Outlines of English and American Literature
by
William J. Long
Part 9 out of 10
that Longfellow is still the favorite of the American home, the most
honored of all our elder poets; that in foreign schools his works are
commonly used as an introduction to English verse, and that he has probably
led more young people to appreciate poetry than any other poet who ever
wrote our language. That strange literary genius Lafcadio Hearn advised his
Japanese students to begin the study of poetry with Longfellow, saying that
they might learn to like other poets better in later years, but that
Longfellow was most certain to charm them at the beginning.
The reason for this advice, given to the antipodes, was probably this, that
young hearts and pure hearts are the same the world over, and Longfellow is
the poet of the young and pure in heart.
LIFE. The impression of serenity in Longfellow's work may be
explained by the gifts which Fortune offered him in the way of
endowment, training and opportunity. By nature he was a gentleman;
his home training was of the best; to his college education four
years of foreign study were added, a very unusual thing at that
time; and no sooner was he ready for his work than the way opened
as if the magic _Sesame_ were on his lips. His own college
gave him a chair of modern languages and literature, which was the
very thing he wanted; then Harvard offered what seemed to him a
wider field, and finally his country called him from the
professor's chair to teach the love of poetry to the whole nation.
Before his long and beautiful life ended he had enjoyed for half a
century the two rewards that all poets desire, and the most of them
in vain; namely, fame and love. The first may be fairly won; the
second is a free gift.
[Illustration: HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW]
Longfellow was born (1807) in the town of Falmouth, Maine, which
has since been transformed into the city of Portland. Like Bryant
he was descended from Pilgrim stock; but where the older poet's
training had been strictly puritanic, Longfellow's was more liberal
and broadly cultured. Bryant received the impulse to poetry from
his grandfather's prayers, but Longfellow seems to have heard his
first call in the sea wind. Some of his best lyrics sing of the
ocean; his early book of essays was called _Driftwood_, his
last volume of poetry _In the Harbor_; and in these lyrics and
titles we have a reflection of his boyhood impressions in looking
forth from the beautiful Falmouth headland, then a wild,
wood-fringed pasture but now a formal park:
I remember the black wharves and the slips,
And the sea tides tossing free,
And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
And the beauty and mystery of the ships,
And the magic of the sea.
[Sidenote: THE CALL OF BOOKS]
This first call was presently neglected for the more insistent
summons of literature; and thereafter Longfellow's inspiration was
at second hand, from books rather than from nature or humanity.
Soon after his graduation from Bowdoin (1825) he was offered a
professorship in modern languages on condition that he prepare
himself for the work by foreign study. With a glad heart he
abandoned the law, which he had begun to study in his father's
office, and spent three happy years in France, Spain and Italy.
There he steeped himself in European poetry, and picked up a
reading knowledge of several languages. Strangely enough, the
romantic influence of Europe was reflected by this poet in a book
of prose essays, _Outre Mer_, modeled on Irving's _Sketch
Book_.
[Sidenote: YEARS OF TEACHING]
For five years Longfellow taught the modern languages at Bowdoin,
and his subject was so new in America that he had to prepare his
own textbooks. Then, after another period of foreign study (this
time in Denmark and Germany), he went to Harvard, where he taught
modern languages and literature for eighteen years. In 1854 he
resigned his chair, and for the remainder of his life devoted
himself whole-heartedly to poetry.
His literary work began with newspaper verses, the best of which
appear in the "Earlier Poems" of his collected works. Next he
attempted prose in his _Outre Mer_, _Driftwood Essays_
and the romances _Hyperion_ and _Kavanagh_. In 1839
appeared his first volume of poetry, _Voices of the Night_,
after which few years went by without some notable poem or volume
from Longfellow's pen. His last book, _In the Harbor_,
appeared with the news of his death, in 1882.
[Sidenote: HIS SERENITY]
Aside from these "milestones" there is little to record in a career
so placid that we remember by analogy "The Old Clock on the
Stairs." For the better part of his life he lived in Cambridge,
where he was surrounded by a rare circle of friends, and whither
increasing numbers came from near or far to pay the tribute of
gratitude to one who had made life more beautiful by his singing.
Once only the serenity was broken by a tragedy, the death of the
poet's wife, who was fatally burned before his eyes,--a tragedy
which occasioned his translation of Dante's _Divina Commedia_
(by which work he strove to keep his sorrow from overwhelming him)
and the exquisite "Cross of Snow." The latter seemed too sacred for
publication; it was found, after the poet's death, among his
private papers.
