Part 17 (1/2)
He could find it delightful
”To lie And gaze into a summer sky And watch the trailing clouds go by Like s.h.i.+ps upon the sea.”
But it is a vast step from this to Browning's mountain picture
”Toward it tilting cloudlets prest Like Persian s.h.i.+ps to Salamis.”
In Browning everything is vigorous and individualized. We see the s.h.i.+ps, we know the nationality, we recall the very battle, and over these we see in imagination the very shape and movements of the clouds; but there is no conceivable reason why Longfellow's lines should not have been written by a blind man who knew clouds merely by the descriptions of others. The limitation of Longfellow's poems reveals his temperament. He was in his perceptions essentially of poetic mind, but always in touch with the common mind; as individual lives grow deeper, students are apt to leave Longfellow for Tennyson, just as they forsake Tennyson for Browning. As to action, the tonic of life, so far as he had it, was supplied to him through friends,--Sumner in America; Freiligrath in Europe,--and yet it must be remembered that he would not, but for a corresponding quality in his own nature, have had just such friends as these. He was not led by his own convictions to leave his study like Emerson and take direct part as a contestant in the struggles of the time. It is a curious fact that Lowell should have censured Th.o.r.eau for not doing in this respect just the thing which Th.o.r.eau ultimately did and Longfellow did not. It was, however, essentially a difference of temperament, and it must be remembered that Longfellow wrote in his diary under date of December 2, 1859, ”This will be a great day in our history; the date of a new Revolution,--quite as much needed as the old one. Even now as I write, they are leading old John Brown to execution in Virginia, for attempting to rescue slaves! This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind, which will come soon.”
His relations with Whittier remained always kindly and unbroken. They dined together at the Atlantic Club and Sat.u.r.day Club, and Longfellow wrote of him in 1857, ”He grows milder and mellower, as does his poetry.” He went to Concord sometimes to dine with Emerson, ”and meet his philosophers, Alcott, Th.o.r.eau, and Channing.” Or Emerson came to Cambridge, ”to take tea,” giving a lecture at the Lyceum, of which Longfellow says, ”The lecture good, but not of his richest and rarest.
His subject 'Eloquence.' By turns he was grave and jocose, and had some striking views and pa.s.sages. He lets in a thousand new lights, side-lights, and cross-lights, into every subject.” When Emerson's collected poems are sent him, Longfellow has the book read to him all the evening and until late at night, and writes of it in his diary: ”Throughout the volume, through the golden mist and sublimation of fancy, gleam bright veins of purest poetry, like rivers running through meadows. Truly, a rare volume; with many exquisite poems in it, among which I should single out 'Monadnoc,' 'Threnody,' 'The Humble-Bee,' as containing much of the quintessence of poetry.” Emerson's was one of the five portraits drawn in crayon by Eastman Johnson, and always kept hanging in the library at Craigie House; the others being those of Hawthorne, Sumner, Felton, and Longfellow himself. No one can deny to our poet the merits of absolute freedom from all jealousy and of an invariable readiness to appreciate those cla.s.sified by many critics as greater than himself. He was one of the first students of Browning in America, when the latter was known chiefly by his ”Bells and Pomegranates,” and instinctively selected the ”Blot in the 'Scutcheon”
as ”a play of great power and beauty,” as the critics would say, and as every one must say who reads it. He is an extraordinary genius, Browning, with dramatic power of the first order. ”Paracelsus” he describes, with some justice, as ”very lofty, but very diffuse.” Of Browning's ”Christmas Eve” he later writes, ”A wonderful man is Browning, but too obscure,” and later makes a similar remark on ”The Ring and the Book.” Of Tennyson he writes, as to ”The Princess,” calling it ”a gentle satire, in the easiest and most flowing blank verse, with two delicious unrhymed songs, and many exquisite pa.s.sages. I went to bed after it, with delightful music ringing in my ears; yet half disappointed in the poem, though not knowing why. There is a discordant note somewhere.”
One very uncertain test of a man of genius is his ”table-talk.”
