.” Fessenden—known to the family as Pitt—arrived the night before she died. According to Zilpah, “she told him she had looked forward and anticipated enjoying a great deal of happiness with him in life, but that was past, God saw fit to take her home and he must not try to win her back to this world, for she was ready and willing to resign everything here, she wished him all happiness and trusted they should meet in a better world.” In her parents’ accounts of her final days, the horrors of the sickroom resolve themselves into the calm, loving passage of an innocent child trusting in a God as benevolent as he is inscrutable. It is the good death that was to play so large a role in the Victorian imagination. “To see a timid feeble girl meeting without dread the messenger who so often appals the stoutest heart was indeed a most consoling sight,” wrote Zilpah. “When you left us,” his father wrote Henry, “I did not expect we should all meet again in this world, but I expected myself to be the first victim. . . . Poor Ann, whose attentions to her sister have been constant, watchful and most affectionate, to the last moment of her existence, is almost disconsolate.” The family circle had been broken, and the mother and father were never quite to recover. Fessenden recovered, married Ellen Deering in 1832,
and went on to a distinguished legal and political career. As Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury, he financed the Union war effort, and he is best remembered today as one of John F. Kennedy’s “profiles in courage,” the senator from Maine whose single vote saved the impeached Andrew Johnson from losing the presidency. The frail Elizabeth Longfellow had perhaps taught him his first lesson in personal courage.

  Henry’s return voyage was made in the shadow of this tragedy; his father’s letter had reached him in Paris, where he had finally called on Lafayette, although his mother’s letter to Liverpool had been delayed and eventually found its way back to Portland. By late August he was home. Despite his brave words of the previous year, there was no confrontation with the college; his father had successfully mediated between the officers of Bowdoin and his proud son. After conferring with Dr. Nichols at First Parish Church, Stephen had concluded that Henry ought to get his foot in the door. At the end of the first year, they could renegotiate. He assured Henry that, despite earlier rumors, “the guardians of the Institution” were well disposed toward him and did not think him too young to teach. The professors “seem to be kind & cordial, and I have no doubt but they would be happy to receive you into their fraternaty. It is very important that you should have some employment on your return, and this is better than any thing that occurs to me at present.” Henry’s proposal for a series of winter lectures drawn from his travels would be welcomed in Portland, he added, “but as we are not a literary people, I doubt whether any reliance could be placed on it as an employment, and the same objection exists with respect [to] other literary labors in this place, unconnected with some literary Institution.” Teaching at Bowdoin would enable Henry to pursue his studies; “the compensation is not great but will answer for one year, and in that time you will be able to look round and mature your plans.”