[Sidenote: HIS WORK AND INFLUENCE]
Reading Longfellow's poems one would never suspect that they were
produced in an age of turmoil. To be sure, one finds a few poems on
slavery (sentimental effusions, written on shipboard to relieve the
monotony of a voyage), but these were better unwritten since they
added nothing to the poet's song and took nothing from the slave's
burden. Longfellow has been criticized for his inaction in the
midst of tumult, but possibly he had his reasons. When everybody's
shouting is an excellent time to hold your tongue. He had his own
work to do, a work for which he was admirably fitted; that he did
not turn aside from it is to his credit and our profit. One demand
of his age was, as we have noted elsewhere, to enter into the
wealth of European poetry; and he gave thirty years of his life to
satisfying that demand. Our own poetry was then sentimental, a kind
of "sugared angel-cake"; and Longfellow, who was sentimental enough
but whose sentiment was balanced by scholarship, made poetry that
was like wholesome bread to common men. Lowell was a more brilliant
writer, and Whittier a more inspired singer; but neither did a work
for American letters that is comparable to that of Longfellow, who
was essentially an educator, a teacher of new ideas, new values,
new beauty. His influence in broadening our literary culture, in
deepening our sympathy for the poets of other lands, and in making
our own poetry a true expression of American feeling is beyond
measure.
MINOR POEMS. It was by his first simple poems that Longfellow won the
hearts of his people, and by them he is still most widely and gratefully
remembered. To name these old favorites ("The Day is Done," "Resignation,"
"Ladder of St. Augustine," "Rainy Day," "Footsteps of Angels," "Light of
Stars," "Reaper and the Flowers," "Hymn to the Night," "Midnight Mass,"
"Excelsior," "Village Blacksmith," "Psalm of Life") is to list many of the
poems that are remembered and quoted wherever in the round world the
English language is spoken.
[Sidenote: VESPER SONGS]
Ordinarily such poems are accepted at their face value as a true expression
of human sentiment; but if we examine them critically, remembering the
people for whom they were written, we may discover the secret of their
popularity. The Anglo-Saxons are first a busy and then a religious folk;
when their day's work is done their thoughts turn naturally to higher
matters; and any examination of Longfellow's minor works shows that a large
proportion of them deal with the thoughts or feelings of men at the close
of day. Such poems would be called _Abendlieder_ in German; a good
Old-English title for them would be "Evensong"; and both titles suggest the
element of faith or worship. In writing these poems Longfellow had,
unconsciously perhaps, the same impulse that leads one man to sing a hymn
and another to say his prayers when the day is done. Because he expresses
this almost universal feeling simply and reverently, his work is dear to
men and women who would not have the habit of work interfere with the
divine instinct of worship.
Further examination of these minor poems shows them to be filled with
sentiment that often slips over the verge of sentimentality. The sentiments
expressed are not of the exalted, imaginative kind; they are the sentiments
of plain people who feel deeply but who can seldom express their feeling.
Now, most people are sentimental (though we commonly try to hide the fact,
more's the pity), and we are at heart grateful to the poet who says for us
in simple, musical language what we are unable or ashamed to say for
ourselves. In a word, the popularity of Longfellow's poems rests firmly on
the humanity of the poet.
[Sidenote: TYPICAL POEMS]
Besides these vesper songs are a hundred other short poems, among which the
reader must make his own selection. The ballads should not be neglected,
for Longfellow knew how to tell a story in verse. If he were too prone to
add a moral to his tale (a moral that does not speak for itself were better
omitted), we can overlook the fault, since his moral was a good one and his
readers liked it. The "occasional" poems, also, written to celebrate
persons or events (such as "Building of the Ship," "Hanging of the Crane,"
"Morituri Salutamus," "Bells of Lynn," "Robert Burns," "Chamber over the
Gate") well deserved the welcome which the American people gave them. And
the sonnets (such as "Three Friends," "Victor and Vanquished," "My Books,"
"Nature," "Milton," "President Garfield," "Giotto's Tower") are not only
the most artistic of Longfellow's works but rank very near to the best
sonnets in the English language.
AMERICAN IDYLS. In the same spirit in which Tennyson wrote his _English
Idyls_ the American poet sent forth certain works reflecting the beauty
of common life on this side of the ocean; and though he never collected or
gave them a name, we think of them as his "American Idyls." Many of his
minor poems belong to this class, but we are thinking especially of
_Evangeline_, _Miles Standish_ and _Hiawatha_. The
last-named, with its myths and legends clustering around one heroic
personage, is commonly called an epic; but its songs of Chibiabos,
Minnehaha, Nokomis and the little Hiawatha are more like idyllic pictures
of the original Americans.
