There is much in Tales of a Wayside Inn of interest. The metrical virtuosity of the twenty-two episodes of “The Saga of King Olaf” (the first part of the work to be written, some of it going back to 1856) is unsurpassed in nineteenth-century American poetry, and a bracing tang of cold salt air enlivens the work. “The Falcon of Ser Federigo” is a skillful retelling of a sunnier tale from Boccaccio. “Torquemada” in its sadism reveals a strain of verismo we do not usually associate with the “genteel” Longfellow. “Lady Wentworth” and “The Baron of St. Castine” are ventures in colonial American myth making. There is no poem in the series that does not reveal some aspect of Longfellow’s craft, and the only real weakness of Tales of a Wayside Inn—assuming we do not reject long narrative verse out of hand—is the shapelessness of the project as a whole. As with Hiawatha, Longfellow could have gone on adding tale after tale, given the open-endedness of the work.
To suggest that Longfellow was a multiculturalist before his time stretches the term a bit, however much the framing of Tales of a Wayside Inn conveys a lack of xenophobia and an eagerness to embrace other European cultures. To suggest that Longfellow was an environmentalist before his time, however, is confirmed by “The Birds of Killingworth,” which closes Part One and is the most readable of the poems other than “Paul Revere’s Ride.” It is one of Longfellow’s most Unitarian works as well; its satire on Connecticut religious orthodoxy still had considerable bite in the 1860s, despite its colonial setting. Spring brings flocks of birds to the farmlands of Killingworth, among them the hungry ravens. A town meeting assembles to discuss how to deal with these pests; it provides the poet with an opportunity to sketch the leading citizens, including the grandest:
Then from his house, a temple painted white,
With fluted columns, and a roof of red,
The Squire came forth, august and splendid sight!
Slowly descending, with majestic tread,
Three flights of stairs, nor looking left or right
Down the long street he walked, as one who said,
“A town that boasts inhabitants like me
Can have no lack of good society!”
He is followed by the clergyman, devoted to Jonathan Edwards and slaughtering deer; the idealistic Preceptor of the Academy, daydreaming of one of his pupils, the fair Almira (“Who was, as in a sonnet he said, / As pure as water, and as good as bread.”); the slow and ponderous Deacon; and sundry bird-hating farmers. After very little debate, the townsmen—over the protests of the sensitive schoolmaster—vote to rid themselves of the birds:
Men who have no faith in fine-spun sentiment
Who put their trust in bullocks and in beeves.
The birds were doomed; and, as the record shows,
A bounty offered for the heads of crows.
A dreadful massacre follows—“the very St. Bartholomew of Birds!” But summer brings the caterpillars and cankerworms and other devouring insects; soon the fields and orchards are stripped bare.
The farmers grew impatient, but a few
Confessed their error, and would not complain,
For after all, the best thing one can do
When it is raining, is to let it rain.
Then they repealed the law, although they knew
It would not call the dead to life again;
As school-boys, finding their mistake too late,
Draw a wet sponge across the accusing slate.
A colorless autumn arrives, then finally a spring when each branch seems to have been hung with wicker baskets: the town has had to import every bird it could find, to restore the balance of nature. The tale is a delightful parable on the Law of Unintended Consequences, and a typically Longfellovian comment on the narrower strains of the New England character.
While the varied episodes of Tales of a Wayside Inn were taking shape, Longfellow was engaged in two even more ambitious projects. As early as 1856, his German friend Scherb had suggested that he write a tragic poem on the Puritans and the Quakers. He began his research, extending it to include the Salem witchcraft scare, and at various stages in the late 1850s wrote scenes for what he came to call his New England Tragedy, which was privately issued in a prose version in 1860. In the 1860s he slowly recrafted this prose into blank verse. The two-part tragedy—“John Endicott,” dealing with the persecution by the Boston authorities of the peaceable Quakers, and “Giles Corey of the Salem Farms,” dramatizing an incident in the witch trials—was published as The New England Tragedies in 1868. It was intended to form the third part of a massive (and never completely finished) work known as Christus: A Mystery (1872). Its first part was The Divine Tragedy, a retelling in dramatic verse of the Jesus story; its second, The Golden Legend, a dramatization of a medieval legend about the Emperor Henry II and a pious young woman who is willing to sacrifice her life for his survival. Together these works absorbed an enormous amount of Longfellow’s time and creative energy in the 1860s, but it is hard to find anyone who believes the results merited the effort. Like many literary figures in the nineteenth century, Longfellow loved the theater and saw tragic drama as the highest art form. Like Henry James, however, and unlike Victor Hugo, he lacked any sense of stagecraft or dramatic pacing. The New England Tragedies are of some interest, nonetheless, because they are so out of character with the figure we usually think of as Longfellow. As bleak as anything Hawthorne ever wrote about seventeenth-century New England, and far more brutal, they seem to represent a moment of questioning of the origins of the New England polity, even of organized Christianity itself. They are unstageable as drama because their individual scenes are so underdeveloped, but they cry out to be set to music.
