Longfellow

by Charles C. Calhoun

  There is no flock, however watched and tended,

  But one dead lamb is there!

  There is no fireside, howsoe’er defended,

  But has no vacant chair. . . .

  The poem, published in The Seaside and the Fireside in 1849, affirms his belief in a Providence whose workings are mysterious but ultimately benign:

  Let us be patient! These severe afflictions

  Not from the ground arise

  But of tentimes celestial benedictions

  Assume this dark disguise. . . .

  Death is but a transition, a portal to “a suburb of the life elysian,” where little Fanny lives on, “Safe from temptation, safe from sin’s pollution.” Her family will meet her again, not as a helpless infant, but “a fair maiden, in her Father’s mansion. / Clothed with celestial grace.”

  This struck a plangent chord among his contemporaries. It was somehow reassuring not only that a family so blessed in all those things that should vouchsafe happiness in this world could be afflicted by such a loss, but that a male poet should share his grief so publicly. This would later be condemned as sentimentality. More recently, however, Longfellow’s work has been celebrated for that very quality, for we are beginning to understand how powerful and positive a role sentiment played in the reception of poetry among Longfellow’s nineteenth-century readers. Most of them would also have found it reassuring to learn that, despite his religious liberalism, Longfellow still believed in a life after death and a reunion of loved ones in some more perfect form. Even a reader who approached this poem unaware of the circumstances of the poet’s personal loss would immediately recognize the truth of the sentiments; it cannot be emphasized enough what a role infant mortality played in the nineteenth-century public’s eagerness for a certain type of poetry, and how skillfully Longfellow in particular met that need. What Longfellow called “the heart’s deep history” had found its chronicler of love and loss.

  “SAIL ON, O UNION . . .”

  ON THE EVENING OF FEBRUARY 12, 1850, the British actress Fanny Kemble stood before an audience of more than three thousand people at the Boston Music Hall for one of her much heralded “readings”—a one-woman dramatization of a play by Shakespeare, on this occasion As You Like It, sponsored by the Mercantile Library Association. But the real event that evening was her recital afterwards of a contemporary poem, Longfellow’s “The Building of the Ship,” which had been published the previous year in his collection The Seaside and the Fireside. Standing alone on stage at her reading desk, her hands trembling, her voice palpitating, tears in her eyes, she gave every word, as the poet noted in his journal, “its true weight and emphasis.” She explained to the audience that when she had first seen the poem, she had desired to read it to a Boston audience, and there she was. Mrs. Kemble was herself an international celebrity—the Vanessa Redgrave of her day, in her membership in a famous theatrical family, in her unparalleled ability as an actress, in her controversial public stands (against slavery and in favor of a woman’s right to divorce)—and she was particularly close to the Longfellow family. In the previous year, Longfellow had surprised the actress at supper at the Craigie House by presenting her with his sonnet “On Mrs. Kemble’s Readings from Shakespeare.” Now she repaid the tribute. “The Building of the Ship” is a poem that insists on being read aloud, and on that particular evening at the Music Hall the poem found its true echo in the cheering of the crowd.

  There were similar reactions throughout the North and West. The year of 1850 was to prove a watershed in the country’s movement toward disunion and war. The Fugitive Slave Act and Daniel Webster’s apostasy in supporting it were to radicalize many New Englanders. Yet few wanted to believe that war between North and South was actually possible, much less desirable. A nationalist poem such as “The Building of the Ship” touched a deep emotion. Hearing a young man recite the poem one day, Lincoln, too, was moved to tears. “It is a wonderful gift to be able to stir men like that,” he said.