[Sidenote: EVANGELINE]
_Evangeline: a Tale of Acadie_ (1847) met the fate of Longfellow's
earlier poems in that it was promptly attacked by a few critics while a
multitude of people read it with delight. Its success may be explained on
four counts. First, it is a charming story, not a "modern" or realistic but
a tender, pathetic story such as we read in old romances, and such as young
people will cherish so long as they remain young people. Second, it had a
New World setting, one that was welcomed in Europe because it offered
readers a new stage, more vast, shadowy, mysterious, than that to which
they were accustomed; and doubly welcomed here because it threw the glamor
of romance over familiar scenes which deserved but had never before found
their poet. Third, this old romance in a new setting was true to universal
human nature; its sentiments of love, faith and deathless loyalty were such
as make the heart beat faster wherever true hearts are found. Finally, it
was written in an unusual verse form, the unrimed hexameter, which
Longfellow handled as well, let us say, as most other English poets who
have tried to use that alluring but difficult measure. For hexameters are
like the Italian language, which is very easy to "pick up," but which few
foreigners ever learn to speak with the rhythm and melody of a child of
Tuscany.
Longfellow began his hexameters fairly well, as witness the opening lines
of _Evangeline_:
This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.
Occasionally also he produced a very good but not quite perfect line or
passage:
And as the voice of the priest repeated the service of sorrow,
So with a mournful sound, like the voice of a vast congregation,
Solemnly answered the sea, and mingled its roar with the dirges.
One must confess, however, that such passages are exceptional, and that one
must change the proper stress of a word too frequently to be enthusiastic
over Longfellow's hexameters. Some of his lines halt or hobble, refusing to
move to the chosen measure, and others lose all their charm when spoken
aloud:
When she had passed it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music.
That line has been praised by critics, but one must believe that they never
pronounced it. To voice its sibilant hissing is to understand the symbol
for a white man in the Indian sign language; that is, two fingers of a hand
extended before the face, like the fork of a serpent's tongue. [Footnote:
This curious symbol, a snake's tongue to represent an Englishman, was
invented by some Indian whose ears were pained by a language in which the
_s_ sounds occur too frequently. Our plurals are nearly all made that
way, unfortunately; but Longfellow was able to make a hissing line without
the use of a single plural.] On the whole, Longfellow's verse should be
judged not by itself but as a part of the tale he was telling. Holmes
summed up the first impression of many readers by saying that he found
these "brimming lines" an excellent medium for a charming story.
That is more than one can truthfully say of the next important idyl, _The
Courtship of Miles Standish_ (1858). The story is a good one and, more
than all the histories, has awakened a romantic interest in the Pilgrims;
but its unhappy hexameters go jolting along, continually upsetting the
musical rhythm, until we wish that the tale had been told in either prose
or poetry.
[Sidenote: SONG OF HIAWATHA]
_The Song of Hiawatha_ (1855) was Longfellow's greatest work, and by
it he will probably be longest remembered as a world poet. The materials
for this poem, its musical names, its primitive traditions, its fascinating
folklore, were all taken from Schoolcraft's books about the Ojibway
Indians; its peculiar verse form, with its easy rhythm and endless
repetition, was copied from the _Kalevala_, the national epic of
Finland. Material and method, the tale and the verse form, were finely
adapted to each other; and though Longfellow showed no originality in
_Hiawatha_, his poetic talent or genius appears in this: that these
tales of childhood are told in a childlike spirit; that these forest
legends have the fragrance of hemlock in them; and that as we read them,
even now, we seem to see the wigwam with its curling smoke, and beyond the
wigwam the dewy earth, the shining river, and the blue sky with its pillars
of tree trunks and its cloud of rustling leaves. The simplicity and
naturalness of primitive folklore is in this work of Longfellow, who of a
hundred writers at home and abroad was the first to reveal the poetry in
the soul of an Indian.
As the poem is well known we forbear quotation; as it is too long, perhaps,
we express a personal preference in naming "Hiawatha's Childhood," his
"Friends," his "Fishing" and his "Wooing" as the parts most likely to
please the beginner. The best that can be said of _Hiawatha_ is that
it adds a new tale to the world's storybook. That book of the centuries has
only a few stories, each of which portrays a man from birth to death,
fronting the problems of this life, meeting its joy or sorrow in man
fashion, and then setting his face bravely to "Ponemah," the Land of the
Hereafter. That Longfellow added a chapter to the volume which preserves
the stories of Ulysses, Beowulf, Arthur and Roland is undoubtedly his best
or most enduring achievement.
