HYPERION AND THE REACTION FROM IT
"Outre-Mer" had been published some time before, with moderate success,
but "Hyperion" was destined to attract far more attention. It is first
mentioned in his journal on September 13, 1838, though in a way which
shows that it had been for some time in preparation, and its gradual
development is traceable through the same channel. One entire book, for
instance, was written and suppressed, namely, "St. Clair's Day Book,"
the hero having first been christened Hyperion, then St. Clair, and then
Paul Flemming. Its author wrote of it, "I called it 'Hyperion,' because
it moves on high among clouds and stars, and expresses the various
aspirations of the soul of man. It is all modelled on this idea, style
and all. It contains my cherished thoughts for three years."{40}
The cordiality with which "Hyperion" was received was due partly to the
love story supposed to be implied in it, and largely to the new
atmosphere of German life and literature which it opened to Americans.
It must always be remembered that the kingdom in which Germany then
ruled was not then, as now, a kingdom of material force and business
enterprise, but as Germans themselves claimed, a kingdom of the air; and
into that realm Hyperion gave to Americans the first glimpse. The faults
and limitations which we now see in it were then passed by, or visible
only to such keen critics as Orestes A. Brownson, who wrote thus of it
in "The Boston Quarterly Review," then the ablest of American
periodicals except "The Dial:" "I do not like the book. It is such a
journal as a man who reads a great deal makes from the scraps in his
table-drawer. Yet it has not the sincerity or quiet touches which give
interest to the real journals of very common persons. It is overloaded
with prettinesses, many of which would tell well in conversation, but
being rather strown over than woven into his narrative, deform where
they should adorn. You cannot guess why the book was written, unless
because the author were tired of reading these morceaux to himself, for
there has been no fusion or fermentation to bring on the hour of
utterance. Then to me the direct personal relation in which we are
brought to the author is unpleasing. Had he but idealized his tale, or
put on the veil of poetry! But as it is, we are embarrassed by his
extreme communicativeness, and wonder that a man, who seems in other
respects to have a mind of delicate texture, could write a letter about
his private life to a public on which he had as yet established no
claim.... Indeed this book will not add to the reputation of its author,
which stood so fair before its publication."{41} This is the criticism
of which Longfellow placidly wrote, "I understand there is a spicy
article against me in the 'Boston Quarterly.' I shall get it as soon as
I can; for, strange as you may think it, these things give me no
pain."{42}
Mr. Howells, in one of the most ardent eulogies ever written upon the
works of Longfellow, bases his admiration largely upon the claim "that
his art never betrays the crudeness or imperfection of essay,"--that is,
of experiment.{43} It would be interesting to know whether this
accomplished author, looking back upon "Hyperion" more than thirty years
later, could reindorse this strong assertion. To others, I fancy,
however attractive and even fascinating the book may still remain, it
has about it a distinctly youthful quality which, while sometimes
characterizing even his poetry, unquestionably marked his early prose. A
later and younger critic says more truly of it, I think, "Plainly in the
style of Richter, with all the mingled grandeur and grotesqueness of the
German romanticists, it is scarcely now a favorite with the adult
reader; though the young, obedient to some vague embryonic law, still
find in it for a season the pleasure, the thrilling melancholy, which
their grandfathers found."{44} But Professor Carpenter, speaking from
the point of view of the younger generation, does not fail to recognize
that Paul Flemming's complaints cease when he reads the tombstone
inscription which becomes the motto of the book; and I recall with
pleasure that, being a youth nurtured on "Hyperion," I selected that
passage for the text of my boyish autobiography written in the Harvard
"Class Book" at the juvenile age of seventeen. Dozens of youths were
perhaps adopting the motto in the same way at the same time, and it is
useless to deny to a book which thus reached youthful hearts the credit
of having influenced the whole period of its popularity.
