It is no wonder that Mr. Longfellow should be the most popular of
American, we might say, of contemporary poets. The fine humanity of his
nature, the wise simplicity of his thought, the picturesqueness of his
images, and the deliciously limpid flow of his style, entirely justify
the public verdict, and give assurance that his present reputation will
settle into fame. That he has not _this_ of Tennyson, nor _that_ of
Browning, may be cheerfully admitted, while he has so many other things
that are his own. There may be none of those flashes of lightning in his
verse that make day for a moment in this dim cavern of consciousness
where we grope; but there is an equable sunshine that touches the
landscape of life with a new charm, and lures us out into healthier air.
If he fall short of the highest reaches of imagination, he is none the
less a master within his own sphere--all the more so, indeed, that he is
conscious of his own limitations, and wastes no strength in striving to
be other than himself. Genial, natural, and original, as much as in
these latter days it is given to be, he holds a place among our poets
like that of Irving among our prose-writers. Make whatever deductions
and qualifications, and they still keep their place in the hearts and
minds of men. In point of time he is our Chaucer--the first who imported
a finer foreign culture into our poetry.
His present volume shows a greater ripeness than any of its
predecessors. We find a mellowness of early autumn in it. There is the
old sweetness native to the man, with greater variety of character and
experience. The personages are all drawn from the life, and sketched
with the light firmness of a practised art. They have no more
individuality than is necessary to the purpose of the poem, which
consists of a series of narratives told by a party of travellers
gathered in Sudbury Inn, and each suited, either by its scene or its
sentiment, to the speaker who recites it. In this also there is a
natural reminiscence of Chaucer; and if we miss the rich minuteness of
his Van Eyck painting, or the depth of his thoughtful humor, we find the
same airy grace, tenderness, simple strength, and exquisite felicities
of description. Nor are twinkles of sly humor wanting. The Interludes,
and above all the Prelude, are masterly examples of that perfect ease of
style which is, of all things, the hardest to attain. The verse flows
clear and sweet as honey, and with a faint fragrance that tells, but not
too plainly, of flowers that grew in many fields. We are made to feel
that, however tedious the processes of culture may be, the ripe result
in facile power and scope of fancy is purely delightful. We confess that
we are so heartily weary of those cataclysms of passion and sentiment
with which literature has been convulsed of late,--as if the main object
were, not to move the reader, but to shake the house about his
ears,--that the homelike quiet and beauty of such poems as these is like
an escape from noise to nature.
As regards the structure of the work looked at as a whole, it strikes us
as a decided fault, that the Saga of King Olaf is so disproportionately
long, especially as many of the pieces which compose it are by no means
so well done as the more strictly original ones. We have no quarrel with
the foreign nature of the subject as such,--for any good matter is
American enough for a truly American poet; but we cannot help thinking
that Mr. Longfellow has sometimes mistaken mere strangeness for
freshness, and has failed to make his readers feel the charm he himself
felt. Put into English, the Saga seems _too_ Norse; and there is often a
hitchiness in the verse that suggests translation with overmuch heed for
literal closeness. It is possible to assume alien forms of verse, but
hardly to enter into forms of thought alien both in time and in the
ethics from which they are derived. "The Building of the Long Serpent"
is not to be named with Mr. Longfellow's "Building of the Ship," which
he learned from no Heimskringla, but from the dockyards of Portland,
where he played as a boy. We are willing, however, to pardon the parts
which we find somewhat ineffectual, in favor of the "Nun of Nidaros,"
which concludes, and in its gracious piety more than redeems, them all.