[Illustration: THE TAPROOM, WAYSIDE INN, SUDBURY]
HIS EXPERIMENTAL WORKS. Unless the student wants to encourage a sentimental
mood by reading _Hyperion_, Longfellow's prose works need not detain
us. Much more valuable and readable are his translations from various
European languages, and of these his metrical version of _The Divine
Comedy_ of Dante is most notable. He attempted also several dramatic
works, among which _The Spanish Student_ (1843) is still readable,
though not very convincing. In _Christus: a Mystery_ he attempted a
miracle play of three acts, dealing with Christianity in the apostolic,
medieval and modern eras; but not even his admirers were satisfied with the
result. "The Golden Legend" (one version of which Caxton printed on the
first English press, and which a score of different poets have paraphrased)
is the only part of _Christus_ that may interest young readers by its
romantic portrayal of the Middle Ages. To name such works is to suggest
Longfellow's varied interests and his habit of experimenting with any
subject or verse form that attracted him in foreign literatures.
The _Tales of a Wayside Inn_ (1863-1873) is the most popular of
Longfellow's miscellaneous works. Here are a score of stories from ancient
or modern sources, as told by a circle of the poet's friends in the Red
Horse Inn, at Sudbury. The title suggests at once the _Canterbury
Tales_ of Chaucer; but it would be unwise to make any comparison between
the two works or the two poets. The ballad of "Paul Revere's Ride" is the
best known of the _Wayside Inn_ poems; the Viking tales of "The Saga
of King Olaf" are the most vigorous; the mellow coloring of the Middle Ages
appears in such stories as "The Legend Beautiful" and "The Bell of Atri."
CHARACTERISTICS OF LONGFELLOW. The broad sympathy of Longfellow, which made
him at home in the literatures of a dozen nations, was one of his finest
qualities. He lived in Cambridge; he wrote in English; he is called the
poet of the American home; but had he lived in Finland and written in a
Scandinavian tongue, his poems must still appeal to us. Indeed, so simply
did he reflect the sentiments of the human heart that Finland or any other
nation might gladly class him among its poets.
[Sidenote: A POET OF ALL PEOPLES]
For example, many Englishmen have written about their Wellington, but, as
Hearn says, not even Tennyson's poem on the subject is quite equal to
Longfellow's "Warden of the Cinque Ports." The spirit of the Spanish
missions, with their self-sacrificing monks and their soldiers "with hearts
of fire and steel," is finely reflected in "The Bells of San Blas." The
half-superstitious loyalty of the Russian peasant for his hereditary ruler
has never been better reflected than in "The White Czar." The story of
Belisarius has been told in scores of histories and books of poetry; but
you will feel a deeper sympathy for the neglected old Roman soldier in
Longfellow's poem than in anything else you may find on the same theme. And
there are many other foreign heroes or brave deeds that find beautiful
expression in the verse of our American poet. Of late it has become almost
a critical habit to disparage Longfellow; but no critic has pointed out
another poet who has reflected with sympathy and understanding the feelings
of so many widely different peoples.
[Illustration: LONGFELLOW'S LIBRARY IN CRAIGIE HOUSE, CAMBRIDGE]
Naturally such a poet had his limitations. In comparison with Chaucer, for
example, we perceive instantly that Longfellow knew only one side of life,
the better side. Unhappy or rebellious or turbulent souls were beyond his
ken. He wrote only for those who work by day and sometimes go to evensong
at night, who hopefully train their children or reverently bury their dead,
and who cleave to a writer that speaks for them the fitting word of faith
or cheer or consolation on every proper occasion. As humanity is largely
made of such men and women, Longfellow will always be a popular poet. For
him, with his serene outlook, there were not nine Muses but only three, and
their names were Faith, Hope and Charity.
[Sidenote: POETIC FAULTS]
Concerning his faults, perhaps the most illuminating thing that can be said
is that critics emphasize and ordinary readers ignore them. The reason for
this is that every poem has two elements, form and content: a critic looks
chiefly at the one, an ordinary reader at the other. Because the form of
Longfellow's verse is often faulty it is easy to criticize him, to show
that he copies the work of others, that he lacks originality, that his
figures are often forced or questionable; but the reader, the young reader
especially, may be too much interested in the charm of the poet's story or
the truth of his sentiment to dissect his poetic figures. Thus, in the
best-known of his earlier poems, "A Psalm of Life," he uses the famous
metaphor of "footprints on the sands of time." That is so bad a figure that
to analyze is to reject it; yet it never bothers young people, who would
understand the poet and like him just as well even had he written
"signboards" instead of "footprints." The point is that Longfellow is so
obviously a true and pleasant poet that his faults easily escape attention
unless we look for them. There is perhaps no better summary of our poet's
qualities than to record again the simple fact that he is the poet of young
people, to whom sentiment is the very breath of life. Should you ask the
reason for his supremacy in this respect, the answer is a paradox.
