FIRST VISIT TO EUROPE
Longfellow's college class (1825) numbered thirty-seven, and his rank in
it at graduation was nominally fourth--though actually third, through
the sudden death of a classmate just before Commencement. Soon after his
graduation, an opportunity occurred to establish a professorship of
modern languages in the college upon a fund given by Mrs. Bowdoin; and
he, being then scarcely nineteen, and nominally a law student in his
father's office, was sent to Europe to prepare himself for this chair,
apparently on an allowance of six hundred dollars a year. The college
tradition is that this appointment--which undoubtedly determined the
literary tendencies of his whole life--was given to him in consequence
of the impression made upon an examining committee by the manner in
which he had translated one of Horace's odes. He accordingly sailed from
New York for Europe on May 15, 1826, having stopped at Boston on the
way, where he dined with Professor George Ticknor, then holding the
professorship at Harvard College to which Longfellow was destined to
succeed at a later day. Professor Ticknor had himself recently returned
from a German university, and urged the young man to begin his studies
there, giving him letters of introduction to Professor Eichhorn, to
Robert Southey, and to Washington Irving, then in Europe.
He sailed on the ship Cadmus, Captain Allen, and wrote to his mother
from Havre that his passage of thirty days had been a dreary blank, and
that the voyage was very tiresome because of the continual talking of
French and broken English, adding, "For Frenchmen, you know, talk
incessantly, and we had at least a dozen of them with us." In spite of
this rather fatiguing opportunity, he was not at once at home in French,
but wrote ere long, "I am coming on famously, I assure you." He wrote
from Auteuil, where he soon went, "Attached to the house is an extensive
garden, full of fruit-trees, and bowers, and alcoves, where the boarders
ramble and talk from morning till night. This makes the situation an
excellent one for me; I can at any time hear French conversation,--for
the French are always talking. Besides, the conversation is the purest
of French, inasmuch as persons from the highest circles in Paris are
residing here,--amongst others, an old gentleman who was of the
household of Louis the Sixteenth, and a Madame de Sailly, daughter of a
celebrated advocate named Berryer, who was the defender of Marshal Ney
in his impeachment for treason. There is also a young student of law
here, who is my almost constant companion, and who corrects all my
mistakes in speaking or writing the French. As he is not much older than
I am, I do not feel so much embarrassed in speaking to him as I do in
speaking to others. These are some of the advantages which I enjoy here,
and you can easily imagine others which a country residence offers over
that of a city, during the vacation of the literary institutions at
Paris and the cessation of their lectures."
It is to be noticed from the outset that the French villages
disappointed him as they disappoint many others. In his letters he
recalls "how fresh and cheerful and breezy a New England village is; how
marked its features--so different from the town, so peculiar, so
delightful." He finds a French village, on the other hand, to be like a
deserted town, having "the same paved streets, the same dark, narrow
alleys without sidewalks, the same dingy stone houses, each peeping into
its neighbor's windows, the same eternal stone walls, shutting in from
the eye of the stranger all the beauty of the place and opposing an
inhospitable barrier to the lover of natural scenery." But when he finds
himself among rural scenes, he has the delight felt by many an American
boy since his days, as in the picture following:--
"From Orléans I started on foot for Tours on the fifth of October.
October is my favorite month of the twelve. When I reflected that if I
remained in Paris I should lose the only opportunity I might ever enjoy
of seeing the centre of France in all the glory of the vintage and the
autumn, I 'shut the book-lid' and took wing, with a little knapsack on
my back, and a blue cap,--not exactly like Quentin Durward, but perhaps
a little more. More anon of him. I had gone as far as Orléans in the
_diligence_ because the route is through an uninteresting country.
"I began the pedestrian part of my journey on one of those dull,
melancholy days which you will find uttering a mournful voice in
Sewall's Almanack: 'Expect--much--rain--about--this--time!' 'Very
miscellaneous weather, good for sundry purposes,'--but not for a journey
on foot, thought I. But I had a merry heart, and it went merrily along
all day. At sundown I found myself about seven leagues on my way and one
beyond Beaugency. I found the route one continued vineyard. On each side
of the road, as far as the eye could reach, there was nothing but vines,
save here and there a glimpse of the Loire, the turrets of an old
château, or spire of a village church. The clouds had passed away with
the morning, and I had made a fine day's journey, cutting across the
country, traversing vineyards, and living in all the luxury of thought
which the occasion inspired. I recollect that at sunset I had entered a
path which wound through a wide vineyard where the villagers were still
at their labors, and I was loitering along, talking with the peasantry
and searching for an _auberge_ to pass the night in. I was presently
overtaken by a band of villagers; I wished them a good evening, and
finding that the girls of the party were going to a village at a short
distance, I joined myself to the band. I wanted to get into one of the
cottages, if possible, in order to study character. I had a flute in my
knapsack, and I thought it would be very pretty to touch up at a cottage
door, Goldsmith-like,--though I would not have done it for the world
without an invitation. Well, before long, I determined to get an
invitation, if possible. So I addressed the girl who was walking beside
me, told her I had a flute in my sack, and asked her if she would like
to dance. Now laugh long and loud! What do you suppose her answer was?
