It is thanks to the “pleasant little thing” that we know so many details of the Longfellow party’s everyday experience in Europe. Clara Crowninshield kept a lengthy and very readable record of their travels (and of her own recurrent self-doubts). Longfellow’s own journals by contrast are less personal but of interest as a record of his intellectual growth, and only fragments of his wife’s correspondence home survive. Crowninshield’s sharp eye and modest demeanor owe a great deal to her anomalous position in the upper ranks of New England society. She was the illegitimate daughter of Salem’s legendary George Crowninshield, a successful privateer in the War of 1812 and a pioneer yachtsman afterwards. (Some trace of his opulence survives in the stateroom of his 191-ton hermaphroditic brig Cleopatra’s Barge, preserved at the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem.) When he died prematurely in 1817, Salem was shocked to discover that he not only had a “love child” but had provided for her in his will, which his family unsuccessfully challenged. Clarissa, or as she preferred, Clara, was raised by her court-appointed guardian, the Salem attorney Benjamin Ropes Nichols, who skillfully managed her inheritance (so skillfully, she lived on it for the rest of her long life). She had befriended Mary Potter at Miss Cushing’s female seminary at Hingham and had frequently visited Portland, where her guardian’s brother Ichabod Nichols was the Longfellows’ minister. After Henry and Mary’s marriage, she stayed with them in Brunswick. In other words, she was accepted in polite society in spite of the circumstances of her birth and the powerful Crowninshield family’s hostility toward her. Mary begged her to accompany them to Europe. Clara expressed reservations—about the trip and about Mary—in a letter to a friend early in 1835:
Shall I go? Mr. Longfellow goes to perfect himself in the German language and its different dialects—so that we shall be located for some time in each place and I shall be forced to study the language to drive off “ennui.” But Mrs. Longfellow is not the sort of person who would feel the least interest in acquiring the language. She is satisfied to have her husband do all the studying and her happiness consists in being by his side. . . . Now I have a great desire to accompany the Longfellows, but it would be very essential to my enjoyment to have another female companion of a different sort from Mrs. Longfellow. She is very sweet and amiable, but she is so absorbed in her husband that she only lives in him. She has not much physical energy and if her husband only goes about and sees what is worth seeing, she is satisfied to have it second-hand thro’ him. Now I want to have somebody go who will excite instead of check any desire I may have to go about and improve myself.
Mary Goddard, by no means as rich as the Swedish thought, but with a father who promised to reimburse Longfellow for her expenses, proved the acceptable companion. She and Clara would divert Mary, while Longfellow devoted his days to wandering through the bookshops and libraries and seeking out the local literati.
On April 10, 1835, the party sailed from New York on the packet Philadelphia, Elisha Morgan captain, for the month-long voyage. The women were uncomfortable; Longfellow was miserable with seasickness for much of the time. It was a great relief to reach Portsmouth on May 8. After a quick excursion to the Isle of Wight—where Longfellow would return thirty-three years later to visit Tennyson—they reached London and the first major stage of their tragic journey.
The size of London overwhelmed the travelers. “It is astonishing how little can be accomplished here in a day!” Longfellow wrote his father. “You can do nothing before 10 o’clock in the morning, and then the distances from point to point are so great—London is on so vast and magnificent a scale, that it is impossible to kill many lions [that is, visit celebrated people] in the course of a day, and at night you are so thoroughly tired, that you sleep late into the next morning.” His party spent their first week in lodgings in “thronged and fashionable” Regent Street, then moved to 8 Princes Street, off Cavendish Square (the building, much altered, survives). In the afternoons, Longfellow frequented the vendors of rare and curious books, while the three women saw the sights and shopped. Eager to meet the leading writers and scholars of the capital, Longfellow at first did not quite know what to make of the cool offhandedness of the English, notably the English custom of not conversing at breakfast. Invited to breakfast by an important man of letters, John Bowring, he sat down to tea and toast and what he assumed would be a lively conversation, only to find his host ignoring him completely and opening and reading a large packet of letters. Another guest was buried in his newspaper. Reminding himself of the German proverb ländlich, sittlich—every country has its customs—Longfellow “reached back to a side table, and seized upon a book, in which I forthwith began to read, thereby conveying a gentle hint to mine hosts, though they heeded it not.” Bowring proved chatty afterwards, when he invited Longfellow into his library to watch his portrait bust being modeled in clay. In his journal, Longfellow pronounced Bowring “overrated.”