Longfellow was not an originator; he had no new song to sing, no new tale
to tell. He was the poet of old heroes, old legends, old sentiments and
ideals. Therefore he is the poet of youth.
* * * * *
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER (1807-1892)
The strange mixture of warrior and peace lover in Whittier has led to a
strange misjudgment of his work. From the obscurity of a New England farm
he emerged as the champion of the Abolitionist party, and for thirty
tumultuous years his poems were as war cries. By such work was he judged as
"the trumpeter of a cause," and the judgment stood between him and his
audience when he sang not of a cause but of a country. Even at the present
time most critics speak of Whittier as "the antislavery poet." Stedman, for
example, focuses our attention on certain lyrics of reform which he calls
"words wrung from the nation's heart"; but the plain fact is that only a
small part of the nation approved these lyrics or took any interest in the
poet who wrote them.
Such was Whittier on one side, a militant poet of reform, sending forth
verses that had the brattle of trumpets and the waving of banners in them:
Lift again the stately emblem on the Bay State's rusted shield,
Give to Northern winds the Pine Tree on our banner's tattered field.
Sons of men who sat in council with their Bibles round the board,
Answering England's royal missive with a firm, "Thus saith the Lord!"
Rise again for home and freedom! set the battle in array!
What the fathers did of old time we their sons must do to-day.
On the other side he was a Friend, or Quaker, and the peaceful spirit of
his people found expression in lyrics of faith that have no equal in our
poetry. He was also a patriot to the core. He loved America with a profound
love; her ideals, her traditions, her epic history were in his blood, and
he glorified them in ballads and idyls that reflect the very spirit of
brave Colonial days. To judge Whittier as a trumpeter, therefore, is to
neglect all that is important in his work; for his reform poems merely
awaken the dying echoes of party clamor, while his ballads and idyls belong
to the whole American people, and his hymns of faith to the wider audience
of humanity.
LIFE. The span of Whittier's life was almost the span of the
nineteenth century. He was born (1807) in the homestead of his
ancestors at Haverhill, Massachusetts, and spent his formative
years working in the fields by day, reading beside the open fire at
night, and spending a few terms in a "deestrict" school presided
over by teachers who came or went with the spring. His schooling
was, therefore, of the scantiest kind; his real education came from
a noble home, from his country's history, from his toil and outdoor
life with its daily contact with nature. The love of home and of
homely virtues, the glorification of manhood and womanhood, the
pride of noble traditions, and always a background of meadow or
woodland or sounding sea,--these were the subjects of Whittier's
best verse, because these were the things he knew most intimately.
[Sidenote: FIRST VERSES]
It was a song of Burns that first turned Whittier to poetry; but
hardly had he begun to write songs of his own when Garrison, the
antislavery agitator, turned his thought from the peaceful farm to
the clamoring world beyond. Attracted by certain verses (Whittier's
sister Elizabeth had sent them secretly to Garrison's paper) the
editor came over to see his contributor and found to his surprise a
country lad who was in evident need of education. Instead of asking
for more poetry, therefore, Garrison awakened the boy's ambition.
For two terms he attended the Haverhill Academy, supporting himself
meanwhile by making shoes. Then his labor was needed at home; but
finding his health too delicate for farm work he chose other
occupations and contributed manfully to the support of his family.
[Illustration: JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER]
For several years thereafter Whittier was like a man trying to find
himself. He did factory work; he edited newspapers; he showed a
talent for political leadership; he made poems which he sold at a
price to remind him of what he had once received for making shoes.
While poetry and politics both called to him alluringly a crisis
arose; Garrison summoned him; and with a sad heart, knowing that he
left all hope of political or literary success behind, he went over
to the Abolitionist party. That was in 1833, when Whittier was
twenty-six years old. At that time the Abolitionists were detested
in the North as well as in the South, and to join them was to
become an outcast.
[Sidenote: STORM AND STRESS]
Then came the militant period of Whittier's life. He became editor
of antislavery journals; he lectured in the cause; he was stoned
for his utterances; his printing shop was burned by a mob.
Meanwhile his poems were sounding abroad like trumpet blasts,
making friends, making enemies. It was a passionate age, when
political enemies were hated like Hessians, but Whittier was always
chivalrous with his opponents. Read his "Randolph of Roanoke" for a
specific example. His "Laus Deo" (1865), a chant of exultation
written when he heard the bells ringing the news of the
constitutional amendment prohibiting slavery, was the last poem of
this period of storm and stress.
[Illustration: OAK KNOLL, WHITTIER'S HOME, DANVERS, MASSACHUSETTS]
In the following year Whittier produced _Snow-Bound_, his
masterpiece. Though he had been writing for half a century, he had
never won either fame or money by his verse; but the publication of
this beautiful idyl placed him in the front rank of American poets.