Longfellow’s other great project in these years was far more welcomed by his public. In 1862 he took up again a project he had tried his hand at on several occasions during his Harvard years: the translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. It has often been said that his purpose was to overcome his grief following Fanny’s death—the daily effort of translation giving him a regular chore to distract him—but this seems rather superficial. Dante had been a central interest of his since his visit to Italy in 1828 and the focus of much of his Harvard teaching. As part of his greater project of introducing Americans to European high culture, he knew the need for a new translation of this central work in the Western tradition. The discovery of Doré’s illustrations in 1862—“a prodigality of horrors,” he called them—and his efforts to teach his children Italian were other incentives to take on the task. What really propelled him, however, was the existence close at hand in Cambridge of a small group of literati who knew Italian well and took keen interest in his progress.
This was the famous Dante Club, which formally began in 1865 but which had existed on a more ad hoc basis for several years. It met weekly in Longfellow’s study. As the youngest member of the group—William Dean Howells—later recalled, the regulars were James Russell Lowell and Charles Eliot Norton. Others were invited from time to time. The practice was for Longfellow to read the canto he had just translated, while the club followed in the original and offered suggestions or alternatives. Longfellow was determined to translate the poem as literally as possible, even though this meant abandoning Dante’s terza rima. The sessions were serious, but they were also convivial, and they became even more so when the work was over and the party (often joined by latecomers) adjourned to the dining room for a supper of oysters and some plain New England fare—cold turkey (which Longfellow carved) or a haunch of venison or canvasback duck, accompanied with wine of the first class from the poet’s fabled cellar. The club often continued into the early hours of the morning.
The young Howells was too shy to speak out in such august company—his one attempt at a correction was passed over, he said—but he left an entertaining account of the group:
When Longfellow read verse, it was with a hollow, with a mellow resonant murmur, like the note of some deep-throated horn. His voice was very lulling in quality, and at the Dante Club
it used to have early effect with an old scholar [possibly George Washington Greene] who sat in a cavernous arm-chair at the corner of the fire, and who drowsed audibly in the soft tone and gentle heat. The poet had a fat terrier [“Trap”] who wished always to be present . . . and he commonly fell asleep at the same moment with that dear old scholar, so that when they began to make themselves heard in concert, one could not tell which it was that most took our thoughts from the text of the Paradiso. When the duet opened, Longfellow would look up with an arch recognition of the fact, and then go gravely on to the end of the canto. At the close he would speak to his friend and lead him out to supper as if he had not seen or heard anything amiss.
The club in Longfellow’s study ended with the publication of The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri in 1867 but continued at Norton’s house with his translation of the Vita Nuova and eventually formed the basis of the Dante Society of America, still very much in existence. Longfellow’s Dante soon became a fixture in every American household with any claim to high culture; while its diction now seems very old fashioned, it has been praised by later and freer translators, and functions as a very useful crib for anyone trying to read Dante in the original. It was not to be Longfellow’s last venture into things Italian.
Throughout his life in Cambridge, Longfellow had yearned, from time to time, to return to the Mediterranean, which glowed in his memories of 1827 and 1828. But the mood would pass (often, as soon as the weather improved), and he had long resisted the temptation to make one more European voyage. In truth, he was too accustomed to his usual routines—each July going to Nahant (with a short, often one-day, side trip to Portland), each September returning to Brattle Street—to be able to summon up the physical and psychic energy such a voyage would demand. It is a tribute to his devotion to his children, however, that in 1868 he finally made such a trip for their benefit. The footloose scholar of the 1820s was now part of an entourage of eleven, including not only the five children but his two sisters, Uncle Tom, Ernest’s brand-new wife, Hattie (it was to be their wedding trip as well), and their former governess, Miss Davie. (Charley sailed with them but quickly took off on his own.)
It was the conventional Grand Tour, made more laborious by the fact that everywhere he went, Longfellow found himself showered with honors and attention. Degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, a visit with the Queen at Windsor Castle, an evening with Liszt in Rome, two days of talk with Tennyson on the Isle of Wight—it was a flattering but exhausting round. As his brother Sam recorded: “He breakfasted with Mr. Gladstone, Sir Henry Holland, the Duke of Argyll; lunched with Lord John Russell at Richmond; dined with various hosts, received midnight calls from Bulwer and Aubrey de Vere.” (One wonders if Bulwer was reminded of the morning in 1835 when Longfellow called on him?)
The trip lasted from June of 1868 until September of 1869. While the children busied themselves with sightseeing, Longfellow merely went through the motions of accompanying them. He was quickly bored with museums and churches, and dwelt instead with the memories that Rome, Venice, the Bernese Alps, the Rhine brought flooding back. The trip did result in several memorable portraits. In Rome, G. P. A. Healy, working from a photograph of Longfellow and Edith, painted them into a topographical view of the Arch of Titus—the learned poet escorting the innocent young American through the ruins of ancient civilization. And Edmonia Lewis, a young African-American sculptor in the circle of Charlotte Cushman and Harriet Hosmer, sculpted a bust (now at Harvard) in which the poet took on the monumentality of a river god.
