Lanier (1842-81), musician, poet, teacher of English, is easily
foremost. He was born in Macon, Georgia, and received his education
at Oglethorpe College, where, on graduating, he became a tutor; he
volunteered in the Confederate Army (1860), toward the end of the
war was captured, and perhaps owed his subsequent ill-health to his
imprisonment of five months at Point Lookout. When the war was over, he
taught again, in Alabama, read law, supported himself by his music--he
was an adept on the flute--wrote for magazines, and by private study in
Baltimore eventually fitted himself to take a lectureship in English
literature at Johns Hopkins University. Courageous in his struggle
with adverse circumstances, buoyant and energetic in spite of his long
battle with disease, Lanier greatly resembles Timrod. Like Timrod,
too, dying early, he left but a slender volume of poetry, uneven in
excellence, an earnest of what he might have accomplished, hardly a
standard by which to appraise him. Lanier’s was a delicate and sensuous
rather than a profound imagination; however, both in his observation of
external nature and in the thoroughness and extent of his acquaintance
with general literature, he was unusually well prepared for the
office of poet. His interest in science fortified and disciplined his
contemplation of the outer world; his poetical instinct was nurtured
through industrious and select reading; and he brought to bear upon
his own literary craftsmanship, and upon the literary work of others,
the ear of a trained musician. His musical ear helped him greatly
in his studies on metre, where his contributions to scholarship are
distinctly more valuable than in his lectures on the English novel.
Deeply sympathetic and generous and sane in all relations of life,
Lanier had a subtle understanding for the realm that lies outside
the haunts of men--for the domain of wild fauna and flora, for the
seldom heeded and the escaping phenomena of the woods and the marsh
and the sea. The poor reception given to his “Tiger Lilies” (1867),
a novel based on experiences in the army, did not dishearten him. In
1875 he definitely announced himself by his poem entitled “Corn,”
published in _Lippincott’s Magazine_, a vision of the South restored
through agriculture. This brought him the opportunity of writing
the “Centennial Cantata” for the Philadelphia Exposition, where he
expressed the faith he now had in the future of the reunited nation.
The Cantata finished, he immediately began a much longer centennial
ode, his “Psalm of the West” (1876), which appeared in _Lippincott’s
Magazine_, and which, with “Corn” and “The Symphony,” made part of
a small volume published in the autumn of 1876. Lanier’s important
critical works were the product of the years between 1876 and his
death. Some three years after he died, his poems were collected and
edited by his wife. If we had to rely upon one poem to keep alive the
fame of Lanier, thinks his biographer, Mr. Edwin Mims, we “could single
out ‘The Marshes of Glynn’ with assurance that there is something so
individual and original about it, and that, at the same time, there is
such a roll and range of verse in it, that it will surely live not only
in American poetry but in English.” “He is the poet of the marshes as
surely as Bryant is of the forests.”
_Maurice Thompson and Mrs. Preston._--Our notice of Southern writers
may conclude with Maurice Thompson and Mrs. Margaret Preston. James
Maurice Thompson (1844-1901) is commonly associated with the Middle
West, since he was born and died in Indiana. His early life, however,
was spent in Kentucky and Georgia, he saw service in the Confederate
Army, and much of his verse and prose carries the stamp of his
experiences in the South and his acquaintance with Southern literature.
He was a lawyer by profession, but by instinct a natural scientist.
In 1885 he was appointed State Geologist of Indiana. From 1890 on he
was connected with the New York _Independent_. His style was crisp and
neat, sometimes over-elaborate; but he kept an eye on the thing he was
talking about, so that in general what he has said of nature is very
acceptable. His devotion to the pastimes of fishing and archery gave
him a good deal of literary material. His extensive and exact knowledge
of the ways of birds enters into many of his poems, as for example “An
Early Bluebird.” The strain of regenerate patriotism in “Lincoln’s
Grave” is the same that we find in Lanier. Mrs. Preston (1820-97) was
the daughter of the Rev. Dr. Junkin, founder of Lafayette College and
afterward president of Washington and Lee University, in Virginia.
Before her marriage, in 1857, she had done some writing. In 1866 she
published “Beechenbrook, a Rhyme of the War”; in 1870, “Old Songs and
New.” Her “Cartoons” (1875) and “Colonial Ballads” (1887) show her at
her best. She has been styled “the greatest Southern poetess”; there
have been few claimants to dispute the title.
