Higginson's Longfellow

THE most noteworthy feature in Colonel Higginson’s recently published life of Longfellow is the presentation of a considerable amount of fresh biographical material. The first of these new contributions consists in extracts from the manuscript correspondence of Mary Potter Longfellow. With this aid he has drawn a most attractive picture of the wife of the poet’s youth. The slender library of “selections of elegant poems from the best authors ” with their pathetic marked passages, and the letters full of unaffected delight in the sights of Europe and of amiable criticism of the people she met, produce the impression of a charming personality, to which Colonel Higginson has now for the first time given due importance among the influences on Longfellow’s early manhood. The letters, too, have occasionally an interest beyond the biographical. Thus, writing from London to her mother in 1835, she says : “Mr. Carlyle of Craigenputtock was soon after announced, and passed an half hour with us much to our delight. He has very unpolished manners, and broad Scottish accent, but such fine language and beautiful thoughts that it is truly delightful to listen to him. Perhaps you have read some of his articles in the Edinburgh Review. He invited us to take tea with him at Chelsea, where they now reside. We were as much charmed with Mrs. C[arlyle] as with her husband. She is a lovely woman, with very simple and pleasing manners. She is also very talented and accomplished, and how delightful it is to see such modesty combined with such power to please.” Again, “Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle have more genuine worth and talent than half the nobility in London. Mr. Carlyle’s literary fame is very high, and she is a very talented woman — but they are people after my own heart — not the least pretension about them.” Such comment throws as pleasant a light on the Longfellows as on the Carlyles, and not every visitor to Chelsea has recorded his impressions so frankly and come off with impunity.

The second source of the new material is the Harvard College Papers in the University Library. From these Mr. Higginson is able to throw light upon the academic side of the poet’s career. It appears that he had to fight for his department against the tyranny of the classics, that he was an early advocate of the elective system, and that in money matters he found the corporation more impressed with the necessity of economizing the college funds than with the beauty of generosity to its teachers. So we learn that things were not all so very different sixty years ago. The biographer’s personal experience enables him to give a pleasant picture of his former teacher’s courtesy and skill in the classroom. On the whole, this section of the book is perhaps the most valuable.

Less convincing is the endeavor to show by extracts from Longfellow’s earlier writings “the origin and growth of his lifelong desire to employ American material and to help the creation of a native literature.” But the undergraduate dialogue on Indians and the Commencement Oration on Our Native Writers, though they are indications of natural youthful interests, even when taken in connection with Hiawatha and Evangeline, hardly suffice to prove that American nationalism was either the main aim or a prevailing characteristic of Longfellow’s literary production. Neither the Indian nor the French Acadian is a serious factor in American civilization, and, as far as national feeling is concerned, Hiawatha and Evangeline might have been written by any English-speaking poet. Nor do the slavery poems, or those touched with local color or politics, prove Colonel Higginson’s point. Americanism in the sense in which we apply the word to Bret Harte or Mark Twain, or in which Mr. Kipling defines it in An American, is not to be found in Longfellow, even in germ. He shows no consciousness of its existence, and consequently no effort to express it. Colonel Higginson himself quotes from one of the poet’s letters these words: “A national literature is the expression of national character and thought; and as our character and modes of thought do not differ essentially from those of England, our literature cannot.” Longfellow may not have foreseen how the two nations were to diverge, but he was acute enough to recognize that it was absurd to seek to build up, in the phrase and spirit of “the prospectus of a new magazine in Philadelphia, ” “a national literature worthy of the country of Niagara — of the land of forests and eagles.”

In other words, the position taken by Mr. Wendell in his Literary History of America is not seriously threatened by the new collection of evidence in the volume under review. Longfellow was a man of letters, and as a poet derived his chief inspiration, not from forests and eagles, but from the literature and art of Europe. These possessed his imagination, and, whatever his ostensible theme, it was in the European spirit that he treated it. And it is no minimizing of his service to his contemporaries to say that it mainly consisted in opening to them the treasures of Continental literary tradition, — a tradition of which he had a finer appreciation than any American had yet attained. In this aspect the professor and the poet are one.