She said she liked to dance, but she did not know what a flute was! What
havoc that made among my romantic ideas! My _quietus_ was made; I said
no more about a flute, the whole journey through; and I thought nothing
but starvation would drive me to strike up at the entrance of a village,
as Goldsmith did."{11}
Thus, wherever he goes, his natural good spirits prevail over
everything. Washington Irving, in his diary, speaks of Longfellow at
Madrid as having "arrived safely and cheerily, having met with no
robbers." Mrs. Alexander Everett, wife of the American minister at
Madrid, writes back to America, "His countenance is itself a letter of
recommendation." He went into good Spanish society and also danced in
the streets on village holidays. At the Alhambra, he saw the refinement
of beauty within the halls, and the clusters of gypsy caves in the
hillside opposite. After eight months of Spain he went on to Italy,
where he remained until December, and passed to Germany with the new
year. He sums up his knowledge of the languages at this point by saying,
"With the French and Spanish languages I am familiarly conversant so as
to speak them correctly and write them with as much ease and fluency as
I do the English. The Portuguese I read without difficulty. And with
regard to my proficiency in the Italian, I have only to say that all at
the hotel where I lodge took me for an Italian, until I told them I was
an American." He settled down to his studies in Germany, his father
having written, with foresight then unusual, "I consider the German
language and literature much more important than the Italian." He did
not, however, have any sense of actual transplantation, as is the case
with some young students, for although he writes to his sister (March
28, 1829), "My poetic career is finished. Since I left America I have
hardly put two lines together," yet he sends to Carey & Lea, the
Philadelphia publishers, to propose a series of sketches and tales of
New England life. These sketches, as given in his note-book, are as
follows:--
"1. New England Scenery: description of Sebago Pond; rafting logs;
tavern scene; a tale connected with the 'Images.'
"2. A New England Village: country squire; the parson; the little
deacon; the farm-house kitchen.
"3. Husking Frolic: song and tales; fellow who plays the fife for the
dance; tale of the Quoddy Indians; description of Sacobezon, their
chief.
"5. Thanksgiving Day: its merry-making, and tales (also of the Indians).
"7. Description of the White Mountains: tale of the Bloody Hand.
"10. Reception of Lafayette in a country village.
"13. Down East: the missionary of Acadie."{12}
A few days after, he wrote from Göttingen to his father, "I shall never
again be in Europe." We thus see his mind at work on American themes in
Germany, as later on German themes in America, unconsciously predicting
that mingling of the two influences which gave him his fame. His earlier
books gave to studious Americans, as I can well recall, their first
imaginative glimpses of Europe, while the poet's homeward-looking
thoughts from Europe had shown the instinct which was to identify his
later fame with purely American themes. It is to be noticed that
whatever was artificial and foreign in Longfellow's work appeared before
he went to Europe; and was the same sort of thing which appeared in all
boyish American work at that period. It was then that in describing the
Indian hunter he made the dance go round by the greenwood tree. He did
not lay this aside at once after his return from Europe, and Margaret
Fuller said of him, "He borrows incessantly and mixes what he borrows."
Criticising the very prelude to "Voices of the Night," she pointed out
the phrases "pentecost" and "bishop's-caps" as indications that he was
not merely "musing upon many things," but on many books which described
them. But the habit steadily diminished. His very gift at translation,
in which he probably exceeded on the whole any other modern poet, led
him, nevertheless, always to reproduce old forms rather than create new
ones, thus aiding immensely his popularity with the mass of simple
readers, while coming short of the full demands of the more critical. To
construct his most difficult poems was thus mainly a serene pleasure,
and something as far as possible from that conflict which kept Hawthorne
all winter, by his wife's testimony, with "a knot in his forehead" while
he was writing "The Scarlet Letter."
