The New England Tragedies. I. John Endicott. Ii. Giles Corey of the Salem Farms

By HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. Boston : Fields, Osgood, & Co.

SINCE this is the effect, we cannot imagine it to have been other than the intention of Mr. Longfellow in these poems to seize the popular idea of the witch and Quaker persecutions of our olden time, and to present it in the array of the simplest words and scenes. Great part of the plot here consists of the Situations furnished by history ; and the characters shine through the often colorless medium of the drama with the form and hues that tradition and association have stamped upon them. The plays, in fact, are as unartificial and as conventional as old ballads; as in these all gold is red, all ladies fair, and all knights brave, so in our New England Tragedies the Puritan rulers are austere, the Quakers are meek and bold, the accused of witchcraft are movingly steadfast and eloquently innocent in their extremity and despair. In spite of the free use of historic material, the critic cannot feel that they are true portraits of the past; but as pictures of the vague and generalized past existing in the common imagination, he must recognize their fidelity, and the fine art with which they are presented. We shall still go to Dr. Palfrey and Mr. Upham for the history of New England; we shall still throw the weird lustre of “ the Scarlet Letter” upon Puritan life, for a closer and deeper study of its character, — but we know that in the sense of men, when the old New England days are spoken of, the

are no other than the images of these tragedies.

One could not read a page of the book without perceiving that it was Longfellow’s, nor without seeing that he had sacrificed some of his peculiarities to the purpose of it; for here is none of the efflorescence of earlier poems, little of the metaphor with which he sometimes paints his lilies so as to make them look like pictures of lilies in old missals. Doubtless for the contemporaries who have grown into love of him for his consecutive gifts a great poet could never sing in vain; the music of all past songs haunts each new effort, and clothes it with a charm that defies inquisition for comparative excellence ; yet, in these latest poems of Mr. Longfellow, we are sensible of the burden he lays upon us in those we like least. The moral rests very heavily upon the action of the first tragedy, and nearly every person of the drama has a private pulpit from which he preaches. The Quakers are, of course, shown with some limitations of the fact in their offences against the Puritan law, and their arrogant intolerance and indecencies ; but still the tragedy is not strongly motivée, and depends in great degree for its interest upon hints of the tragedy beyond and without it. The scarcely more than intimated love of John Endicott the younger for fair Edith Christison the Quakeress gives the poem a pensive grace it would have wanted in a more downright passion ; the iron hardness of the times that in Master Merry casts a stone at the Sabbath-breaking doves on his housetop, the dim-seen anguish of Governor Endicott for the rebellious soft - heartedness of his son, the grave friendship of the Puritan elders and rulers, — are elements of the tragedy that have a force not felt in the attitudes and suffering of the Quakers, to whose madness, indeed, it was perhaps impossible to give any method. Those scenes in which Governor Endicott is prominent are all specially effective through the solemn stateliness of his presence, — a figure far better conceived than that of John Norton, his spiritual adviser, — and the play reaches its climax, as well as its close, in the misgiving of this strong man, in whom the sign of relenting is the sign of death, — who can break, but not bend.

In “Giles Corey,” as in “John Endicott,” there is no strong local presentation of fact; it is the light of legend and common association on the woods, the village, and the tribunal; something still less authentic than these seems to be battered in the character of Tituba, the Indian witch, — a character that recalls Maestro Verdi’s music, and the scenes of that opera of which the scene is laid near Salem. All the other people are natural; and the protest against superstition has little of the merely ethical effect of the moralizing in “John Endicott.” Mr. Longfellow had much to do because there could be so little to say that his reader did not already feel. You have but to think of a score of innocent people put to death by the delusion of just and good men, and you have a tragedy more terrible than any possible to write. What scene of drama ever moved like the sight of that old warrant in the Salem court-house, for the execution of Bridget Bishop, with the sheriff’s return upon it? The poet could only take the tragical facts and clothe them in a little imagined circumstance, paint us Giles Corey’s peaceful life in that home over which the cloud soon should drift; suggest the agony and horror of the rending ties of trust and affection between old friends and neighbors as the blight of accusation fell upon one and another ; hint the cruel conscientiousness of the magistracy, the loath conviction of the minister, the panic and dismay of the people ; show the accused, with the accusers falling into torment before them ; and bring us at last into the presence of the dead victim of the most terrible fear that ever fell on men’s souls. All this he has done with so much simplicity and reticence that his success is scarcely recognized except as the reader in his afterthought finds all his vague impressions and associations of the witchcraft history given an ordered shape and embodiment. There are few passages to be quoted from the poem ; it would be hard to fix upon any scene as expressive of the spirit in which the whole is written ; but it holds the reader to the end, and at last he is conscious of that strange, sad pleasure, that “ angenehmer Schmerz,” which high tragic poetry alone can give through sympathies evoked and baffled by some inexorable doom, yet not so sharply rejected but they cling even to its accomplishment with some dim purpose of rescue.