Thereafter he was a national figure, and the magazines which once
scorned his verses were now most eager to print them. So he made an
end of the poverty which had been his portion since childhood.
[Sidenote: PEACEFUL YEARS]
For the remainder of his life he lived serenely at Amesbury, for
the most part, in a modest house presided over by a relative. He
wrote poetry now more carefully, for a wider audience, and every
few years saw another little volume added to his store: _Ballads
of New England_, _Miriam and Other Poems_, _Hazel
Blossoms_, _Poems of Nature_, _St. Gregory's Quest_,
_At Sundown_. When he died (1892) he was honored not so widely
perhaps as Longfellow, but more deeply, as we honor those whose
peace has been won through manful strife. Holmes, the ready poet of
all occasions, expressed a formal but sincere judgment in the
lines:
Best loved and saintliest of our singing train,
Earth's noblest tributes to thy name belong:
A lifelong record closed without a stain,
A blameless memory shrined in deathless song.
EARLIER WORKS. [Footnote: Though we are concerned here with Whittier's
poetry, we should at least mention certain of his prose works, such as
_Legends of New England_, _Leaves from Margaret Smith's Journal_
and _Old Portraits and Modern Sketches_. The chief value of these is
in their pictures of Colonial life.] In Whittier's poetry we note three
distinct stages, and note also that he was on the wrong trail until he
followed his own spirit. His earliest work was inspired by Burns, but this
was of no consequence. Next he fell under the spell of Scott and wrote
"Mogg Megone" and "The Bridal of Pennacook." These Indian romances in verse
are too much influenced by Scott's border poems and also by sentimental
novels of savage life, such as Mrs. Child's _Hobomok_; they do not
ring true, and in this respect are like almost everything else in
literature on the subject of the Indians.
[Sidenote: REFORM POEMS]
In _Voices of Freedom_ (1849) and other poems inspired by the
antislavery campaign Whittier for the first time came close to his own age.
He was no longer an echo but a voice, a man's voice, shouting above a
tumult. He spoke not for the nation but for a party; and it was inevitable
that his reform lyrics should fall into neglect with the occasions that
called them forth. They are interesting now not as poems but as sidelights
on a critical period of our history. Their intensely passionate quality
appears in "Faneuil Hall," "Song of the Free," "The Pine Tree," "Randolph
of Roanoke" and "The Farewell of an Indian Slave Mother."
There is a fine swinging rhythm in these poems, in "Massachusetts to
Virginia" especially, which recalls Macaulay's "Armada"; and two of them at
least show astonishing power and vitality. One is "Laus Deo," to which we
have referred in our story of the poet's life. The other is "Ichabod"
(1850), written after the "Seventh of March Speech" of Webster, when that
statesman seemed to have betrayed the men who elected and trusted him.
Surprise, anger, scorn, indignation, sorrow,--all these emotions were
loosed in a flood after Webster's speech; but Whittier waited till he had
fused them into one emotion, and when his slow words fell at last they fell
with the weight of judgment and the scorching of fire upon their victim. If
words could kill a man, these surely are the words. "Ichabod" is the most
powerful poem of its kind in our language; but it is fearfully unjust to
Webster. Those who read it should read also "The Lost Occasion," written
thirty years later, which Whittier placed next to "Ichabod" in the final
edition of his poems. So he tried to right a wrong (unfortunately after the
victim was dead) by offering generous tribute to the statesman he had once
misjudged.
BALLADS AND AMERICAN IDYLS. Whittier's manly heart and his talent for
flowing verse made him an excellent ballad writer; but his work in this
field is so different from that of his predecessors that he came near to
inventing a new type of poetry. Thus, many of the old ballads celebrate the
bravery that mounts with fighting; but Whittier always lays emphasis on the
higher quality that we call moral courage. "Barclay of Ury" will illustrate
our criticism: the verse has a martial swing; the hero is a veteran who has
known the lust of battle; but his courage now appears in self-mastery, in
the ability to bear in silence the jeers of a mob. Again, the old ballad
aims to tell a story, nothing else, and drives straight to its mark; but
Whittier portrays the whole landscape and background of the action. He
deals largely with Colonial life in New England, and his descriptions of
place and people are unrivaled in our poetry. Read one of his typical
ballads, "The Wreck of Rivermouth" or "The Witch's Daughter" or "The
Garrison of Cape Ann" or "Skipper Ireson's Ride," and see how closely he
identifies himself with the place and time of his story.
