Stories of Authors, British and American Part 18

More pertinent as to his habits of loneliness is the following account of how he lived for nine or ten years after his graduation from Bowdoin. "I had always," he writes, "a natural tendency (it appears to have been on the paternal side) toward seclusion; and this I now indulged to the utmost, so that, for months together, I scarcely held human intercourse outside of my own family, seldom going out except at twilight, or only to take the nearest way to the most convenient solitude, which was oftenest the seash.o.r.e.... Having spent so much of my boyhood and youth from my native place, I had very few acquaintances in Salem, and during the nine or ten years that I spent there, in this solitary way, I doubt whether so much as twenty people in the town were aware of my existence."

Such was the solitariness of the youthful Hawthorne. Is it surprising that in the fiction of the mature man there should be a pervading sense of remoteness, of silences that fascinate, of mysteries that charm?

LV

MAX MuLLER'S RECOLLECTIONS OF EMERSON, LOWELL, AND HOLMES

Living at Oxford, writes Max Muller, I have had the good fortune of receiving visits from Emerson, Dr. Wendell Holmes, and Lowell, to speak of the brightest stars only. Each of them stayed at our house for several days, so that I could take them in at leisure, while others had to be taken at one gulp, often between one train and the next. Oxford has a great attraction for all Americans, and it is a pleasure to see how completely they feel at home in the memories of the place. The days when Emerson, Wendell Holmes, and Lowell were staying with us, the breakfasts and luncheons, the teas and dinners, and the delightful walks through college halls, chapels and gardens are possessions forever....

I do not wonder that philosophers by profession had nothing to say to his (Emerson's) essays because they did not seem to advance their favorite inquiries beyond the point they had reached before. But there were many people, particularly in America, to whom these rhapsodies did more good than any learned disquisitions or carefully arranged sermons. There is in them what attracts us so much in the ancients, freshness, directness, self-confidence, unswerving loyalty to truth, as far as they could see it. He had no one to fear, no one to please.

Socrates or Plato, if suddenly brought to life in America, might have spoken like Emerson, and the effect produced by Emerson was certainly like that produced by Socrates in olden times.

What Emerson's personal charm must have been in earlier life we can only conjecture from the rapturous praises bestowed on him by his friends, even during his lifetime.... And his influence was not confined to the American mind. I have watched it growing in England. I can still remember the time when even experienced judges spoke of his essays as mere declamations, as poetical rhapsodies, as poor imitations of Carlyle. Then gradually one man after another found something in Emerson which was not to be found in Carlyle, particularly his loving heart, his tolerant spirit, his comprehensive sympathy with all that was or was meant to be good and true, even though to his own mind it was neither the one nor the other....

Another eminent American who often honored my quiet home at Oxford was James Russell Lowell, for a long time United States minister in England. He was a professor and at the same time a politician and a man of the world. Few essays are so brimful of interesting facts and original reflections as his essays ent.i.tled _Among my Books_.

Lowell's conversation was inexhaustible, his information astonishing.

Pleasant as he was, even as an antagonist, he would occasionally lose his temper and use very emphatic language. I was once sitting next to him when I heard him stagger his neighbor, a young lady, by bursting out with, "But, madam, I do not accept your major premise!" Poor thing, she evidently was not accustomed to such language, and not acquainted with that terrible term. She collapsed, evidently quite at a loss as to what gift on her part Mr. Lowell declined to accept.

Sometimes even the most harmless remark about America would call forth very sharp replies from him. Everybody knows that the salaries paid by America to her diplomatic staff are insufficient, and no one knew it better than he himself. But when the remark was made in his presence that the United States treated their diplomatic representatives stingily, he fired up, and discoursed most eloquently on the advantages of high thoughts and humble living....

I lost the pleasure of shaking hands with Longfellow during his stay in England. Though I have been more of a fixture at Oxford than most professors, I was away during the vacation when he paid his visit to our university, and thus lost seeing a poet to whom I felt strongly attracted, not only by the general spirit of his poetry, which was steeped in German thought, but as the translator of several of my father's poems.

