Literary and Social Essays Part 6

"Sailing with supreme dominion Through the upper realms of air,"

were attended by shorter poems, sonnets, "birds of pa.s.sage", as the poet called his swallow flights of song. In all these larger poems, while the characteristics of the earlier volumes were more amply developed and ill.u.s.trated, and the subtle beauty of the skill became even more exquisite, the essential qualities of the work remain unchanged, and the charm of a poet and his significance in the literature and development of his country were never more readily defined.

Child of New England, and trained by her best influences; of a temperament singularly sweet and serene, and with the st.u.r.dy rect.i.tude of his race; refined and softened by wide contact with other lands and many men; born in prosperity, accomplished in all literatures, and himself a literary artist of consummate elegance, he was the fine flower of the Puritan stock under its changed modern conditions. Out of strength had come forth sweetness. The grim iconoclast, "humming a surly hymn", had issued in the Christian gentleman. Captain Miles Standish had risen into Sir Philip Sidney. The austere morality that relentlessly ruled the elder New England reappeared in the genius of this singer in the most gracious and captivating form. The grave nature of Bryant in his early secluded life among the solitary hills of Western Ma.s.sachusetts had been tinged by them with their own sobriety. There was something of the sombre forest, of the gray rocky face of stern New England in his granitic verse. But what delicate wild-flowers nodded in the clefts! What scent of the pine-tree, what music of gurgling water, filled the cool air! What bird high poised upon its solitary way through heaven-taught faith to him who pursued his way alone!

But while the same moral tone in the poetry both of Bryant and of Longfellow shows them to be children of the same soil and tradition, and shows also that they saw plainly, what poets of the greatest genius have often not seen at all, that in the morality of human life lies its true beauty, the different aspect of Puritan development which they displayed was due to difference of temperament and circ.u.mstance. The foundations of our distinctive literature were largely laid in New England, and they rest upon morality. Literary New England had never a trace of literary Bohemia. The most ill.u.s.trious group, and the earliest, of American authors and scholars and literary men, the Boston and Cambridge group of the last generation--Channing, the two Danas, Sparks, Everett, Bancroft, Ticknor, Prescott, Norton, Ripley, Palfrey, Emerson, Parker, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, Aga.s.siz, Lowell, Motley--have been all sober and industrious citizens of whom Judge Sewall would have approved.

Their lives as well as their works have enn.o.bled literature. They have ill.u.s.trated the moral sanity of genius.

Longfellow shares this trait with them all. It is the moral purity of his verse which at once charms the heart, and in his first most famous poem, the "Psalm of Life", it is the direct inculcation of a moral purpose. Those who insist that literary art, like all other art, should not concern itself positively with morality, must reflect that the heart of this age has been touched as truly by Longfellow, however differently, as that of any time by its master-poet. This, indeed, is his peculiar distinction. Among the great poetic names of the century in English literature, Burns, in a general way, is the poet of love; Wordsworth, of lofty contemplation of nature; Byron, of pa.s.sion; Sh.e.l.ley, of aspiration; Keats, of romance; Scott, of heroic legend; and not less, and quite as distinctively, Longfellow, of the domestic affections. He is the poet of the household, of the fireside, of the universal home feeling. The infinite tenderness and patience, the pathos, and the beauty of daily life, of familiar emotion, and the common scene, these are the significance of that verse whose beautiful and simple melody, softly murmuring for more than forty years, made the singer the most widely beloved of living men.

Longfellow's genius was not a great creative force. It burst into no tempests of mighty pa.s.sion. It did not wrestle with the haughtily veiled problems of fate and free-will absolute. It had no dramatic movement and variety, no eccentricity and grotesqueness and unexpectedness. It was not Lear, nor Faust, nor Manfred, nor Romeo. A carnation is not a pa.s.sion-flower. Indeed, no poet of so universal and sincere a popularity ever sang so little of love as a pa.s.sion. None of his smaller poems are love poems; and _Evangeline_ is a tale, not of fiery romance, but of affection "that hopes and endures and is patient", of the unwasting "beauty and strength of woman's devotion", of the constantly tried and tested virtue that makes up the happiness of daily life. No one has described so well as Longfellow himself the character and influence of his own poetry:

"Come read to me some poem, Some simple and heart-felt lay, That shall soothe this restless feeling, And banish the thoughts of day.