An even sharper humiliation awaited when he presented a letter from the Philadelphia publisher Willis Gaylord Clark to one of the most fashionable British writers of the day, the young Edward Bulwer, later Lord Lytton, who had recently published the highly successful historical novel The Last Days of Pompeii. Longfellow called but found him on his way out, “a true dandy,” with a lisping accent and a thoroughly condescending manner to an American visitor. Bulwer twirled Clark’s letter between his fingertips and issued a vague invitation for Longfellow to come back some other morning.
N. P. Willis, a Portlander who had had a glittering journalistic career abroad, came to his rescue with invitations to meet more welcoming company. At 10:00 p.m. on May 23, Longfellow went to a soiree at the house of Charles Babbage, the famous mathematician. There he found, reclining upon an ottoman, Ada Byron, the poet’s daughter (“a countenance like her father’s, though rather too red to be handsome”). Babbage himself was “a very plain and unostentatious man, with more the air of a recluse student than a man of the world.” His guests were quite otherwise, and Longfellow was introduced to a series of fashionable, even beautiful women, including Lady Dudley Stuart, as well as to her father, Lucien Bonaparte, Prince de Canino. He admired the belles of the salon—“Mrs. Blackwood and Lady Seymour—sisters of the fashionable and celebrated Hon. Mrs. Norton. Glossy black hair, and clear, brilliant complexions.” By 2:00 a.m., he was ready to leave, though not without noticing on a small table one of Babbage’s famous calculating machines. “His son—a young and rather raw lad, who is said to be like his father a good mathematician, showed us the operation of the machine, which I cannot describe, for I do not understand it.” Longfellow had unwittingly stumbled upon the future—Babbage’s machine was a prototype of what would someday be known as the computer.
There were further reminders that he was no longer in New England. At Lady Dudley Stuart’s house a few nights later, he encountered “the Marchioness of ——— naked almost to the waist; in appearance a magnificent whore [the word is almost effaced in his journal]; in character, if report be true, no less so; and taken all in all, a superb animal.” The singers Grisi and Rubini “executed some glorious passages from Rossini.” His other sightseeing, in the company of his wife and her friends, was more conventional: Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey (where he caught glimpses “of a curate reading prayers and bobbing his head to and fro like Punch in the puppet-show”), a choral service at St. Paul’s, the National Gallery, the celebrations for William IV’s seventieth birthday, and an excursion upriver to Richmond and Hampton Court on a dreamy English summer afternoon. Willis’s patron Mary Skinner invited them to her country house, Shirley Park, where they discovered her to be “a furious admirer” of that now largely forgotten writer; “she thinks him superior to Irving.” Willis was in fact licking his wounds; his newspaper articles on British high society (published that year in America as Pencillings by the Way) had repeated private conversations he had heard in various stately dining rooms, to the outrage of his hosts. Back in London, only a night visit across the Thames to Vauxh
all Gardens—the famous pleasure grounds of the previous century—proved a disappointment; the ladies pronounced it vulgar, and Longfellow agreed.