=Major Poets of New England.=--With this caption we return to the main
stream of American verse, and reach the men whose lives and works may
be said to justify a connected account of poetry in the United States.
We shall take up Longfellow first. Whatever vicissitudes his literary
standing has suffered, or is likely to suffer, he is bound for a long
time to appear as the central figure among our poets.
_Henry Wadsworth Longfellow._--The subject of this sketch was born in
Portland, Maine, February 27, 1807. He came of a gifted stock. His
father was a lawyer of ability, and his mother a woman of artistic
temperament and varied attainments, so that the boy grew up in an
atmosphere of study and refinement. Longfellow was a wise and gentle
child, fond of books, not too sensitive, always normal and sane. Until
1821 he went to school in Portland; in 1822 he entered the sophomore
class at Bowdoin College. Here he attained a good rank in scholarship,
and became acquainted, not intimately, with the future novelist
Hawthorne. Upon graduation in 1825, Longfellow went abroad, in order
to fit himself for a professorship in modern languages which lay open
to him at Bowdoin. He visited France, Germany, England, and the South
of Europe; on his return in 1829 he gave himself up with ardour and
success to the activity of teaching. In 1831 he was married to Miss
Mary S. Potter. In 1835, having received an invitation to the chair of
modern languages at Harvard, he went abroad again for further travel
and study, this time mainly to Germany and the North. The death of
his young wife, shortly after their arrival in Holland, filled his
cup with bitterness, but did not swerve him from preparation for the
duties of his chair at Cambridge. Nevertheless, as may be read beneath
the surface of his romance “Hyperion,” his determination that he must
ultimately become a poet, and not end as a teacher in the classroom,
can be traced to this critical epoch in his life.
Longfellow taught at Harvard from 1836 until 1854, with but one
intermission, in 1842, when on account of his health he made his third
trip to Europe. In 1843 he married Miss Frances E. Appleton, whom he
had met in Switzerland sixteen years before, and whose presence and
influence are likewise traceable in “Hyperion.” Through the generosity
of his father-in-law, he was able to establish a home in Craigie House,
where he had been a lodger since 1837, a dwelling of Revolutionary
fame. For a while, Longfellow’s study was the room once occupied by
Washington. Here, surrounded by his books and, as the years went on,
by a growing family circle, he lived in comfort and felicity. His
reputation spread, and the number of his acquaintances increased. Among
his friends he reckoned Sparks and Prescott, the historians; Ticknor,
his predecessor at Harvard, and Lowell, who afterward succeeded
Longfellow; Fields, Emerson, Holmes, and Hawthorne; Felton, Sumner,
Agassiz, and Norton. He read and wrote variously and extensively; he
counted it a privilege to be interpreting Dante “to young hearts.” In
time, however, his duties as a teacher, above all the preparation of
lectures, gradually wore upon him. He felt that he could not serve two
masters, and he clave to poetry. At length, in 1854, he resigned his
professorship, to devote himself exclusively to authorship. Seven years
later, under the most distressing circumstances, he lost his second
wife. From this catastrophe, Longfellow, though he eventually regained
his outward cheerfulness, never inwardly recovered. “He bore his grief
with courage and in silence. Only after months had passed could he
speak of it; and then only in fewest words.” In 1868 he made his last
visit to Europe, where he was met with “a flood of hospitality.” In
London “he breakfasted with Mr. Gladstone, Sir Henry Holland, the Duke
of Argyll; lunched with Lord John Russell at Richmond, ... received
midnight calls from Bulwer and Aubrey de Vere.... The Queen received
him cordially and without ceremony in one of the galleries of Windsor
Castle.” After a visit of two days with Tennyson, Longfellow and his
party crossed to the Continent. They spent the summer in Switzerland,
the autumn in France, the winter in Florence and Rome. When he returned
to America, he “found Cambridge in all its beauty; not a leaf faded.”
“How glad,” he wrote, “I am to be at home. The quiet and rest are
welcome after the surly sea. But there is a tinge of sadness in it,
also.” The last ten years of Longfellow’s life were quiet and serene,
with a tinge of sadness in them, also. Yet they were filled with
literary projects which, for a man of his age, he carried through
with remarkable energy; and, until toward the end, his correspondence
was enormous. In 1880 his health showed signs of failing. In 1882 he
suffered a brief and sharp illness, and on Friday, March 24, “he sank
quietly in death.” “The long, busy, blameless life was ended.”