"Hot from the grand old masters, Not from the bards sublime, Whose distant footsteps echo Through the corridors of Time.

"Such songs have power to quiet The restless pulse of care, And come like the benediction That follows after prayer."

This was the office of Longfellow in literature, and how perfectly it was fulfilled! It was not a wilful purpose, but he carefully guarded the fountain of his song from contamination or diversion, and this was its natural overflow. During the long period of his literary activity there were many "schools" and styles and fas.h.i.+ons of poetry. The influence first of Byron, then of Keats, is manifest in the poetry of the last generation, and in later days a voluptuous vagueness and barbaric splendor, as of the lower empire in literature, have corroded the vigor of much modern verse. But no perfumed blandishment of doubtful G.o.ddesses won Longfellow from his sweet and domestic Muse. The clear thought, the true feeling, the pure aspiration, is expressed with limpid simplicity:

"Strong without rage; without o'erflowing, full."

The most delightful picture in Goldsmith's life is that of the youth wandering through rural Europe, stopping at the little villages in the peaceful summer sunset, and sweetly playing melodies upon his flute for the lads and la.s.ses to dance upon the green. Who that reads "The Traveller" and "The Deserted Village" does not hear in their pensive music the far-away fluting of that kind-hearted wanderer, and see the lovely idyl of that simple life? So sings this poet to the young men and maidens in the soft summer air. They follow his measures with fascinated hearts, for they hear in them their own hearts singing; they catch the music of their dearest hope, of their best endeavor; they hear the voices of the peaceful joy that hallows faithful affection, of the benediction that belongs to self-sacrifice and devotion. And now that the singer is gone, and his voice is silent, those hushed hearts recall the words of Father Felicien, Evangeline's pastor:

"Forty years of my life have I labored among you, and taught you Not in word alone, but in deed, to love one another."

It is this fidelity of his genius to itself, the universal feeling to which he gives expression, and the perfection of his literary workmans.h.i.+p, which is sure to give Longfellow a permanent place in literature. His poems are apples of gold in pictures of silver. There is nothing in them excessive, nothing overwrought, nothing strained into turgidity, obscurity, and nonsense. There is sometimes, indeed, a fine stateliness, as in the "a.r.s.enal at Springfield", and even a resounding splendor of diction, as in "Sandalphon". But when the melody is most delicate it is simple. The poet throws nothing into the mist to make it large. How purely melodious his verse can be without losing the thought or its most transparent expression is seen in "The Evening Star" and "Snow-Flakes".

The literary decoration of his style, the aroma and color and richness, so to speak, which it derives from his ample accomplishment in literature, are incomparable. His verse is embroidered with allusions and names and ill.u.s.trations wrought with a taste so true and a skill so rare that the robe, though it be cloth of gold, is as finely flexible as linen, and still beautifully reveals, not conceals, the living form.

This scholarly allusion and literary tone were at one time criticised as showing that Longfellow's genius was really an exotic grown under gla.s.s, or a smooth-throated mocking-bird warbling a foreign melody. A recent admirable paper in the _Evening Post_ intimates that the kindly poet took the suggestion in good part, and modified his strain. But there was never any interruption or change in the continuity of his work.

_Evangeline_ and _Hiawatha_ and _The Courts.h.i.+p of Miles Standish_ blossom as naturally out of his evident and characteristic taste and tendency as _The Golden Legend_ or the _Masque of Pandora_. In the _Tales of a Wayside Inn_ the "Ride of Paul Revere" is as natural a play of his power as "King Robert of Sicily". The various aspect and character of nature upon the American continent is nowhere so fully, beautifully, and accurately portrayed as in _Evangeline_. The scenery of the poem is the vast American landscape, boundless prairie and wooded hill, br.i.m.m.i.n.g river and green valley, sparkling savanna and broad bayou, city and village, camp and wigwam, peopled with the children of many races, and all the blended panorama seen in the magic light of imagination. So, too, the poetic character of the Indian legend is preserved with conscientious care and fit monotony of rippling music in _Hiawatha_. But this is an accident and an incident. It is not the theme which determines the poet. All Scotland, indeed, sings and glows in the verse of Burns, but very little of England is seen or heard in that of Byron.

