University of Virginia Library

THE POET OF THE PEOPLE.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the most famous and most widely read of all American poets—His personality, his learning, his wide range of themes, and his wonderful power of telling stories in song.

By George Holme.

WRITING in a day of story telling poets, Longfellow stood easily in the front rank as a story teller if not as a poet. As a poet he cannot be classed with Tennyson or Browning. He had none of their high ideality or dramatic power, but he had something which to the world at large is just as valuable. He could sweep the chords of daily human experience, could find the sweetness and the beauty in commonplace, every day human life. His art of expression may not have struck the highest or the lowest notes, but the harmony was perfect, without ever a false tone, and the universal human heart responds to its music. He had a high purpose, and he wrote nothing which did not contain the charm of poetry; but it was the song of the commonplace and conventional. This commonplace song has found a niche in every household in America.

Longfellow's life, from the very beginning, moved on even lines. Both he and William Cullen Bryant were descendants of John Alden, whose courtship Longfellow made famous: and the Longfellows were a race equally peaceful and honest. There are no romantic stories to tell of his youth. He went to school with Nathaniel Willis and Seba Smith, and other boys who even at that early age were thinking more of verse making than pleasure.

He graduated from Bowdoin College with Nathaniel Hawthorne, J. S. C. Abbott, Jonathan Cilley, and George McCheever, and was almost at once asked to accept a chair among his professors.

One of the clever men who were his associates in those early days said that he was waiting to see some great event break down the classic walls that surrounded Longfellow, and let his genius loose. But those walls were adamant. The civil war came with its tumult of the nation's heart, and left Longfellow calm. His beautiful wife was burned before his eyes, and it left him sad.

Neither event showed to any appreciable extent in his work. He never owned a style of his own growing out of an appreciation of nature, like Bryant's. He was a man of books, who assimilated their contents, and in a manner digested what he found there, fashioned it anew, preached sermons upon the texts, and sent the material out again. He was not a plagiarist, but one who wrote out of the accumulated knowledge of others.

Few people who have read "Evangeline" but once can criticise it, because

The Sailing of the Mayflower: "Sun illumined and white, on the eastern verge of the ocean Gleamed the departing sail."

[Description: From a painting by A.W. Bayes]

they have rushed through it for the sake of the story. This story was a gift from Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had heard of the young couple of Acadia, and who had kept them in mind, intending to weave their story into a romance. The forcible deportation of eighteen thousand French people from their own homes touched Hawthorne as it never could

The Home of Evangeline: "Naught but tradition remains of the beautiful village of Grand Pre"

[Description: Picture of cows by Gleeson]

have touched Longfellow until it was put before him as literature.

"Evangeline" was brought out in the same year with Tennyson's "Princess," and disputed the palm with it in the minds of many. Perhaps more people have read and enjoyed "Evangeline" than have understood "The Princess." Longfellow's narrative is given with a charming simplicity, and his pictures of the new world's early days are perfect. It is the real French village of Grand Pré which is put before us, and it is the real colonial Louisiana, and not a poetic dream. But it was a picture drawn from what other men had seen. Longfellow had never visited the Acadian valley. "Evangeline" was as popular in England as it was in America. Artists painted pictures of the heroine, and admired the poet, who was called the head of American literature. His conventional habits of thought and his story telling faculty were appreciated by the great public on both sides of the Atlantic. They created something the man who was not "literary" could understand: something not too elusive, not too artistic.

Longfellow always suggested somebody else. In the "Tales of a Wayside Inn," which shows his story telling talent at its best, he reminds us of both Chaucer and Boccaccio. In this poem the story tellers were portraits. The Musician was Ole Bull. The Sicilian was Professor Luigi Monti, who dined every Sunday with Longfellow; the Youth, Dr. Henry W. Wales; the Theologian was the poet's brother, and the Poet, Thomas William Parsons.

The stories here told are gathered from the literature of all countries. Longfellow lived abroad for several years at different times, and saturated himself with foreign languages and literatures. He was never an American poet in the truest sense, even when he was writing upon American subjects. We think of him as the poet of the Pilgrims, and the story of the Mayflower will always come back to us through his presentation: but even here he writes with a foreign education molding his expressions, and tells of the grim trials of his forebears, with more thought of "what will be thought of it over the ocean," as a poem, than of singing to the American people the song of their nation's birth.

The valuation which was given to Longfellow's poetry by his contemporaries is most interesting. To the Craigie house in Cambridge where he lived, came almost every man in America who was known to letters. Charles Sumner, who was one of Longfellow's oldest and most devoted friends, had a most extravagant opinion of the poet. He often told that the "Psalm of Life" had saved one man he knew from suicide. The fellow was in the depths of misery when he came upon the unsigned poem in a scrap of newspaper. Hawthorne valued Longfellow, but then Hawthorne was not a critic, but a genius who saw everything through the mist of his own imagination.

But there was another genius who

called upon the public to witness his prophecy that there would be no future for Longfellow's poetry. This was the young Edgar Allen Poe, then the critic of the Gentleman's Magazine. He wrote of "Hyperion":

"Works like this of Professor Longfellow are the triumphs of Tom o' Bedlam and the grief of all true criticism. They are patent in unsettling the popular faith in art. That such things succeed at all is attributable to the fact that there exist men of genius who indite them; that men of genius ever indite them is attributable to the fact that they are the most indolent of human beings. To the writers of these things we say: All ethics lie, and all history lies, or the world shall forget ye and your works. We dismiss 'Hyperion' in brief. We grant him high qualities, but deny him the future. Without design, without shape, without beginning, middle, or end, what earthly object has his book accomplished?"

Margaret Fuller joined with Poe in his opinion. She wrote criticisms—undoubtedly without jealousy or malice—for the Tribune, in which she said:

"We must confess to a coolness towards Mr. Longfellow in consequence of the exaggerated praises that have been bestowed upon him. When we see a person of moderate powers receive honors which should be reserved for the highest, we feel something like assailing him, and taking from him the crown which should be reserved for grander brows. It may be that the management of his publishers has

raised him to a place above one he would wish to claim. We the more readily believe this of Mr. Longfellow, as one so sensible to the beauties of other writers, and so largely indebted to them, must know his comparative rank better than his readers have known it."

After all, what did his friends claim for him beyond the fact that he touched the heart of humanity? Was not that sufficient? He aimed to reach the feelings of men and women, and he succeeded. He has probably been more read than any poet except the Psalmist. And in spite of the caustic predictions of Poe, his literary immortality is assured as one who sang not for a class but for all his fellow men.