I was more fortunate with Dr. Wendell Holmes. His arrival in England had been proclaimed beforehand, and one naturally remained at home in order to be allowed to receive him. His hundred days in England were one uninterrupted triumphal progress. When he arrived at Liverpool he found about three hundred invitations waiting for him. Though he was accompanied by a most active and efficient daughter, he had at once to engage a secretary to answer this deluge of letters. And though he was past eighty, he never spared himself, and was always ready to see and to be seen. He was not only an old, but a ripe and mellow man.

There was no subject on which one could touch which was not familiar to the autocrat of the breakfast table. His thoughts and his words were ready, and one felt that it was not for the first time that the subject had been carefully thought out and talked out by him. That he should have been able to stand all the fatigue of the journey and the constant claims on his ready wit seemed to me marvelous. I had the pleasure of showing him the old buildings of Oxford. He seemed to know them all, and had something to ask and say about every one. When we came to Magdalen College, he wanted to see and to measure the elms. He was very proud of some elms in America, and he had actually brought some string with which he had measured the largest tree he knew in his own country. He proceeded to measure one of our finest elms in Magdalen College, and when he found that it was larger than his American giant, he stood before it admiring it, without a single word of envy or disappointment.

I had, however, a great fright while he was staying at our house. He had evidently done too much, and after our first dinner party he had feverish shivering fits, and the doctor whom I sent for declared at once that he must keep perfectly quiet in bed, and attend no more parties of any kind. This was a great disappointment to myself and to a great many of my friends. But at his time of life the doctor's warning could not be disregarded, and I had, at all events, the satisfaction of sending him off to Cambridge safe and sound. I had him several days quite to myself, and there were few subjects which we did not discuss. We mostly agreed, but even where we did not, it was a real pleasure to differ from him. We discussed the greatest and the smallest questions, and on every one he had some wise and telling remarks to pour out. I remember one conversation while we were sitting at an old wainscoted room at All Souls', ornamented with the arms of former fellows. It had been at first the library of the college, then one of the fellows' rooms, and lastly a lecture room. We were deep in the old question of the true relation between the divine and human in man, and here again, as on all other questions, everything seemed to be clear and evident to his mind. Perhaps I ought not to repeat what he said to me when we parted: "I have had much talk with people in England; with you I have had a real conversation." We understood each other and wondered how it was that men so often misunderstood one another. I told him that it was the badness of our language, he thought it was the badness of our tempers. Perhaps we were both right.

With him again good-by was good-by for life, and at such moments one wonders indeed how kindred souls became separated, and one feels startled and repelled at the thought that, such as they were on earth, they can never meet again. And yet there is continuity in the world, there is no flaw, no break anywhere, and what has been will surely be again, though how it will be we cannot know, and if only we trust in the wisdom that pervades the whole universe, we need not know.

LVI

HOWELLS CALLS ON EMERSON, AND DESCRIBES LONGFELLOW

In 1860 William Dean Howells, now one of the foremost literary influences in the English-speaking world, was a young man writing for the _Ohio State Journal_ of Columbus. Several of his poems had been kindly received and published by the _Atlantic Monthly_, so that the young lady from New England who screamed with surprise at seeing the _Atlantic_ on a western table and cried, "Why, have you got the _Atlantic Monthly out here_?" could be met with, "There are several contributors to the _Atlantic_ in Columbus." The several were Howells and J.J. Piatt. But to be an accepted contributor to the _Atlantic_ was not enough. Howells must see the literary celebrities of New England. Emerson and Bayard Taylor he had seen and heard in Columbus, but Longfellow, Hawthorne, Lowell, Holmes, and Whittier were the literary saints at whose shrine he wished to burn the sacred incense of his adoring soul.

From Hawthorne he received a card introducing him to Emerson. Emerson was then about sixty, although nothing about him suggested an old man.

After some conversation on general topics, Emerson began to talk of Hawthorne, praising Hawthorne's fine personal qualities. "But his last book," he added, reflectively, "is mere mush." This criticism related to the _Marble Faun_. Of course, such a comment shocked Howells, whose sense of literary values was much keener than Emerson's. "Emerson had, in fact," writes Howells, "a defective sense as to specific pieces of literature; he praised extravagantly, and in the wrong place, especially among the new things, and he failed to see the worth of much that was fine and precious beside the line of his fancy."

