THE AGE OF INNOCENCE
America at this time was an overgrown youthful body, ill-supplied with
mind; and a few ardent believers in culture set out to fill this need.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a student at Bowdoin College, and the
faculty decided that Cervantes and Dante and Goethe and Moliere and Hugo
ought to be more than names to the American people; somebody ought to
study these languages and literatures, and pass them on. They gave
Longfellow a traveling scholarship for three years, and he went abroad
and collected things romantic and beautiful and innocent in Spain and
Italy and Germany and France, and came home and spent the next twenty or
thirty years in teaching them, first at Bowdoin and then at Harvard. He
translated poetry, and also wrote poetry of his own, very much
resembling the translations. At the age of forty-seven he became a poet
exclusively, and lived to be a seventy-five-year-old boy, just as
romantic and beautiful and innocent as when he had first gone out to
gather nourishment for the hungry young soul of America.
Longfellow was a moralist, and it was his purpose to draw useful
conclusions in his poetry. He would start by looking at the planet Mars,
and end by proving that human beings must be brave and self-reliant: not
that there is anything remotely suggesting such qualities in a “red
planet,” but because this planet happens to be named after the God of
war. He would look at a ship on the stocks, and draw conclusions about
the government of his country. He would look at the village blacksmith,
and thank him for a lesson in diligence and sobriety.
That kind of poetry has now gone out of fashion. The young intellectuals
of America are no longer romantic and beautiful and innocent, and they
say that Longfellow is propaganda. But you know my thesis by now--theirs
is just as much propaganda, only it is on the other side. What
Longfellow called art is incitement towards diligence and sobriety,
while what our young sophisticates call art is incitement toward going
to hell in a hurry. Anything that pictures the delights of the senses
and the breakdown of the will is art; but poor Longfellow, in an
unguarded moment, had the misfortune to exclaim that
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal.
These two lines have been enough to damn him in the eyes of a whole
generation of coterie-litterateurs.
Turning the pages of the art which Longfellow brought back from Europe,
there flashes to mind a memory of the days when I also traveled in
Europe, collecting culture. It was in Naples, a soft moonlit evening in
early spring, and I stood before a great statue, noting its dim
outlines. A figure slipped up beside me, and a soft voice began to
whisper, offering to take me to a place where there were beautiful boys:
“beautiful, sweet Neapolitan boys,” I remember the phrase. I wonder what
the traveling idealist from Bowdoin College would have made of such a
whisper in the moonlight!
That was a dozen years ago, and we in America have learned something
about Europe since then. I am the last person in the world who would
desire a return to the age of innocence, or advocate, even for the
young, the blinking of grim and hideous facts. But this I do believe: a
time will come, and not so far in the future, when American youth will
react from the hip-pocket flask and petting-party stage of culture.
With full knowledge of vice and disease, it will choose virtue and
health, because these are the truly interesting and worth while things,
and the truly great themes of art.
Pending the arrival of such a time, I record my notion, that poetry does
not cease to be great because it is declaimed by a million schoolboys.
“To be or not to be,” and “Friends, Romans, countrymen,” are great
poetry, even though we personally are tired of them. If it be permitted
to tell a story in verse, then assuredly “The Wreck of the Hesperus” is
a tragic story told in vivid and stirring language. I say that anyone
who does not know this for a great ballad simply does not know what a
ballad is. You may spend your time digging in Percy’s “Reliques” and
other old volumes, and find things less easy to read, but nothing more
worth reading. I go farther and admit that when I was young I found
delight in “Paul Revere’s Ride” and “Hiawatha” and “Evangeline,” and I
don’t believe that kind of young person is yet entirely extinct in
America.