Surrounded by a group of men who were such masters of this gift as Lowell, Holmes, and T. G. Appleton, Longfellow might well be excused from developing it to the highest extent, and he also ”being rather a silent man,” as he says of himself, escaped thereby the tendency to monologue, which was sometimes a subject of complaint in regard to the other three. Longfellow's reticence and self-control saved him from all such perils; but it must be admitted, on the other hand, that when his brother collects a dozen pages of his ”table-talk” at the end of his memoirs, or when one reads his own list of them in ”Kavanagh,” the reader feels a slight inadequacy, as of things good enough to be said, but not quite worth the printing. Yet at their best, they are sometimes pungent and telling, as where he says, ”When looking for anything lost, begin by looking where you think it is not;” or, ”Silence is a great peace-maker;” or, ”In youth all doors open outward; in old age they all open inward,” or, more thoughtfully, ”Amus.e.m.e.nts are like specie payments. We do not much care for them, if we know we can have them; but we like to know they may be had,” or more profoundly still, ”How often it happens that after we know a man personally, we cease to read his writings. Is it that we exhaust him by a look? Is it that his personality gives us all of him we desire?” There are also included among these pa.s.sages some thoroughly poetic touches, as where he says, ”The spring came suddenly, bursting upon the world as a child bursts into a room, with a laugh and a shout, and hands full of flowers.” Or this, ”How sudden and sweet are the visitations of our happiest thoughts; what delightful surprises! In the midst of life's most trivial occupations,--as when we are reading a newspaper, or lighting a bed-candle, or waiting for our horses to drive round,--the lovely face appears, and thoughts more precious than gold are whispered in our ear.”
The test of popularity in a poet is nowhere more visible than in the demand for autographs. Longfellow writes in his own diary that on November 25, 1856, he has more than sixty such requests lying on his table; and again on January 9, ”Yesterday I wrote, sealed, and directed seventy autographs. To-day I added five or six more and mailed them.” It does not appear whether the later seventy applications included the earlier sixty, but it is, in view of the weakness of human nature, very probable. This number must have gone on increasing. I remember that in 1875 I saw in his study a pile which must have numbered more than seventy, and which had come in a single day from a single high school in a Western city, to congratulate him on his birthday, and each hinting at an autograph, which I think he was about to supply.
At the time of his seventy-fourth birthday, 1881, a lady in Ohio sent him a hundred blank cards, with the request that he would write his name on each, that she might distribute them among her guests at a party she was to give on that day. The same day was celebrated by some forty different schools in the Western States, all writing him letters and requesting answers. He sent to each school, his brother tells us, some stanza with signature and good wishes. He was patient even with the gentleman who wrote to him to request that he would send his autograph in his ”own handwriting.” As a matter of fact, he had to leave many letters unanswered, even by a secretary, in his latest years.
It is a most tantalizing thing to know, through the revelations of Mr.
William Winter, that Longfellow left certain poems unpublished. Mr.
Winter says: ”He said also that he sometimes wrote poems that were for himself alone, that he should not care ever to publish, because they were too delicate for publication.”{105} Quite akin to this was another remark made by him to the same friend, that ”the desire of the young poet is not for applause, but for recognition.” The two remarks limit one another; the desire for recognition only begins when the longing for mere expression is satisfied. Thoroughly practical and methodical and industrious, Longfellow yet needed some self-expression first of all. It is impossible to imagine him as writing puffs of himself, like Poe, or volunteering reports of receptions given to him, like Whitman. He said to Mr. Winter, again and again, ”What you desire will come, if you will but wait for it.” The question is not whether this is the only form of the poetic temperament, but it was clearly his form of it. Th.o.r.eau well says that there is no definition of poetry which the poet will not instantly set aside by defying all its limitations, and it is the same with the poetic temperament itself.
{100 Scudder's _Men and Letters_, p. 68.}
{101 _Life_, ii. 19, 20.}
{102 _The New England Poets_, p. 141.}
{103 _Life_, ii. 189.}
{104 Tennyson's _Life_, by his son, i. 507.}
{105 _Life_, iii. 356.}
CHAPTER XXIV
LONGFELLOW AS A MAN
Longfellow always amused himself, as do most public men, with the confused and contradictory descriptions of his personal appearance: with the Newport bookseller who exclaimed, ”Why, you look more like a sea captain than a poet!” and a printer who described him as ”a hale, portly, fine-looking man, nearly six feet in height, well proportioned, with a tendency to fatness; brown hair and blue eyes, and bearing the general appearance of a comfortable hotel-keeper.” More graphic still, and on the whole nearer to the facts, is this description by an English military visitor who met him at a reception in Boston in 1850. I happened upon the volume containing it amid a pile of literary lumber in one of the great antiquarian bookstores of London:--
”He was rather under the middle size, but gracefully formed, and extremely prepossessing in his general appearance. His hair was light-colored, and tastefully disposed. Below a fine forehead gleamed two of the most beautiful eyes I had ever beheld in any human head. One seemed to gaze far into their azure depths. A very sweet smile, not at all of the pensively-poetical character, lurked about the well-shaped mouth, and altogether the expression of Henry Wordsworth [_sic_]
Longfellow's face was most winning. He was dressed very fas.h.i.+onably--almost too much so; a blue frock coat of Parisian cut, a handsome waistcoat, faultless pantaloons, and primrose-colored 'kids'
set off his compact figure, which was not a moment still; for like a b.u.t.terfly glancing from flower to flower, he was tripping from one lady to another, admired and courted by all. He shook me cordially by the hand, introduced me to his lady, invited me to his house, and then he was off again like a humming bird.”{106}