[Illustration: STREET IN OLD MARBLEHEAD
Skipper Ireson's home on extreme right]
[Sidenote: PATRIOTIC QUALITY]
There is one quality, however, in which our Quaker poet resembles the old
ballad makers, namely, his intense patriotism, and this recalls the fact
that ballads were the first histories, the first expression not only of
brave deeds but of the national pride which the deeds symbolized. Though
Whittier keeps himself modestly in the background, as a story teller ought
to do, he can never quite repress the love of his native land or the
quickened heartbeats that set his verse marching as if to the drums. This
patriotism, though intense, was never intolerant but rather sympathetic
with men of other lands, as appears in "The Pipes at Lucknow", a ballad
dealing with a dramatic incident of the Sepoy Rebellion. The Scotsman who
could read that ballad unmoved, without a kindling of the eye or a stirring
of the heart, would be unworthy of his clan or country.
Even better than Whittier's ballads are certain narrative poems reflecting
the life of simple people, to which we give the name of idyls. "Telling the
Bees," "In School Days," "My Playmate," "Maud Muller," "The Barefoot
Boy,"--there are no other American poems quite like these, none so tender,
none written with such perfect sympathy. Some of them are like photographs;
and the lens that gathered them was not a glass but a human heart. Others
sing the emotion of love as only Whittier, the Galahad of poets, could have
sung it,--as in this stanza from "A Sea Dream":
Draw near, more near, forever dear!
Where'er I rest or roam,
Or in the city's crowded streets,
Or by the blown sea foam,
The thought of thee is home!
SNOW-BOUND. The best of Whittier's idyls is _Snow-Bound_ (1866), into
which he gathered a boy's tenderest memories. In naming this as the best
poem in the language on the subject of home we do not offer a criticism but
an invitation. Because all that is best in human life centers in the ideal
of home, and because Whittier reflected that ideal in a beautiful way,
_Snow-Bound_ should be read if we read nothing else of American
poetry. There is perhaps only one thing to prevent this idyl from becoming
a universal poem: its natural setting can be appreciated only by those who
live within the snow line, who have seen the white flakes gather and drift,
confining every family to the circle of its own hearth fire in what Emerson
calls "the tumultuous privacy of storm."
The plan of the poem is simplicity itself. It opens with a description of a
snowstorm that thickens with the December night. The inmates of an old
farmhouse gather about the open fire, and Whittier describes them one by
one, how they looked to the boy (for _Snow-Bound_ is a recollection of
boyhood), and what stories they told to reveal their interests. The rest of
the poem is a reverie, as of one no longer a boy, who looks into his fire
and sees not the fire-pictures but those other scenes or portraits that are
graved deep in every human heart.
[Sidenote: CHARM OF SNOW-BOUND]
To praise such a work is superfluous, and to criticize its artless
sincerity is beyond our ability. Many good writers have explained the poem;
yet still its deepest charm escapes analysis, perhaps because it has no
name. The best criticism that the present writer ever heard on the subject
came from a Habitant farmer in the Province of Quebec, a simple, unlettered
man, who was a poet at heart but who would have been amazed had anyone told
him so. His children, who were learning English literature through the
happy medium of _Evangeline_ and _Snow-Bound_, brought the latter
poem home from school, and the old man would sit smoking his pipe and
listening to the story. When they read of the winter scenes, of the fire
roaring its defiance up the chimney-throat at the storm without,
What matter how the night behaved?
What matter how the north-wind raved?
Blow high, blow low, not all its snow
Could quench our hearth-fire's ruddy glow,--
then he would stir in his chair, make his pipe glow fiercely, and blow a
cloud of smoke about his head. But in the following scene, with its
memories of the dead and its immortal hope, he would sit very still, as if
listening to exquisite music. When asked why he liked the poem his face
lighted: "W'y I lak heem, M'sieu Whittier? I lak heem 'cause he speak de
true. He know de storm, and de leetle _cabane_, and heart of de boy
an' hees moder. _Oui, oui_, he know de man also."
Nature, home, the heart of a boy and a man and a mother,--the poet who can
reflect such elemental matters so that the simple of earth understand and
love their beauty deserves the critic's best tribute of silence.
POEMS OF FAITH AND NATURE. Aside from the reform poems it is hard to group
Whittier's works, which are all alike in that they portray familiar scenes
against a natural background. In his _Tent on the Beach_ (1867) he
attempted a collection of tales in the manner of Longfellow's _Wayside
Inn_, but of these only one or two ballads, such as "Abraham Davenport"
and "The Wreck of Rivermouth," are now treasured. The best part of the book
is the "Prelude," which pictures the poet among his friends and records his
impressions of sky and sea and shore.
[Sidenote: TWO VIEWS OF NATURE]
The outdoor poems of Whittier are interesting, aside from their own beauty,
as suggesting two poetic conceptions of nature which have little in common.