At the age of thirteen, Longfellow printed four stanzas, “The Battle
of Lovell’s Pond,” in a corner of _The Portland Gazette_. Within the
next six years he wrote a considerable number of poems for _The United
States Literary Gazette_. By 1833, in addition to text-books for his
classes, he had, in various magazines, published original articles,
stories, and several reviews; among them an important estimate of
poetry, especially the poetry of America, in a notice of Sidney’s
“Defense of Poesy” contributed to _The North American Review_;
as well as translations from the Spanish of Manrique and others,
with an “Introductory Essay on the Moral and Devotional Poetry of
Spain” (1833). “Outre-Mer,” first published as a series of sketches,
appeared in book form in 1835, “Hyperion” in 1839, and “Voices of
the Night” in the same year as “Hyperion.” “Voices of the Night”
made Longfellow’s reputation as a poet; the edition was immediately
exhausted. “Hyperion,” which eventually sold well, though at present
it is not often enough read, was at first unfortunate, the publisher
failing before this book had a fair start. Of Longfellow’s better
known works, published during the latter half of his lifetime, his
“Ballads and Other Poems” appeared in 1841, “The Spanish Student” in
1843, “Evangeline” in 1847, “Kavanagh,” another prose romance, in
1849, “Hiawatha” in 1855, “The Courtship of Miles Standish” in 1858,
“The Golden Legend” in 1872, and “Aftermath” in 1873. The “Tales
of a Wayside Inn” came out in 1863, 1872, and 1873, the First Day
separately, the Second and the Third Day in company with other writings.
In consequence, it may be, of a latter-day tendency to disparage
Longfellow’s verse, there has been an effort of late to rehabilitate
his prose; not so much, indeed, for its own sake, as for its importance
in the history of our literature. “Hyperion,” for example, is not
merely what Longfellow called it, “a sincere book, showing the passage
of a morbid mind into a purer and healthier state”; that is, it is
not merely the veiled autobiography of our most popular poet. Its
final reception and large sale are a proof that in the forties not a
few Americans could be interested in German student life and in the
discussion of Continental literatures. With this romance, one might
say, began an American literature that, without ceasing to be native,
could claim to be cosmopolitan. Possibly no single work produced
in this country ever effected more in the dissemination of European
culture. Its faults are on the surface. The style is not seldom forced
and florid, having the colour of Jean Paul rather than Irving; and the
sentiment here and there is gushing. Nevertheless, parts of “Hyperion”
are good prose, the prose of a scholar who is aware of what he is
saying and of a poet who knows how to avoid scraps of metre when he is
not writing verse. The poet-scholar knows, too, on what sort of basis
the best poetry is founded: “O thou poor authorling!... to cheer thy
solitary labour, remember that the secret studies of an author are the
sunken piers upon which is to rest the bridge of his fame, spanning the
dark waters of Oblivion. They are out of sight; but without them no
superstructure can stand secure.”
The nature of Longfellow’s secret studies is partly indicated by the
extent of his published translations. Although one could hardly aver
that the poet was anything like a linguistic investigator in the
modern sense, he had a wide acquaintance with Germanic and Romance
literatures; he spoke several modern tongues with fluency; and he
had a sufficient command of idiom to translate with seeming ease
from Swedish, German, Old English, French, Spanish, and Italian.