Apart from the personal romance which his readers attached to it, the
book had great value as the first real importation into our literature
of the wealth of German romance and song. So faithful and ample are its
local descriptions that a cheap edition of it is always on sale at
Heidelberg, and every English and American visitor to that picturesque
old city seems to know the book by heart. Bearing it in his hand, the
traveller still climbs the rent summit of the Gesprengte Thurm and looks
down upon the throng in the castle gardens; or inquires vainly for the
ruined linden-tree, or gives a sigh to the fate of Emma of Ilmenau, and
murmurs solemnly,--as a fat and red-faced Englishman once murmured to me
on that storied spot,--"That night there fell a star from heaven!" There
is no doubt that under the sway of the simpler style now prevailing,
much of the rhetoric of "Hyperion" seems turgid, some of its learning
obtrusive, and a good deal of its emotion forced; but it was
nevertheless an epoch-making book for a generation of youths and
maidens, and it still retains its charm. The curious fact, however,
remains--a fact not hitherto noticed, I think, by biographers or
critics--that at the very time when the author was at work on
"Hyperion," there was a constant reaction in his mind that was carrying
him in the direction of more strictly American subjects, handled under a
simpler treatment. He wrote on September 13, 1838, "Looked over my notes
and papers for 'Hyperion.' Long for leisure to begin once more." It is
impossible to say how long a preparation this implies; it may have been
months or years. Yet the following letter to a young girl, his wife's
youngest sister, shows how, within less than a year previous, his
observation had been again turned towards the American Indians as a
theme.
CAMBRIDGE, October 29, 1837.
MY DEAR MARGARET,--I was very much delighted with your present of
the slippers. They are too pretty to be trodden under foot; yet such
is their destiny, and shall be accomplished, as soon as may be. The
colors look beautifully upon the drab ground; much more so than on
the black. Don't you think so? I should have answered your note, and
sent you my thanks, by Alexander on Wednesday last; but when I last
saw him, I had not received the package. Therefore you must not
imagine from my delay, that I do not sufficiently appreciate the
gift....
There is nothing very new in Boston, which after all is a gossiping
kind of _Little Peddlington_, if you know what that is; if you
don't, you must read the story. People take too much cognizance of
their neighbors; interest themselves too much in what no way
concerns them. However, it is no great matter.
There are Indians here: savage fellows;--one Black-Hawk and his
friends, with naked shoulders and red blankets wrapped about their
bodies:--the rest all grease and Spanish brown and vermillion. One
carries a great war-club, and wears horns on his head; another had
his face painted like a grid-iron, all in bands:--another is all
red, like a lobster; and another black and blue, in great daubs of
paint laid on not sparingly. Queer fellows!--One great champion of
the _Fox_ nation had a short pipe in his mouth, smoking with great
self-complacency as he marched out of the City Hall: another was
smoking a cigar! Withal, they looked very formidable. Hard
customers....
Very truly yours
H. W. L.{45}
Note, again, how this tendency to home themes asserts itself explicitly
in Longfellow's notice of Hawthorne's "Twice-Told Tales" at about the
same time in "The North American Review," (July, 1837):--
"One of the most prominent characteristics of these tales is, that they
are national in their character. The author has wisely chosen his themes
among the traditions of New England; the dusty legends of 'the good Old
Colony times, when we lived under a king.' This is the right material
for story. It seems as natural to make tales out of old tumble-down
traditions, as canes and snuff-boxes out of old steeples, or trees
planted by great men. The puritanical times begin to look romantic in
the distance. Who would not like to have strolled through the city of
Agamenticus, where a market was held every week, on Wednesday, and there
were two annual fairs at St. James's and St. Paul's? Who would not like
to have been present at the court of the Worshipful Thomas Gorges, in
those palmy days of the law, when Tom Heard was fined five shillings for
being drunk, and John Payne the same, 'for swearing one oath'? Who would
not like to have seen the time, when Thomas Taylor was presented to the
grand jury 'for abusing Captain Raynes, being in authority, by
_thee-ing_ and _thou-ing_ him;' and John Wardell likewise, for denying
Cambridge College to be an ordinance of God; and when some were fined
for winking at comely damsels in church; and others for being
common-sleepers there on the Lord's day? Truly, many quaint and quiet
customs, many comic scenes and strange adventures, many wild and
wondrous things, fit for humorous tale, and soft, pathetic story, lie
all about us here in New England. There is no tradition of the Rhine nor
of the Black Forest, which can compare in beauty with that of the
Phantom Ship. The Flying Dutchman of the Cape, and the Klabotermann of
the Baltic, are nowise superior. The story of Peter Rugg, the man who
could not find Boston, is as good as that told by Gervase of Tilbury, of
a man who gave himself to the devils by an unfortunate imprecation, and
was used by them as a wheelbarrow; and the Great Carbuncle of the White
Mountains shines with no less splendor, than that which illuminated the
subterranean palace in Rome, as related by William of Malmesbury. Truly,
from such a Fortunatus's pocket and wishing-cap, a tale-bearer may
furnish forth a sufficiency of 'peryllous adventures right
espouventables, bryfefly compyled and pyteous for to here.'"
