Part 7 (1/2)
Witty Tom Nash was right enough when he called this kind of stuff, ”that drunken, staggering kinde of verse which is all vp hill and downe hill, like the waye betwixt Stamford and Beechfeeld, and goes like a horse plunging through the myre in the deep of winter, now soust up to the saddle, and straight aloft on his tiptoes.” It will be noticed that his prose falls into a kind of tipsy hexameter. The attempt in England at that time failed, but the controversy to which it gave rise was so far useful that it called forth Samuel Daniel's ”Defence of Ryme” (1603), one of the n.o.blest pieces of prose in the language. Hall also, in his ”Satires,” condemned the heresy in some verses remarkable for their grave beauty and strength.
The revival of the hexameter in modern poetry is due to Johann Heinrich Voss, a man of genius, an admirable metrist, and, Schlegel's sneer to the contrary notwithstanding, hitherto the best translator of Homer. His ”Odyssey” (1783), his ”Iliad” (1791), and his ”Luise” (1795), were confessedly Goethe's teachers in this kind of verse. The ”Hermann and Dorothea” of the latter (1798) was the first true poem written in modern hexameters. From Germany, Southey imported that and other cla.s.sic metres into England, and we should be grateful to him, at least, for having given the model for Canning's ”Knife-grinder.” The exotic, however, again refused to take root, and for many years after we have no example of English hexameters. It was universally conceded that the temper of our language was unfriendly to them.
It remained for a man of true poetic genius to make them not only tolerated, but popular. Longfellow's translation of ”The Children of the Lord's Supper” may have softened prejudice somewhat, but ”Evangeline”
(1847), though enc.u.mbered with too many descriptive irrelevancies, was so full of beauty, pathos, and melody, that it made converts by thousands to the hitherto ridiculed measure. More than this, it made Longfellow at once the most popular of contemporary English poets.
Clough's ”Bothie”--poem whose singular merit has. .h.i.therto failed of the wide appreciation it deserves--followed not long after; and Kingsley's ”Andromeda” is yet damp from the press.
While we acknowledge that the victory thus won by ”Evangeline” is a striking proof of the genius of the author, we confess that we have never been able to overcome the feeling that the new metre is a dangerous and deceitful one. It is too easy to write, and too uniform for true pleasure in reading. Its ease sometimes leads Mr. Longfellow into prose,--as in the verse
Combed and wattled gules and all the rest of the blazon,
and into a prosaic phraseology which has now and then infected his style in other metres, as where he says
Spectral gleam their snow-white _dresses_,
using a word as essentially unpoetic as ”surtout or pea-jacket.” We think one great danger of the hexameter is, that it gradually accustoms the poet to be content with a certain regular recurrence of accented sounds, to the neglect of the poetic value of language and intensity of phrase.
But while we frankly avow our infidelity as regards the metre, we as frankly confess our admiration of the high qualities of ”Miles Standish.” In construction we think it superior to ”Evangeline”; the narrative is more straightforward, and the characters are defined with a firmer touch. It is a poem of wonderful picturesqueness, tenderness, and simplicity, and the situations are all conceived with the truest artistic feeling. Nothing can be better, to our thinking, than the picture of Standish and Alden in the opening scene, tinged as it is with a delicate humor, which the contrast between the thoughts and characters of the two heightens almost to pathos. The pictures of Priscilla spinning, and the bridal procession, are also masterly. We feel charmed to see such exquisite imaginations conjured out of the little old familiar anecdote of John Alden's vicarious wooing. We are astonished, like the fisherman in the Arabian tale, that so much genius could be contained in so small and leaden a casket. Those who cannot a.s.sociate sentiment with the fair Priscilla's maiden name of Mullins may be consoled by hearing that it is only a corruption of the Huguenot Desmoulins--as Barnum is of the Norman Vernon.
Indifferent poets comfort themselves with the notion that contemporary popularity is no test of merit, and that true poetry must always wait for a new generation to do it justice. The theory is not true in any general sense. With hardly an exception, the poetry that was ever to receive a wide appreciation has received it at once. Popularity in itself is no test of permanent literary fame, but the kind of it is and always has been a very decided one. Mr. Longfellow has been greatly popular because he so greatly deserved it. He has the secret of all the great poets--the power of expressing universal sentiments simply and naturally. A false standard of criticism has obtained of late, which brings a brick as a sample of the house, a line or two of condensed expression as a gauge of the poem. But it is only the whole poem that is a proof of the poem, and there are twenty fragmentary poets, for one who is capable of simple and sustained beauty. Of this quality Mr.