  It was not the only poem of note in The Seaside and the Fireside—“Seaweed” and “The Fire of Drift-Wood” are two of Longfellow’s very best lyrics—but none others attracted so devoted a readership. It was as if the Union suddenly had a national poem, and even Southern readers could respond positively to its appeal for transsectional cooperation and sympathy. Looking to Schiller’s “Song of the Bell” for inspiration, Longfellow had perfected a metaphor that expressed everyone’s prayer that war would not come. He chose the quintessentially New England trade of ship building for his ostensible subject, although, despite his Portland childhood and European voyages, he did not actually know much about marine construction and had to look the details up in an encyclopedia. Nonetheless, the poem sounds authentically nautical. He weaves together two stories—the actual building of a merchant vessel and the romance between the master’s daughter and the builder.

  “Thus,” said he, “will we build this ship!

  Lay square the blocks upon the slip,

  And follow well this plan of mine.

  Choose the timbers with greatest care;

  Of all that is unsound beware;

  For only what is sound and strong

  To this vessel shall belong.

  Cedar of Maine and Georgia pine

  Here together shall combine.

  A goodly frame, and a goodly fame,

  And the UNION be her name!

  For the day that gives her to the sea

  Shall give my daughter unto thee!”

  This conflation of the national romance and the personal one continues as the stately vessel takes form. But the section that reduced grown men and women to tears comes at the end, in a stanza that begins with these much-quoted lines:

  Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!

  Sail on, O Union, strong and great!

  Humanity with all its fears,

  With all the hopes of future years,

  Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

  Longfellow’s work of the 1850s rarely strikes so obviously political a note; compared to Whittier, say, he would have seemed to have avoided politics altogether. Moreover, he famously avoided public speaking, a necessity in those days for anyone seeking office. Throughout the 1840s and early 1850s, he remained a firm if undemonstrative Whig, adhering to the party of respectability and moderate, pro-tariff Beacon Hill conservatism. While his antislavery sentiments were never in doubt, he avoided direct criticism of the South, somewhat in the spirit of “cedar of Maine and Georgia pine.” After all, his sister Mary had married James Greenleaf, a Boston cotton broker, and they lived much of the year in New Orleans. Moreover, the Appleton family fortunes were still very much linked to the textile industry, which depended on an uninterrupted supply of Southern cotton for its New England mills. At a low point in his relations with the Appletons, the outspokenly antislavery Sumner had famously denounced Fanny’s father and his mill-owning associates for their alliance of “the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom.”

  In this context, Longfellow’s 1849 venture back into prose—the rural sketch entitled Kavanagh—can be read as an allegory of the foolishness of political or any other kind of partisanship. Ostensibly a mild satire on small-town convention and unreflective Calvinism, Kavanagh traces the paths of the leading residents of a Berkshire-like village over several years. It is so slight a piece—more a pastel than a sketch—that it almost resists paraphrase, but it has considerable wit and charm (in the style its author associated with the German writer Jean Paul). Kavanagh sets the tone for a later generation of New England “local color” writing, notably the work of Sarah Orne Jewett, a good friend of Longfellow’s after the Civil War, when she shared a house with Annie Fields, the widow of publisher James T. Fields. Kavanagh has one other distinction: it depicts what is probably the first lesbian relationship in American fiction. Alice Archer’s passion for Cecilia Vaughan is not just a schoolgirl crush: when the tale’s male ingenu replaces her in Cecilia’s affections, Alice liter
ally wastes away in grief. Longfellow may have been influenced by his own close friendship with the great American actress Charlotte Cushman, whose long-term relationship with a younger woman was widely known and generally unquestioned by her adoring public.

  Kavanagh also gave Longfellow the opportunity to make an important statement vis-à-vis the literary politics of the day: whether American literature ought to be exclusively American—in subject matter, diction, audience. Asked what he thought of “our national literature,” Longfellow’s fictional alter ego Mr. Churchill replies:

  “Simply, that a national literature is not the growth of a day. Centuries must contribute their dew and sunshine to it. Our own is growing slowly but surely, striking its roots downward, and its branches upward, as is natural; and I do not wish, for the sake of what some people call originality, to invert it, and try to make it grow with its roots in the air. And as for having it so savage and wild as you want it, I have only to say, that all literature, as well as all art, is the result of culture and intellectual refinement. . . . As the blood of all nations is mingling with our own, so will their thoughts and feelings finally mingle in our literature. We shall draw from the Germans, tenderness; from the Spanish, passion; from the French, vivacity,—to mingle more and more with our English solid sense. And this will give us universality, so much to be desired.”