Colonel Higginson thinks that “up to the present moment no serious visible reaction has occurred in the case of Longfellow.” It is to be feared that his faith will not be universally shared. Only his own closeness to his subject explains how he can fail to be aware of the attitude of the younger generation toward the poetry of Longfellow. Whether the reaction is justified is another matter, but reaction there surely is. The numerical test of which Colonel Higginson gives some interesting instances will probably still hold both here and abroad, but if the figures could be gathered from the literary class the result would assuredly be different. This is easy enough to understand. Longfellow, though rich in allusion, was never precious, never eccentric, never obscure, and those who sniff at him to-day are apt to be enamored of just those qualities. American poets of the rising generation are in general no more spontaneous, no more free from tradition in phrase and figure than he was, but they are often affected and usually difficult to understand. If this be distinction, Longfellow had none of it. He was always simple in thought and expression, always healthy, always sincere, always well bred. He uttered clearly and melodiously the old inherited wisdom, and if, as Colonel Higginson says, “he will never be read for the profoundest stirring, or for the unlocking of the deepest mysteries, he will always be read for invigoration, for comfort, for content. ” He had quiet humor, gentle pathos, the power of telling a story and of suggesting an atmosphere, and these may well suffice to maintain for him an audience that does not demand the originality and profundity of the great old masters, or the subtlety and complexity of the little new ones.

The danger which an author incurs from the lack of a clear conception of his probable public is particularly great in the case of short biographies such as those in the series to which the present volume belongs. In the large official “life,” no matters of fact dealing with the immediate subject are taken for granted; in the appreciative essay, all such are merely alluded to or assumed altogether. But in a book of the present type, the ideal is to supply all the essential facts likely to be required by the outsider, yet to do this so freshly and succinctly as not to tire those who are familiar with them, and to leave space for individual criticism and a personal estimate.

Colonel Higginson, in spite of his interest in the literature of the day, has found it hard to realize what a new generation may not know about Longfellow, and he has been acutely conscious of how much his own neighbors and contemporaries do know. He has consequently at times failed to relate things which the intelligent reader of another place or generation might fairly expect to be told; and he has sought, on the other hand, to interest those who have inherited the Cambridge tradition by gleaning material not hitherto presented. From this spring both the defects and the value of his book.

The value has already been indicated in what has been said of the new contributions. One or two illustrations will show the nature of the defects. Nowhere in the volume does the author mention Longfellow’s religious affiliation. Now this is not merely a matter of curiosity; for Longfellow’s Unitarianism is an important fact in the light of his consistently cheerful faith in human nature, and of the absence of black shadows in his picture of human life. Further, we are told of his friendship with Emerson, but the nature and extent of his relations to the Transcendental movement are left unexplained. Doubtless every one on Brattle Street knows, but Colonel Higginson’s audience has no such narrow limits, and it is conceivable that there are readers who need to be told.

Again, although there are novelty and value in what is said about the period during which Longfellow held the Smith Professorship of Modern Languages and Belles-Lettres, the significance and influence of that chair are not touched upon. Yet, outside of Harvard circles, there must be many who do not know that in that position Ticknor, followed by Longfellow and Lowell, began the study of the literature of modern Continental Europe in American colleges. The relation of this fact to the influence of Longfellow’s literary work on the country at large needs only to be suggested.

In his final summing up, Colonel Higginson is admirably quiet and restrained. He gives full credit to Longfellow for the qualities which are fairly his, and he is justly enthusiastic over his blameless character and the charm of his personality. Of these he can speak with authority, and his presentation of them is marked by the assurance that comes from first - hand acquaintance. Probably no one will ever give us a knowledge of Longfellow intimate as our knowledge of some poets is intimate, for the absence of passion in him prevented that laying open of the springs of feeling to which we owe the fact that we know some great men as we know ourselves. But to the external portraiture, which is all we get of more reserved natures, Colonel Higginson has made a contribution of substantial value.

William Allan Neilson.