In no other conspicuous figure in literary history are the man and the poet more indissolubly blended than in Longfellow. The poet was the man, and the man the poet. What he was to the stranger reading in distant lands, by

"The long wash of Australasian seas,"

that he was to the most intimate of his friends. His life and character were perfectly reflected in his books. There is no purity or grace or feeling or spotless charm in his verse which did not belong to the man.

There was never an explanation to be offered for him; no allowance was necessary for the eccentricity or grotesqueness or wilfulness or humor of genius. Simple, modest, frank, manly, he was the good citizen, the self-respecting gentleman, the symmetrical man.

He lived in an interesting historic house in a venerable university town, itself the suburb of a great city; the highway running by his gate and dividing the smooth gra.s.s and modest green terraces about the house from the fields and meadows that sloped gently to the placid Charles, and the low range of distant hills that made the horizon. Through the little gate pa.s.sed an endless procession of pilgrims of every degree and from every country to pay homage to their American friend. Every morning came the letters of those who could not come in person, and with infinite urbanity and sympathy and patience the master of the house received them all, and his gracious hospitality but deepened the admiration and affection of the guests. His nearer friends sometimes remonstrated at his sweet courtesy to such annoying "devastators of the day". But to an urgent complaint of his endless favor to a flagrant offender, Longfellow only answered, good-humoredly, "If I did not speak kindly to him, there is not a man in the world who would." On the day that he was taken ill, six days only before his death, three schoolboys came out from Boston on their Sat.u.r.day holiday to ask his autograph. The benign lover of children welcomed them heartily, showed them a hundred interesting objects in his house, then wrote his name for them, and for the last time.

Few men had known deeper sorrow. But no man ever mounted upon his sorrow more surely to higher things. Blessed and beloved, the singer is gone, but his song remains, and its pure and imperishable melody is the song of the lark in the morning of our literature:

"Type of the wise who soar but never roam, True to the kindred points of heaven and home."

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

In 1817 Bryant's "Thanatopsis" was published in the _North American Review_. Richard Henry Dana, the elder, who was then one of the editors, said that it could not be an American poem, for there was no American who could have written it. But it does not seem to have produced a remarkable impression upon the public mind. The planet rose silently and un.o.bserved. Ten years afterwards, in 1827, Dana's own "Buccaneer" was published, and Christopher North, in _Blackwood_, saluted it as "by far the most original and powerful of American poetical compositions". But it produced in this country no general effect which is remembered. Nine years later, in 1836, Holmes's "Metrical Essay" was delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard College, and was as distinct an event in literary circles as Edward Everett's oration before the same society in 1824, or Ralph Waldo Emerson's in 1837, or Horace Bushnell's in 1848, or Wendell Phillips's in 1881. Holmes was then twenty-seven years old, and had just returned from his professional studies in Europe, where, as in his college days at Cambridge, where he was born, he had toyed with many Muses, yet still, with native Yankee prudence, held fast the hand of Aesculapius. His poem, like the address of Emerson in the next year, showed how completely the modern spirit of refined and exquisite literary cultivation and of free and undaunted thought had superseded the uncouth literary form and stern and rigid Calvinism of the Mathers and early Boston.

The melody and grace of Goldsmith's line, but with a fresh local spirit, have not been more perfectly reproduced, nor with a more distinct revelation of a new spirit, than in this poem. It is retrospective and contemplative, but it is also full of the buoyancy of youth, of the consciousness of poetic skill, and of blithe antic.i.p.ation. Its tender reminiscence and occasional fond elegiac strain are but clouds of the morning. Its literary form is exquisite, and its general impression is that of bright, elastic, confident power. It was by no means, however, a first work, nor was the poet unknown in his own home. But the "Metrical Essay" introduced him to a larger public, while the fugitive pieces already known were the a.s.surance that the more important poem was not a happy chance, but the development of a quality already proved. Seven years before, in 1829, the year he graduated at Harvard, Holmes began to contribute to _The Collegian_, a college magazine. Two years later, in 1831, appeared the _New England Magazine_, in which the young writer, as he might himself say, took the road with his double team of verse and prose, holding the ribbons with unsurpa.s.sed lightness and grace and skill, now for two generations guiding those fleet and well-groomed coursers, which still show their heels to panting rivals, the prancing team behind which we have all driven and are still driving with constant and undiminished delight.