  While pursuing this ideal of universality in his own poetry and teaching, and especially in his labors as a translator, Longfellow nonetheless never could turn his back on “the matter of New England.” In 1858, for example, he published one of his most popular and influential works, The Courtship of Miles Standish, a romantic, in places even comic, “epic” of life in the early Plymouth Colony. Embellishing a story about the courtship of his own maternal ancestors, Priscilla Mullen and John Alden, Longfellow was able to satirize the blustery and vainglorious ways of the Pilgrims’ military leader, Captain Standish, a miles gloriosus in the tradition of Renaissance comedy. The mild-mannered Alden finally does “speak for himself” and wins the hand of Priscilla, who proves the strongest character of the three. Seated at her famous spinning wheel, she achieves a long life of her own beyond Longfellow’s text, as an icon of colonial femininity (at once demure and spunky) and the inspiration for a Colonial Revival wave of “Pilgrim Century” reproduction furniture. In the early twentieth century, her face would launch a thousand advertising campaigns, from detergents to life insurance.

  The 1850s represent the happiest period of Longfellow’s own long life. Indeed his existence at the Craigie House amid his growing family and his ever-increasing international fame seemed almost too good to be true. His fellow Saturday Club member Oliver Wendell Holmes once told a friend that he trembled every time he drove past the Craigie House, “for those who lived there had their happiness so perfect that no change, of all the changes which must come to them, could fail to be for the worse.” One immediate change, however, was for the better: in 1854, Longfellow finally felt he was financially secure enough to cease teaching at Harvard (which, five years later, gave him an honorary degree).

  His popularity made him a celebrity on the scale of Jenny Lind and Charles Dickens. He sold twenty-five thousand copies of Miles Standish within the first two months (plus another ten thousand copies on the first day in London). Looking over his literary earnings in 1857, Longfellow calculated that he had sold the following number of books:

  Voices of the Night 43,500

  Ballads and Other Poems 40,470

  The Spanish Student 38,400

  The Belfrey of Bruges 38,300

  Evangeline 35,850

  Seaside and Fireside 30,000

  The Golden Legend 17,188

  The Song of Hiawatha 50,000

  Outre-Mer 7,500

  Hyperion 14,550

  Kavanagh 10,500

  The improvements to the Craigie House (whose interior in this decade more or less assumed the form the visitor sees today), the formal garden and new lilacs and elms set out by Longfellow himself, the property acquired between the house and the river to protect his view, the quiet, cool summers in the cottage at Nahant—all these were outward signs of an inner security and an at-homeness with the world. Life had its ennuis, to be sure: the unceasing stream of visitors (virtually anyone respectable who came to the door and asked decently was admitted), the importunate letters from strangers (for autographs, money, criticism of their poetry), the persistent attacks of “neuralgia” (possibly chronic sinusitis) and severe eyestrain (during which Fanny read to him and wrote out his letters). But none of these nuisances spoiled his sense of equilibrium.

  This quiet possession of himself comes through in many of the poems collected in the 1850s under the title Birds of Passage. The collection included his Portland poems “My Lost Youth” and “The Ropewalk” as well as such small gems as “In the Churchyard at Cambridge” and “Snow-Flakes.” It also included one of the greatest American poems of the century, the elegy “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport.”

  Visiting Newport in 1852, early in its career as a fashionable summer resort, Longfellow had seen not only the bogus “Viking tower” (in fact the ruin of an eighteenth-century mill), which helped inspire his popular “Skeleton in Armor”), but also the somewhat neglected cemetery laid out in pre-Revolutionary times by the seaport’s small (and by Longfellow’s time long vanished) Jewish community.