His renderings from Tegnér’s “Frithiof’s Saga” seemed so true to
the original that the Swedish poet urged Longfellow to complete the
translation. The versions of Uhland and others which he made in Germany
during the year 1836 were later on extraordinarily efficacious in
popularising German literature for America. He may likewise be counted
one of the pioneers among American students of Old English or, as
he called it, “Anglo-Saxon.” As a teacher of modern languages, he
naturally gave heed to Greek and Latin secondarily, and there came a
time when he deplored the fact that his familiarity with Greek had
slipped away. Yet he loved the classics, his favourite among the Latin
poets being Horace. In Horace, he said, one could find all that was
worth while in the message of Goethe, expressed just as well, and
uttered earlier. Of course the most considerable piece of scholarship
undertaken by Longfellow was his translation of the “Divine Comedy,”
a task for which his enthusiastic teaching of Dante had helped to fit
him, and one which he had commenced (1839) years before the death
of his second wife; yet one which he resumed and mainly completed
relatively late in life, and, like Bryant’s Homer, something taken
up as the resource of a soul bitterly bereaved, unable to accomplish
spontaneous creative work. In compassing this task, Longfellow had
the encouragement and the direct assistance of Norton and Lowell, to
whose knowledge and taste the translation as it now stands is greatly
indebted. Even so, it cannot rank high in artistic workmanship. First
of all, the translator found that, in order to reproduce the sense with
fidelity, he must sacrifice the rhyme, a dubious concession so long
as metrical structure was to be retained at all. Still, Longfellow’s
translation is pure and lucid English; for the beginner in Dante the
critical apparatus is valuable even now; and the three sonnets prefixed
to the “Inferno,” “Purgatorio,” and “Paradiso” are in themselves an
introduction to Dante of a sort hardly to be surpassed. The best spirit
of America is blended in them with the best of the Middle Ages.
In considering Longfellow as an original poet, we shall not go
astray if we remember his own conception of originality. To him the
poetic gift meant, not the power of creating new material--as the
vulgar suppose--but insight, the power of seeing things according to
their eternal values. Doubtless he realised that one needs insight
to discover how far the vulgar supposition is blind. At all events,
we need not look for new ideas or new sentiments in the poetry of
Longfellow, but for an attempt to make us see things as he sees them,
after he has tried to see them as they are. In his dramas, and in
his narratives--these latter being more important--he frankly took
material furnished by his wide reading, or lying ready to his hand,
and strove to clothe it in a new and more permanent form. “Evangeline”
is an instance of his method. The story was given him by Hawthorne; in
elaborating it, Longfellow consulted such works on Nova Scotia and the
exile of the Acadians as were accessible to him; he was true to his
sources. Had he known of better authorities, he would have read them,
and his account of the exile would have been historically more precise.
The metre of “Evangeline,” suggested by that of Goethe’s “Hermann und
Dorothea,” is one of the rare instances where dactylic hexameter has
succeeded in English. One can truthfully say that whatever Longfellow
took he really appropriated, that is, made his own. It was but seldom
that his materials would not fuse, for he had a thorough command of
technique. In “Hiawatha,” which has been called “the nearest approach
to an American epic,” he employed a form of verse borrowed from the
Finnish “Kalevala,” in which to embody traditions of the Indians.
As Freiligrath remarked, there is something odd in the notion of
Hiawatha, child of the West Wind, meeting with historical Christian
missionaries. However, Longfellow’s daring synthesis of heterogeneous
elements pleased that great authority on American antiquities Henry R.
Schoolcraft; after many failures, a native poet had at length arisen to
portray our aborigines, in a long poem, with fidelity and imagination.
Ten thousand copies were sold in this country within four weeks, and
the poem was translated into six modern languages.
The dramatic works of Longfellow have suffered in comparison with his
narrative poems and lyrics. The causes of this are partly internal and
partly external. In his “Christus,” which he fancied would endure, he
probably chose a subject of too great magnitude for his powers. Yet
the second part at least, “The Golden Legend,” at present operates
less vitally than it should, largely because of its sympathy with the
ideals of the Middle Ages--with ideals which we, still living in the
Renaissance, are not ready to comprehend. “‘The Golden Legend,’” said
G. P. R. James, “is like an old ruin with the ivy and the rich blue
mould upon it.” Is it not more like a Gothic church before mould and
ruin have crept in? It is a bit of wholesome, rejuvenated medievalism,
an edifice whose threshold the intellectual pride of our age feels
discomfort in crossing.
It is by his shorter poems that Longfellow now chiefly lives. Brief
narratives such as “The Skeleton in Armour,” and “The Wreck of the
Schooner Hesperus,” lyrics of sentiment and pathos--“Psalms of
Life”--more rarely bits of humour like the German mechanic’s song,
“I know a maiden, fair to see,” were soon established in the popular
memory. It would be ungracious to say that the popular taste has been
wrong in preferring what is sentimental and pathetic in Longfellow.