It is always to be borne in mind that, as Mr. Scudder has pointed out in
his admirable paper on "Longfellow and his Art," the young poet was
really preparing himself in Europe for his literary work as well as for
his professional work, and half consciously. This is singularly
confirmed by his lifelong friend, Professor George W. Greene, who, in
dedicating his "The Life of Nathanael Greene" to his friend, thus
recalls an evening spent together at Naples in 1828:--
"We wanted," he says, "to be alone, and yet to feel that there was life
all around us. We went up to the flat roof of the house where, as we
walked, we could look down into the crowded street, and out upon the
wonderful bay, and across the bay to Ischia and Capri and Sorrento, and
over the house-tops and villas and vineyards to Vesuvius. The ominous
pillar of smoke hung suspended above the fatal mountain, reminding us of
Pliny, its first and noblest victim. A golden vapor crowned the bold
promontory of Sorrento, and we thought of Tasso. Capri was calmly
sleeping, like a sea-bird upon the waters; and we seemed to hear the
voice of Tacitus from across the gulf of eighteen centuries, telling us
that the historian's pen is still powerful to absolve or to condemn long
after the imperial sceptre has fallen from the withered hand. There,
too, lay the native island of him whose daring mind conceived the
fearful vengeance of the Sicilian Vespers. We did not yet know
Niccolini; but his grand verses had already begun their work of
regeneration in the Italian heart. Virgil's tomb was not far off. The
spot consecrated by Sannazaro's ashes was near us. And over all, with a
thrill like that of solemn music, fell the splendor of the Italian
sunset."{13}
As an illustration of this obvious fact that Longfellow, during this
first European visit, while nominally training himself for purely
educational work, was fitting himself also for a literary career, we
find from his letter to his father, May 15, 1829, that while hearing
lectures in German and studying faithfully that language, he was, as he
says, "writing a book, a kind of Sketch-Book of scenes in France, Spain,
and Italy." We shall presently encounter this book under the name of
"Outre-Mer." He connects his two aims by saying in the same letter, "One
must write and write correctly, in order to teach." Again he adds, "The
further I advance, the more I see to be done. The more, too, I am
persuaded of the charlatanism of literary men. For the rest, my fervent
wish is to return home." His brother tells us that among his note-books
of that period, we find a favorite passage from Locke which reappears
many years after in one of his letters and in his impromptu address to
the children of Cambridge, in 1880: "Thus the ideas as well as the
children of our youth often die before us, and our minds represent to us
those tombs to which we are approaching; where, though the brass and
marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time, and the imagery
moulders away."{14} He also included a quotation from John Lyly's
"Endymion," which ten years later furnished the opening of his own
"Hyperion." "Dost thou know what a poet is? Why, fool, a poet is as much
as one should say--a poet." When we consider what he had just before
written to his sister, it only furnishes another illustration of the
fact, which needs no demonstration, that young authors do not always
know themselves.
He reached home from Europe, after three years of absence, on August 11,
1829, looking toward Bowdoin College as his abode, and a professorship
of modern languages as his future position. Up to this time, to be sure,
the economical college had offered him only an instructorship. But he
had shown at this point that quiet decision and firmness which marked
him in all practical affairs, and which was not always quite approved by
his more anxious father. In this case he carried his point, and he
received on the 6th of September this simple record of proceedings from
the college:--
"In the Board of Trustees of Bowdoin College, Sept. 1st, 1829: Mr. Henry
W. Longfellow having declined to accept the office of instructor in
modern languages.
"Voted, that we now proceed to the choice of a professor of modern
languages.
"And Mr. H. W. Longfellow was chosen."
Thus briefly was the matter settled, and he was launched upon his life's
career at the age of twenty-two. Of those who made up his circle of
friends in later years, Holmes had just graduated from Harvard, Sumner
was a Senior there, and Lowell was a schoolboy in Cambridge. Few
American colleges had at that time special professors of modern
languages, though George Ticknor had set a standard for them all.
Longfellow had to prepare his own text-books--to translate "L'Homond's
Grammar," to edit an excellent little volume of French "Proverbes
Dramatiques," and a small Spanish Reader, "Novelas Españolas." He was
also enlisted in a few matters outside, and drew up the outline of a
prospectus for a girls' high school in Portland, such high schools being
then almost as rare as professorships of modern languages. He was also
librarian. He gave a course of lectures on French, Spanish, and Italian
literature, but there seems to have been no reference to German, which
had not then come forward into the place in American education which it
now occupies. As to literature, he wrote to his friend, George W.
Greene, "Since my return I have written one piece of poetry, but have
not published a line. You need not be alarmed on that score. I am all
prudence now, since I can form a more accurate judgment of the merit of
poetry. If I ever publish a volume, it will be many years first." It was
actually nine years. For the "North American Review" he wrote in April,
1831, an essay on "The Origin and Progress of the French Language." He
afterwards sent similar papers to the same periodical upon the Italian
and Spanish languages and literatures, each of these containing also
original translations. Thus he entered on his career as a teacher, but
another change in life also awaited him.
{11 _Life_, i. 90, 91.}
{12 _Life_, i. 165.}
{13 Scudder's _Men and Letters_, 28, 29.}
{14 Locke, _Essay on the Human Understanding_, bk. ii. ch. 10, "Of
Retention."}