Longfellow has given repeated and striking examples, and those critics are strangely mistaken who think that what he does is easy to be done, because he has the power to make it seem so. We think his chief fault is a too great tendency to moralize, or rather, a distrust of his readers, which leads him to point out the moral which he wishes to be drawn from any special poem. We wish, for example, that the last two stanzas could be cut off from ”The Two Angels,” a poem which, without them, is as perfect as anything in the language.
Many of the pieces in this volume having already shone as captain jewels in Maga's carcanet, need no comment from us; and we should, perhaps, have avoided the delicate responsibility of criticizing one of our most precious contributors, had it not been that we have seen some very unfair attempts to depreciate Mr. Longfellow, and that, as it seemed to us, for qualities which stamp him as a true and original poet. The writer who appeals to more peculiar moods of mind, to more complex or more esoteric motives of emotion, may be a greater favorite with the few; but he whose verse is in sympathy with moods that are human and not personal, with emotions that do not belong to periods in the development of individual minds, but to all men in all years, wins the grat.i.tude and love of whoever can read the language which he makes musical with solace and aspiration. The present volume, while it will confirm Mr.
Longfellow's claim to the high rank he has won among lyric poets, deserves attention also as proving him to possess that faculty of epic narration which is rarer than all others in the nineteenth century. In our love of stimulants, and our numbness of taste, which craves the red pepper of a biting vocabulary, we of the present generation are apt to overlook this almost obsolete and un.o.btrusive quality; but we doubt if, since Chaucer, we have had an example of more purely objective narrative than in ”The Courts.h.i.+p of Miles Standish.” Apart from its intrinsic beauty, this gives the poem a claim to higher and more thoughtful consideration; and we feel sure that posterity will confirm the verdict of the present in regard to a poet whose reputation is due to no fleeting fancy, but to an instinctive recognition by the public of that which charms now and charms always,--true power and originality, without grimace and distortion; for Apollo, and not Milo, is the artistic type of strength.
TALES OF A WAYSIDE INN
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 a.s.surance 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 pa.s.sion 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 a.s.sume 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 s.h.i.+p,” 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.
WHITTIER
IN WAR TIME, AND OTHER POEMS
It is a curious ill.u.s.tration of the attraction of opposites, that, among our elder poets, the war we are waging finds its keenest expression in the Quaker Whittier. Here is, indeed, a soldier prisoner on parole in a drab coat, with no hope of exchange, but with a heart beating time to the tap of the drum. Mr. Whittier is, on the whole, the most American of our poets, and there is a fire of warlike patriotism in him that burns all the more intensely that it is smothered by his creed. But it is not as a singular ant.i.thesis of dogma and character that this peculiarity of his is interesting to us. The fact has more significance as ill.u.s.trating how deep an impress the fathers of New England stamped upon the commonwealth they founded. Here is a descendant and member of the sect they chiefly persecuted, more deeply imbued with the spirit of the Puritans than even their own lineal representatives. The New Englander is too strong for the sectarian, and the hereditary animosity softens to reverence, as the sincere man, looking back, conjures up the image of a sincerity as pure, though more stern, than his own. And yet the poetic sentiment of Whittier misleads him as far in admiration, as the pitiful sn.o.bbery of certain renegades perverts them to depreciation, of the Puritans. It is not in any sense true that these pious and earnest men brought with them to the New World the deliberate forethought of the democracy which was to develop itself from their inst.i.tutions. They brought over its seed, but unconsciously, and it was the kindly nature of the soil and climate that was to give it the chance to propagate and disperse itself. The same conditions have produced the same results also at the South, and nothing but slavery blocks the way to a perfect sympathy between the two sections.
Mr. Whittier is essentially a lyric poet, and the fervor of his temperament gives his pieces of that kind a remarkable force and effectiveness. Twenty years ago many of his poems were in the nature of _conciones ad populum_, vigorous stump-speeches in verse, appealing as much to the blood as the brain, and none the less convincing for that.