A poet whose love of the hearth was so strong, and whose personal
acquaintance with domestic happiness and domestic grief was so
profound, did well to pour out his soul in verses which add sunshine
to daylight for the happy, and in which the deeply afflicted may find
pensive solace. Yet the popular taste has clung to “Tell me not in
mournful numbers,” where the sentiment is not above suspicion, and to
“The Skeleton in Armour,” where character, sentiment, and historical
setting are for the most part incongruous; and it has almost let the
sonnet on Milton fall asleep.
Longfellow was the most popular poet ever brought forth on this
continent. His unparalleled vogue was destined to undergo a reaction.
Among those who want better bread than is made of wheat, his poetry is
not now counted a stimulating diet. However, when American scholarship
shall succeed in reducing American literature to a true perspective,
he will come to his own again. His patriotism will be rediscovered; his
technical skill will be carefully appraised; the honours heaped upon
him throughout the civilised world will be recognised as just; and the
character from which flowed a well of undefiled poetry will stand out
as one of the noblest products of occidental civilisation.
_James Russell Lowell._--By general consent, Longfellow is our American
poet, _par excellence_, Emerson our philosopher, James Russell Lowell
our man of letters. Others, Lowell among them, have shared more richly
than Longfellow in a distinctively lyrical temperament; others have
thought more consecutively than Emerson. No one, however, when his
initial talents are considered, has produced so much good poetry as
Longfellow; no one in the realm of philosophic thought has been so
patently influential as Emerson; and no one, not even Irving, has
fared well in so many avenues of literature and popular scholarship
as Lowell. He was poet, critic, professor, editor, diplomat, patriot,
humanist; and withal he was a man and a friend.
He was born on Washington’s birthday, February 22, 1819, at “Elmwood,”
Cambridge, a house still in the possession of his family. On his
father’s side he was of English blood, being descended from Percival
Lowell, who came from Somersetshire to Massachusetts Colony in 1639;
through his mother he drew his lineage from the folk of the Orkney
Islands. His father was a well educated clergyman, faithful and
affectionate; his mother, whether really gifted with second sight
or not, was of a less usual type, imaginative, high-strung, with a
tendency to mental derangement. During his infancy her youngest son
heard ballads for lullabies. As a child he was read to sleep with
Spenser’s “Faerie Queene.” When he grew older, he had the range of
his father’s generously stocked library. At the age of nine, he
was devouring Walter Scott, and, like Scott at the same age, was
astonishing his companions with improvised tales of fear and wonder.
His imagination was not unduly stimulated; he lived a wholesome
outdoor life, and he had a sound schooling in the classics. When he
went to Harvard, in 1834, “he was a shy yet not very tractable youth,
given, like so many boys who are shy from excess rather than from
defect of ability, to occasional violence and oddity of expression
or act.” At Harvard, he gradually rebelled against the rigour of a
fixed curriculum, but read omnivorously in English literature of the
sixteenth and the nineteenth century, and, following the English
romanticists of a generation previous, paid particular attention to
Spenser and Milton. “Milton,” he observes, “has excited my ambition
to read all the Greek and Latin classics which he did.” Lowell had
gone through a precocious love affair at the age of ten; while in
college he was again “hopelessly in love.” His efforts in the way of
serious writing were at this time facile and, naturally, not profound;
his humour was naïve, and more engaging. His gradual neglect of the
prescribed routine, in spite of his father’s attempts to stir up in
the young man a respect for academic honours, at length brought upon
Lowell the open displeasure of the Harvard faculty; so that in his
senior year he was temporarily suspended, and directed to regain his
standing under the private instruction of the Rev. Barzillai Frost
at Concord. Longfellow was one of his teachers in Cambridge; in his
retirement, he met Emerson and Thoreau. When he left his tutor and
returned to Harvard, Class Day was past; but he brought back his Class
Poem finished, and allowed it to circulate among his friends. It is
interesting as an evidence of Lowell’s early freedom in using a variety
of metres, of his feeling for nature, of his New England heritage of
conservatism, of his inability as yet to enter into sympathy with
the movement for the abolition of slavery, or with Emerson and
Transcendentalism. It is interesting as a mixture of the old and the
new; its touches of enthusiasm are in odd contrast with its general
manner, which is strongly reminiscent of post-Revolutionary satire.