On his visit to Tennyson at Farringford on June 23, 1868, his friendly British rival walked him over the downs to Dimbola Lodge, the seaside home of the formidable Julia Margaret Cameron. She took the best photograph of him ever made. Recognized today as one of the master photographers of her century, she was regarded as an eccentric, though an interesting one, by many of her vast circle of friends and relatives. In the tradition of Victorian country-house amateur theatricals, she wrapped her photographic subjects in dramatic costumes, in the former hen-house that served as her studio. The image she captured does not look like Longfellow so much as her romantic idea of what Longfellow ought to look like: wild, bardic, craggy, just off the moors. But it is a masterpiece. His clawlike hand holds the dark robe to his shoulder; in profile, he glares defiantly at some distant object, his mass of wind-tossed white hair and jutting beard dominating the dark background of the portrait. It is not Longfellow, but Lear.
MORITURI SALUTAMUS
ALTHOUGH HE CONTINUED to write poetry until almost the last weeks of his life, Longfellow’s project in his final decade seems to have been to revisit images and themes he had worked with earlier, to see what could still be drawn from them. He expressed this condition with stunning conciseness in the two stanzas of “Aftermath,” published in a small volume with that title in 1873. Building on a metaphor both personal and writerly, he describes the process of going over the mown fields in early winter to gather what the harvesters have left behind.
Not the sweet, new grass with flowers
Is this harvesting of ours;
Not the upland clover bloom;
But the rowen mixed with weeds,
Tangled tufts from marsh and meads,
Where the poppy drops its seeds
In the silence and the gloom.
This was a literal description of the river meadow between the Craigie House and the Charles, which Longfellow rented out to a farmer whom he must have seen making just such a final sweep each November. In a few deft strokes, the poem also invokes the mental landscape of a poet who, during the twenty-one years that he survived Fanny, struggled through the half-light of memory and desperation.
Two years later, he tackled this problem of aging in a far more vigorous, New England–like way. The occasion was the fiftieth reunion of the famous Bowdoin Class of 1825. Longfellow had returned infrequently to Brunswick after 1835, and he had a lifelong aversion to speaking or reciting before crowds, but he finally accepted President Joshua Chamberlain’s invitation. (Chamberlain, who became famous in the 1980s as a result of several modern books and films about his Civil War heroics, was leading the struggling college at a particularly low moment in its fortunes; he, too, as a youth had taught modern languages there.) Longfellow took his title from Gerome’s painting of the gladiators saluting Caesar in the Colosseum. In the fall of 1875, he read “Morituri Salutamus” aloud (in a voice few people could hear) in Brunswick’s First Parish Church, where almost twenty-five years earlier Harriet Beecher Stowe had experienced her vision of Uncle Tom, and where Longfellow was relieved to learn that he could stand at the pulpit. (“Let me cover myself as much as possible; I wish it might be entirely.”) The poem is both elegy and gentle jeremiad. Despite copious classical and local allusions—including a handsome tribute to the sole surviving professor from 1825, Alpheus Packard—the diction is in the easy middle style of Longfellow’s best narrative poems. The poet pulls off the difficult feat of sounding both learned and enthusiastic.
The scholar and the world! The endless strife,
The discord in the harmonies of life!
The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books;
The market-place, the eager love of gain,
Whose aim is vanity, and whose end is pain!
The scholar, he suggests, can escape, or at least delay, such a wasted end far better than other men.
Ah, nothing is too late
Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.
Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles
Wrote his grand Oedipus, and Simonides
Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers,
When each had numbered more than fourscore years,
And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten,
Had but begun his “Characters of Men.”
Chaucer, at Woodstock with the nightingales,
At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales;
Go
the at Weimar, toiling to the last,
Completed Faust when eighty years were past.
These are indeed exceptions; but they show
How far the gulf-stream of our youth may flow
Into the arctic regions of our lives,
Where little else than life itself survives.
In his own life he had lived up to this charge: he had published a second series of Tales of a Wayside Inn (1870) and Three Books of Song (1872), and in 1874 he sold “The Hanging of the Crane” to a New York newspaper for four thousand dollars (a deal brokered by Sam Ward, and the highest price ever paid to that date for a single poem). That same year, he began one of the most ambitious publishing projects in the history of poetry: what eventually became the thirty-one volumes of his Poems of Places, a wide-ranging anthology in translation of representative, often topographical, lyrics drawn not only from every major European literature but extending into Asia and the Arab world as well. If Longfellow can be said to have “invented” comparative literature for the American university at Harvard in the late 1830s, then Poems of Places gives him standing as nineteenth-century America’s most ambitious multiculturalist. Five more volumes of his own poetry were to appear, combining dramatic verse, lyrics, incidental verse, and sonnets on a variety of subjects: The Masque of Pandora (1875), Keramos (1878), Ultima Thule (1880), In the Harbor (1882), and Michael Angelo: A Fragment (1883 and 1886).
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