Then Emerson made some inquiry about a Michigan young man who had been sending some of his poetry to Emerson. Howells was embarra.s.sed to be obliged to say that he knew nothing of the Michigan poet. Later Emerson asked whether he had become acquainted with the poems of Mr.

William Henry Channing. Howells replied that he knew them only through the criticism of Poe.

"Whose criticisms?" asked Emerson.

"Poe's," replied Howells.

"Oh," Emerson cried after a thoughtful moment, "you mean _the jingle man_!"

This was a moment of confusion and embarra.s.sment for Howells. Had the vituperative pen of Poe ever thrown off more stinging criticism than that? "_The jingle man!_"

Emerson turned the conversation to Howells himself and asked him what he had written for the _Atlantic_. Howells replied, and Emerson took down the bound volumes and carefully affixed Howells' initials to the poems. "He followed me to the door, still speaking of poetry, and as he took a kindly enough leave of me, he said one might very well give a pleasant hour to it now and then." This was a shock to Howells. "A pleasant hour!" Howells was intending to consecrate all time and eternity to it, and here is the Sage of Concord coolly speaking of poetry as though it were some trifling diversion, like billiards or whist.

Later in life when Howells resided in Cambridge he had abundant opportunity to become acquainted with Longfellow, whom in _Literary Friends and Acquaintance_ he calls the "White Mr. Longfellow."

"He was the most perfectly modest man I ever saw, ever imagined, but he had a gentle dignity which I do not believe any one, the coa.r.s.est, the obtusest, could trespa.s.s upon. In the years when I began to know him, his long hair and the beautiful beard which mixed with it were of iron-gray, which I saw blanch to a perfect silver, while that pearly tone of his complexion, which Appleton so admired, lost itself in the wanness of age and pain. When he walked, he had a kind of spring in his gait, as if now and again a buoyant thought lifted him from the ground. It was fine to meet him coming down a Cambridge street; you felt that the encounter made you a part of literary history, and set you apart with him for the moment from the poor and mean. When he appeared in Harvard Square, he beatified if not beautified the ugliest and vulgarest looking spot on the planet outside of New York. You could meet him sometimes at the market, if you were of the same provision-man as he, for Longfellow remained as constant to his tradespeople as to any other friends. He rather liked to bring his proofs back to the printer himself, and we often found ourselves together at the University Press, where _The Atlantic Monthly_ used to be printed. But outside of his own house Longfellow seemed to want a fit atmosphere, and I love best to think of him in his study, where he wrought at his lovely art with a serenity expressed in his smooth, regular, and scrupulously perfect handwriting. It was quite vertical, and rounded, with a slope neither to the right nor left, and at the time I knew him first, he was fond of using a soft pencil on printing paper, though commonly he wrote with a quill. Each letter was distinct in shape, and between the verses was always the exact s.p.a.ce of half an inch. I have a good many of his poems written in this fashion, but whether they were the first drafts or not I cannot say; very likely not. Towards the last he no longer sent the poems to the magazines in his own hand, but they were always signed in autograph.

"I once asked him if he were not a great deal interrupted, and he said, with a faint sigh, Not more than was good for him, he fancied; if it were not for the interruptions, he might overwork. He was not a friend to stated exercise, I believe, nor fond of walking, as Lowell was; he had not, indeed, the childish a.s.sociations of the younger poet with the Cambridge neighborhoods; and I never saw him walking for pleasure except on the east veranda of his house, though I was told he loved walking in his youth. In this and in some other things Longfellow was more European than American, more Latin than Saxon. He once said quaintly that one got a great deal of exercise in putting on and off one's overcoat and overshoes....

"He was patient, as I said of all things, and gentle beyond all mere gentlemanliness. But it would have been a great mistake to mistake his mildness for softness. It was most manly and firm, and of course, it was braced with the New England conscience he was born to. If he did not find it well to a.s.sert himself, he was prompt in behalf of his friends, and one of the fine things told of him was his resenting some things said of Sumner at a dinner in Boston during the old pro-slavery times; he said to the gentlemen present that Sumner was his friend, and he must leave their company if they continued to a.s.sail him.