As the sojourn ended, Longfellow expressed regret that he had not met more of the literati. (He did dine with Jeremy Bentham’s nephew and also met Sir Walter Scott’s daughter, who had married J. G. Lockhart, Scott’s biographer.) In fact, probably without fully appreciating it at the time, he had won the friendship of two of the most interesting British writers of the nineteenth century, Jane and Thomas Carlyle. Ralph Waldo Emerson had given him an introduction. It is not known how Emerson knew of Longfellow, but he had just returned from Europe himself and would have been well placed to advise the new Harvard professor on his itinerary. The Carlyles adored Emerson, who had visited them in 1833 at their house at Craigenputtock in a remote part of Scotland, and who was to serve for many years as Carlyle’s unofficial agent and publicist in America. On May 21, after leaving the Bowrings, Longfellow had traveled to Chelsea, then a riverside village of market gardens well outside of London, to present his letter at what is now 24 Cheyne Row, where the Carlyles had been living just less than a year. (The house, remarkably little changed, is today a National Trust museum.) Carlyle was out, but his wife welcomed him—“a sweet, simple, lovely woman, with long black tresses, and a downcast, timid look,” he wrote of her that night in his journal. She told him they strongly desired to see America (they were so chronically short of funds, Carlyle was considering a lecture tour), and spoke movingly of how much Emerson’s visit had meant to them. Longfellow would not have been aware of how terribly she had suffered in the solitude of Craigenputtock, which she endured because her husband thought he could work best there. “It was like the visit of an angel,” Longfellow quoted her as saying of Emerson, “and though he staid with us hardly 24 hours, yet when he left us I cried.—I could not help it.”
Gradually Longfellow recognized that he was in the presence of a remarkable woman. Speaking with her of Hayward, who had just published a prose translation of Faust that neither of them liked, Longfellow pointed out Hayward’s own harsh words about other translators. “O yes indeed,” Jane Carlyle responded, “detraction is the element in which he moves and breathes and has his being!” She told Longfellow of the crushing accident that had befallen her husband some two months earlier—“one of the greatest calamities that could happen to an author.” He had lent the only manuscript of the first volume of his French Revolution—the work that soon would make him world famous—to his friend John Stuart Mill, “who carelessly left it a week or two upon his study table; when to his great dismay he found it had been torn to pieces and consumed by the servants, who had made use of it to light the fire and lamps!”
Back in town, Longfellow bought a copy of Carlyle’s Life of Schiller (1825)—the only clue that Clara Crowninshield had, a few days later, when an ungainly figure turned up at their lodgings in her chaperone’s absence and presented a card: Mr. Carlyle of Craigenputtock.
He was tall and awkward in his appearance and his countenance did not betray inward cultivation, but as soon as he began to converse his original mind beamed forth. He conversed a good deal and was often poetical in many of his expressions. I felt my enthusiasm kindle and I hung upon every word he let fall.
He invited them to tea at his house that evening at six. If the Longfellows were not back in time, he explained, the Carlyles would simply wait until they arrived. Longfellow recorded the occasion:
He is a tall man—with coal-black hair—brown complexion—and a face that reminds you of Burns. His dress, an old blue coat—brown trousers—and carpet socks upon his feet. His manners awkward—almost clownish. but his conversation is glorious—so natural—and bearing the stamp of so free and original a mind. Spoke of Napoleon—thinks he would have made an excellent author, had his genius been directed that way. “His bulletins are perfect in their kind. They are characteristic of the man. He spoke pistol bullets. His brothers are authors. One has written tales—another, an Epic poem, the reading of which I have never had the audacity to undertake!
“Bourienne’s Memoirs is one of the most entertaining books I ever read. It afforded me the greatest gratification. I read it on a hot summer’s day in the country. It seemed as if a gorgeous pageant was passing through my mind. It is more like an Epic poem, than anything I have read of late.” (What a vile memory I have—that I cannot recal [sic] more definitely the conversation of the evening I have just passed; not even the striking and peculiar expressions which I most wish to record, as a memento of an original thinker.)
Mrs. Carlyle as modest, quiet, and lovely as ever. A sweet little woman—a wild-flower from the Highlands of Scotland. . . .
The evening had worn Longfellow out. He underestimated Jane Carlyle’s gifts—in more recent times, thanks to her extraordinary letters, she has become more widely read than her husband. But she was something new to the twenty-eight-year-old American: an attractive, “womanly” woman, socially a step or two above her husband, willing to help him in a self-effacing way in his strenuous intellectual work, and quite capable of holding her own in a wide-ranging conversation. Some memory of the possibilities she suggested would not leave him.