We must always remember that Longfellow came forward at a time when
cultivated Americans were wasting a great deal of superfluous sympathy
on themselves. It was the general impression that the soil was barren,
that the past offered no material and they must be European or die. Yet
Longfellow's few predecessors had already made themselves heard by
disregarding this tradition and taking what they found on the spot.
Charles Brockden Brown, although his style was exotic and Godwinish, yet
found his themes among American Indians and in the scenes of the yellow
fever in Philadelphia. It was not Irving who invested the Hudson with
romance, but the Hudson that inspired Irving. When in 1786, Mrs. Josiah
Quincy, then a young girl, sailed upon that river in a sloop, she wrote,
"Our captain had a legend for every scene, either supernatural or
traditional or of actual occurrence during the war, and not a mountain
reared its head unconnected with some marvellous story." Irving was then
but three years old, yet Ichabod Crane and Rip Van Winkle or their
prototypes were already on the spot waiting for biographers; and it was
much the same with Cooper, who was not born until three years later.
What was needed was self-confidence and a strong literary desire to take
the materials at hand. Irving, Cooper, Dana, had already done this; but
Longfellow followed with more varied gifts, more thorough training; the
"Dial" writers followed in their turn, and a distinctive American
literature was born, this quality reaching a climax in Thoreau, who
frankly wrote, "I have travelled a great deal--in Concord."
And while thus Longfellow found his desire for a national literature
strengthened at every point by the example of his classmate Hawthorne,
so he may have learned much, though not immediately, through the warning
unconsciously given by Bryant, against the perils of undue moralizing.
Bryant's early poem, "To a Water-Fowl," was as profound in feeling and
as perfect in structure as anything of Longfellow's, up to the last
verse, which some profane critic compared to a tin kettle of moralizing,
tied to the legs of the flying bird. Whittier's poems had almost always
some such appendage, and he used to regret in later life that he had not
earlier been contented to leave his moral for the reader to draw, or in
other words, to lop off habitually the last verse of each poem. Apart
from this there was a marked superiority, even on the didactic side, in
Longfellow's moralizing as compared with Bryant's. There is no light or
joy in the "Thanatopsis;" but Longfellow, like Whittier, was always
hopeful. It was not alone that he preached, as an eminent British critic
once said to me, "a safe piety," but his religious impulse was serene
and even joyous, and this under the pressure of the deepest personal
sorrows.
It is also to be observed that Longfellow wrote in this same number of
"The North American Review" (July, 1837) another paper which was
prophetic with regard to prose style, as was the Hawthorne essay in
respect to thought. It was a review of Tegner's "Frithiof's Saga" which
showed a power of description, brought to bear on Swedish life and
scenery, which he really never quite attained in "Hyperion," because it
was there sometimes vitiated by a slightly false note. A portion of it
was used afterwards as a preface to his second volume of poems ("Ballads
and Other Poems"), a preface regarded by some good critics as
Longfellow's best piece of prose work. It was, at any rate, impossible
not to recognize a fresh and vigorous quality in a descriptive passage
opening thus; and I can myself testify that it stamped itself on the
memories of young readers almost as vividly as the ballads which
followed:--
"There is something patriarchal still lingering about rural life in
Sweden, which renders it a fit theme for song. Almost primeval
simplicity reigns over that northern land,--almost primeval solitude and
stillness. You pass out from the gate of the city, and, as if by magic,
the scene changes to a wild, woodland landscape. Around you are forests
of fir. Overhead hang the long, fan-like branches, trailing with moss,
and heavy with red and blue cones. Under foot is a carpet of yellow
leaves; and the air is warm and balmy. On a wooden bridge you cross a
little silver stream; and anon come forth into a pleasant and sunny land
of farms. Wooden fences divide the adjoining fields. Across the road are
gates, which are opened by troops of children. The peasants take off
their hats as you pass; you sneeze, and they cry, 'God bless you.' The
houses in the villages and smaller towns are all built of hewn timber,
and for the most part painted red. The floors of the taverns are strewn
with the fragrant tips of fir boughs. In many villages there are no
taverns, and the peasants take turns in receiving travellers. The
thrifty housewife shows you into the best chamber, the walls of which
are hung round with rude pictures from the Bible; and brings you her
heavy silver spoons,--an heirloom,--to dip the curdled milk from the
pan. You have oaten cakes baked some months before; or bread with
anise-seed and coriander in it, or perhaps a little pine bark."
{40 _Life_, i. 353.}
{41 _Boston Quarterly Review_, January, 1840, iii. 128.}
{42 _Life_, i. 354.}
{43 _North American Review_, civ. 537.}
{44 Carpenter's _Longfellow_, p. 55.}
{45 MS.}