"But he spoke almost as rarely of his friends as of himself. He liked the large, impersonal topics which could be dealt with, on their human side, and involved characters rather than individuals. This was rather strange in Cambridge, where we were apt to take our instances from our environments. It was not the only thing he was strange in there; he was not to that manner born; he lacked the final intimacies which can come only of birth and lifelong a.s.sociation, and which make the men of the Boston breed seem exclusive when they least feel so; he was Longfellow to the friends who were James, and Charles, and Wendell to one another. He and Hawthorne were cla.s.smates at college, but I never heard him mention Hawthorne; I never heard him mention Whittier or Emerson. I think his reticence about his contemporaries was largely due to his reluctance from criticism: he was the finest artist of them all, and if he praised he must have praised with the reservations of an honest man. Of younger writers he was willing enough to speak.

No new contributor made his mark in the magazine unnoted by him, and sometimes I showed him verse in ma.n.u.script which gave me peculiar pleasure. I remember his liking for the first piece that Mr. Maurice Thompson sent me, and how he tasted the fresh flavor of it and inhaled its wild new fragrance."

LVII

LONGFELLOW, THE UNIVERSAL POET

We have pa.s.sed the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Longfellow, and he still remains the favorite American poet. Not that Longfellow is one of the great world poets; Longfellow himself would have been offended with that eulogistic extravagance which would place him among the few immortals. He is not a Homer, nor a Dante, nor a Shakspere.

No, he is not even a Wordsworth in philosophic insight into nature, nor a Sh.e.l.ley in power to s.n.a.t.c.h the soul into the starry empyrean, nor a Tennyson in variety and pa.s.sion, nor a Milton in grandeur of poetic expression. He is--only Longfellow. But that means he has his own peculiar charm. It is idle to detract from the fame of one man because he is not some one else. Roast beef may be more nutritious than strawberries, but that is no criticism upon the flavor of the strawberry. Longfellow is not Milton, but then neither is Milton Longfellow:

If I cannot carry forests on my back Neither can you crack a nut.

Of late years the critics have been finding fault with Longfellow.

They have said that really Longfellow is no poet. Frederic Harrison calls Evangeline "goody, goody dribble!" and Quiller-Couch in his anthology gives three pages to Longfellow and seven to Wilfred Scawen Blunt--but who is Blunt? When I was in Berlin I found in a German history of English and American Literature one-half a page devoted to Longfellow and ten pages to Poe. Perhaps some of this criticism is but the natural reaction following the extreme praise that ensued after the death of Longfellow in 1882.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW From a wood engraving of a life photograph]

But Longfellow is surviving all derogatory criticism. He is still the poet with the universal appeal. It is altogether probable that he is more widely read to-day than any other American poet. Even foreigners still express their affection for this poet of the domestic affections. In 1907 Sir Henry Mortimer Durand, the English Amba.s.sador to the United States, made an address in which he made graceful acknowledgement of his debt to this American poet:

"I owe much of the pleasure of my life to American writers of every shade of thought.... But I owe to one American writer much more than pleasure. Tastes differ and fashions change, and I am told that the poetry of Longfellow is not read as it used to be. Men in my own country have asked me whether the rivers of Damascus were not better than all the waters of Israel, whether Shakspere, and Milton, and Sh.e.l.ley, and Keats were not enough for me, that I need go to Longfellow. And Americans have seemed surprised that I did not speak rather of Lowell and Bryant and others. Far be it from me to say a word against any of them. I have loved them all from my youth up, every one of them in his own way, and Shakspere as the master and compendium of them all. No one, I suppose, would place Longfellow as a poet quite on the same level with some of them. But the fact remains that, for one reason or another, perhaps in part from early a.s.sociations, Longfellow has always spoken to my heart. Many a time, in lands far away from the land he loved so well, I have sought for sympathy in happiness and in sorrow--

Not from the grand old masters, Not from the bards sublime, Whose distant footsteps echo Through the corridors of time--

but from that pure and gentle and untroubled spirit."

Professor E.A. Grosvenor, of Amherst, years ago published an article on Longfellow that was widely copied. It is an interesting account of a conversation in 1879 on board the Messageries steamer _Donai_, bound from Constantinople to Ma.r.s.eilles. On board many nationalities were represented. The story is a fine ill.u.s.tration of the wide-spread popularity of the American poet.