  The trees are white with dust, that o’er their sleep

  Wave their broad curtains in the south-wind’s breath,

  While underneath these leafy tents they keep

  The long, mysterious Exodus of Death. . . .

  How came they here? What burst of Christian hate,

  What persecution, merciless and blind,

  Drove o’er the sea—that desert desolate—

  These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind?

  The narrator of the poem transforms the eighteenth-century genre of the graveyard elegy into something more piercing, as he reflects on the pride and humiliation of an accursed and mocked people, never at home until they find the grave—and now (as far as he can tell) a dead nation that never will rise again. Amid the crude boosterism and often vicious nativism of antebellum America, the poem stands out as a small beacon of sympathy for the oppressed and the maligned, a celebration of a vanished “race” for whom few others gave a thought.

  The decade that had begun with Mrs. Kemble’s soaring recitation of Longfellow’s plea for national unity soon experienced a crisis of sectionalism that seemed to deepen each year. As the Whig Party fell to pieces amid this sectional strife, Longfellow found himself more and more drawn toward the new Republican Party—a successful coalition of abolitionists, nativists, antislavery Whigs, and Free Soilers, in which Charles Sumner had rapidly emerged as the Massachusetts leader. To the distress of “proper” Boston, Sumner was elected by the General Court to a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1851, and he proceeded to use this national platform as a rallying point for the antislavery cause. The dispute between North and South was suddenly brought home to the Longfellows in 1856 when their friend was almost killed at his seat in the Senate chamber. A deranged South Carolinian, offended by a remark Sumner had made in debate with the assailant’s kinsman, approached the Senator from behind as he was writing letters at his desk. He beat Sumner unconscious with a heavy cane. The North was outraged—the incident confirmed suspicions that Southerners lacked self-control and were quick to turn violent and lawless—while the South congratulated the assailant, Congressman Preston Brooks, for teaching a “scoundrel” a lesson. Admirers sent Brooks new canes.

  Like most people throughout the country, Longfellow still thought secession could be avoided. Yet, like many of his Boston friends, he privately applauded John Brown’s bold though bloody raid and predicted the South would soon reap the whirlwind of slave revolt, which it had sown. When Lincoln won on the Republican ticket in 1860, Longfellow was elated: “It is the redemption of the country. Freedom is triumphant.” He did not realize ho
w long that victory would take, or what a price his own family would pay.

  HIAWATHA

  LONGFELLOW’S GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT in the decade before the Civil War might seem at first an attempt to escape into a world of fantasy. The Song of Hiawatha is a very odd poem, but there was something inevitable about Longfellow’s writing it. From his early youth he had been fascinated by tales of Native Americans. The many thousands of Wabanakis—“the people of the dawn”—who had once inhabited the coast of Maine had dwindled to a few hundred by his day, enduring a marginal existence, often literally on the edge of the line of white settlement, eking out a living as trappers and woodsmen and guides. Yet a communal memory remained among the whites from more frightening times, when the Native Americans and their French allies had come close to driving the English from Maine. “Indian Massacre Creek” passed near Longfellow’s grandfather’s Gorham farm; stories of the natives’ raids in the seventeenth century gave a grim aura to Deering’s Woods. The young poet’s first work celebrated the heroism of the ill-fated whites at Lovell’s Pond.

  As a Bowdoin undergraduate poet, Longfellow occasionally turned to Native American themes. As a Bowdoin professor, in 1832, he took the occasion of a review of Sir Philip Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy in the North American Review to champion this uniquely American poetic source. He cited as an example the last words of Pushmataha, the Choctaw chief who had died in Washington in 1824.

  I shall die, but you will return to your brethren. As you go along the paths, you will see the flowers, and hear the birds; but Pushmataha will see and hear them no more. When you come to your home, they will ask you, where is Pushmataha? and you will say to them, He is no more. They will hear the tidings like the sound of the fall of a mighty oak in the stillness of the wood [his italics].