Settling himself in front of a coal fire, Longfellow spent much of the next day reading The Life of Schiller—“a work of rare merit—written by one who entered con amore into his subject”—and finished it at nearly 2:00 a.m. “I shall lie down to sleep with my soul quickened, and my good resolutions and aspirations strengthened. God grant that the light of morning may not dissipate them all.” The biography was probably Carlyle’s most lucid work—his prose was to grow louder and more exaggerated with age—and it handily summarized for the Anglo-American reader the full impact of Sturm und Drang romanticism and Kantian idealism on German literature. On June 2, the Americans went with Mrs. Carlyle to visit the studio of the sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey (whom she pegged as “too mercenary” to “satisfy his ideal”) and were invited back to Chelsea the next day for breakfast. Mary Longfellow had been suffering “from the ague” all the time they had been in London, Clara had a dressmaker’s appointment, and the other Mary would not go without them, so Longfellow went alone.
Breakfasted at Mr. Carlyle’s—in a quiet, friendly way. He spoke of the interesting spots in the old city of London—the surprise with which in threading some of the bye-lanes he came out upon little green squares—“and saw great trees growing in the heart of a brick and mortar wilderness.”
He thinks bodily indisposition an inevitable consequence of great mental exertion. Exercise and diet will not relieve him—he gives himself up to toil for a month or so at a time—and is quite run down—at the end of that time—so that “he would die in it,” if he did not desist. He then throws his books aside—and takes to relaxation and the free air.
He stepped out of the room for a few minutes and I asked his wife if he considered Gothe the greatest man that ever lived. She replied:
“Oh, yes. I believe he does indeed. He thinks him the greatest man that ever lived; excepting only Jesus Christ.”
Mrs. Carlyle is also a German scholar. She told me her husband was much pleased with what she said of her own impressions of Schiller and Gothe: “What I read of Schiller makes me shed tears; but what I read of Gothe, I read a second time.”—Her husband wrote this to Gothe, who expressed himself much gratified; as his aim was to make people think, and not to move their sympathies.—Gothe she thinks the greater man;—Schiller the most loveable.
After breakfast Carlyle took his guest a few doors up Cheyne Row to meet the elderly Leigh Hunt, popularly remembered today for “Abou Ben Adhem” (1834) but in his youth an early champion of Shelley and Keats and a writer who had suffered much for his political radicalism. Longfellow found “a thin man of medium stature, with a mop head of iron-gray hair, parted carelessly over his forehead like a girls—and a lively, intelligent countenance furrowed deeply with the mark of thought or sorrow. His manners are rather nervous,
though open and friendly.” Longfellow summed up this final visit with Carlyle in his journal:
Our conversation glanced from topic to topic—America—Willis’s letters—the propriety of “showing up” people in print—which was advocated both by Hunt and Carlyle—and sundry other topics. Left him after half an hour’s interview, with very favorable impressions—thinking that he may be a man as much—to say the least—as much sinned against as sinning. At the door Carlyle shook me by the hand cordially and said
“God bless you! A pleasant journey to you; and when you return to London do not forget to inquire us out!”
Longfellow and Carlyle make a very odd pair, but the visits were long and cordial, and in the American’s presence Carlyle seems to have restrained himself from the biting social criticism and literary tirades that were to make him so feared and whose blustering tone would eventually make him so easy to dismiss. The unexpected appearance of a well-read and impressionable young New Englander in a city in which the Carlyles themselves did not feel at home surely renewed happy memories of Emerson’s pilgrimage to Craigenputtock. It also reassured Carlyle that he had an American audience. Longfellow was a passionate pilgrim indeed when it came to the new German literature, and Carlyle had succeeded Coleridge as the chief conduit of that stream of idealism into New England, where it was to help shape transcendentalism. In Carlyle and Leigh Hunt, Longfellow also encountered a phenomenon he had not known in America: writers of the first importance who had not compromised their staunchly held artistic and political beliefs and who were paying for it, each in his own way. Longfellow himself avoided such confrontations, but he was to experience vicariously, in the life of his closest male friend, Charles Sumner, a similar firmness when it came to standing up for principle. For all their obvious differences, Carlyle and Longfellow did have one thing in common: in a literary world dominated by London, they were from the periphery—the one a Highland Scot, the other a North American.
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