Mr. F. B. Sanborn, whose tribute to Holmes on his eightieth birthday shows how thorough was his research for that labor of love, tells us that his first contribution to the _New England Magazine_ was published in the third or September number of the first year, 1831. It was a copy of verses of an unpromising t.i.tle--"To an Insect". But that particular insect, seemingly the creature of a day, proved to be immortal, for it was the katydid, whose voice is perennial:

"Thou sayest an undisputed thing In such a solemn way."

In the contributions of the young graduate the high spirits of a frolicsome fancy effervesce and sparkle. But their quality of a new literary tone and spirit is very evident. The ease and fun of these bright prolusions, without impudence or coa.r.s.eness, the poetic touch and refinement, were as unmistakable as the brisk pungency of the gibe. The stately and scholarly Boston of Channing, Dana, Everett, and Ticknor might indeed have looked askance at the literary claims of such lines as these "Thoughts in Dejection" of a poet wondering if the path to Parna.s.sus lay over Charlestown or Chelsea bridge:

"What is a poet's fame?

Sad hints about his reason, And sadder praise from gazetteers, To be returned in season.

"For him the future holds No civic wreath above him; Nor slated roof nor varnished chair, Nor wife nor child to love him.

"Maid of the village inn, Who workest woe on satin, The gra.s.s in black, the graves in green, The epitaph in Latin,

"Trust not to them who say In stanzas they adore thee; Oh, rather sleep in church-yard clay, With maudlin cherubs o'er thee!"

The lines to the katydid, with "L'Inconnue"--

"Is thy name Mary, maiden fair?"--

published in the magazine at about the same time, disclose Holmes's natural melody and his fine instinct for literary form. But his lyrical fervor finds its most jubilant expression at this time in "Old Ironsides", written at the turning-point in the poet's life, when he had renounced the study of the law, and was deciding upon medicine as his profession. The proposal to destroy the frigate Const.i.tution, fondly and familiarly known as "Old Ironsides", kindled a patriotic frenzy in the sensitive Boston boy, which burst forth into the n.o.ble lyric,

"Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!"

There had been no American poetry with a truer lilt of song than these early verses, and there has been none since. Two years later, in 1833, Holmes went to complete his medical studies in Paris, and the lines to a grisette--

"Ah, Clemence, when I saw thee last Trip down the Rue de Seine!"--

published upon his return in his first volume of verse, are a charming ill.u.s.tration of his lyrical genius. His limpid line never flowed more clearly than in this poem. It has the pensive tone of all his best poems of the kind, but it is the half-happy sadness of youth.

All these early verses have an a.s.sured literary form. The scope and strain were new, but their most significant quality was not melody nor pensive grace, but humor. This was ingrained and genuine. Sometimes it was rollicking, as in "The Height of the Ridiculous" and "The September Gale". Sometimes it was drolly meditative, as in "Evening, by a Tailor".

Sometimes it was a tearful smile of the deepest feeling, as in the most charming and perfect of these poems, "The Last Leaf", in which delicate and searching pathos is exquisitely fused with tender gayety. The haunting music and meaning of the lines,

"The mossy marbles rest On the lips that he has pressed In their bloom, And the names he loved to hear Have been carved for many a year On the tomb",

lingered always in the memory of Lincoln, whose simple sincerity and native melancholy would instinctively have rejected any false note. It is in such melody as that of the "Last Leaf" that we feel how truly the grim old Puritan strength has become sweetness.

To this poetic grace and humor and music, which at that time were unrivalled, although the early notes of a tuneful choir of awakening songsters were already heard, the young Holmes added the brisk and crisp and sparkling charm of his prose. From the beginning his coursers were paired, and with equal pace they have constantly held the road. In the _New England Magazine_ for November in the same year, 1831, a short paper was published called the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table". The tone of placid dogmatism and infallible finality with which the bulls of the domestic pope are delivered is delightfully familiar. This earliest one has perhaps more of the cardinal's preliminary scarlet than of the mature papal white, but in its first note the voice of the Autocrat is unmistakable:

"Somebody was rigmarolling the other day about the artificial distinctions of society.

'Madam,' said I, 'society is the same in all large places. I divide it thus: 1. People of cultivation who live in large houses.

2. People of cultivation who live in small houses.