The earlier regards nature as a mistress to be loved or a divinity to be
worshiped for her own sake; she has her own laws or mercies, and man is but
one of her creatures. The Anglo-Saxon scops viewed nature in this way; so
did Bryant, in whose "Forest Hymn" is the feeling of primitive ages. Many
modern poets (and novelists also, like Scott and Cooper) have outgrown this
conception; they regard nature as a kind of stage for the drama of human
life, which is all-important.
Whittier belongs to this later school; he portrays nature magnificently,
but always as the background for some human incident, sad or tender or
heroic, which appears to us more real because viewed in its natural
setting. Note in "The Wreck of Rivermouth," for example, how the merry
party in their sailboat, the mowers on the salt marshes, the "witch"
mumbling her warning, the challenge of a careless girl, the skipper's fear,
the river, the breeze, the laughing sea,--everything is exactly as it
should be. It is this humanized view of the natural world which makes
Whittier's ballads unique and which gives deeper meaning to his "Hampton
Beach," "Among the Hills," "Trailing Arbutus," "The Vanishers" and other of
his best nature poems.
[Sidenote: WHITTIER'S CREED]
Our reading of Whittier should not end until we are familiar with "The
Eternal Goodness," "Trust," "My Soul and I," "The Prayer of Agassiz" and a
few more of his hymns of faith. Our appreciation of such hymns will be more
sympathetic if we remember, first, that Whittier came of ancestors whose
souls approved the opening proposition of the Declaration of Independence;
and second, that he belonged to the Society of Friends, who believed that
God revealed himself directly to every human soul (the "inner light" they
called it), and that a man's primal responsibility was to God and his own
conscience. The creed of Whittier may therefore be summarized in two
articles: "I believe in the Divine love and in the equality of men." The
latter article appears in all his poems; the former is crystallized in "The
Eternal Goodness," a hymn so trustful and reverent that it might well be
the evensong of humanity.
CHARACTERISTICS OF WHITTIER. One may summarize Whittier in the statement
that he is the poet of the home and the hills, and of that freedom without
which the home loses its chief joy and the hill its inspiration. In writing
of such themes Whittier failed to win the highest honors of a poet; and the
failure was due not to his lack of culture, as is sometimes alleged (for
there is no other culture equal to right living), but rather to the stern
conditions of his life, to his devotion to duty, to his struggle for
liberty, to his lifelong purpose of helping men by his singing. Great poems
are usually the result of seclusion, of aloofness, but Whittier was always
a worker in the world.
[Sidenote: A NATURAL SINGER]
His naturalness is perhaps his best poetic virtue. There is in his verse a
spontaneous "singing" quality which leaves the impression that poetry was
his native language. It is easy to understand why Burns first attracted
him, for both poets were natural singers who remind us of what Bede wrote
of Cadmon: "He learned not the art of poetry from men." Next to his
spontaneity is his rare simplicity, his gift of speaking straight from a
heart that never grew old. Sometimes his simplicity is as artless as that
of a child, as in "Maud Muller"; generally it is noble, as in his modest
"Proem" to _Voices of Freedom_; occasionally it is passionate, as in
the exultant cry of "Laus Deo"; and at times it rises to the simplicity of
pure art, as in "Telling the Bees." The last-named poem portrays an old
Colonial custom which provided that when death came to a farmhouse the bees
must be told and their hives draped in mourning. It portrays also, as a
perfect, natural background, the path to Whittier's home and his sister's
old-fashioned flower garden, in which the daffodils still bloom where she
planted them long ago.
[Sidenote: THE MAN AND THE POET]
That Whittier was not a great poet, as the critics assure us, may be
frankly admitted. That he had elements of greatness is also without
question; and precisely for this reason, because his power is so often
manifest in noble or exquisite passages, there is disappointment in reading
him when we stumble upon bad rimes, careless workmanship, mishandling of
his native speech. Our experience here is probably like that of Whittier's
friend Garrison. The latter had read certain poems that attracted him; he
came quickly to see the poet; and out from under the barn, his clothes
sprinkled with hayseed, crawled a shy country lad who explained bashfully
that he had been hunting hens' nests. Anything could be forgiven after
that; interest in the boy would surely temper criticism of the poet.
Even so our present criticism of Whittier's verse must include certain
considerations of the man who wrote it: that he smacked of his native soil;
that his education was scanty and hardly earned; that he used words as his
father and mother used them, and was not ashamed of their rural accent. His
own experience, moreover, had weathered him until he seemed part of a
rugged landscape. He knew life, and he loved it. He had endured poverty,
and glorified it. He had been farm hand, shoemaker, self-supporting
student, editor of country newspapers, local politician, champion of
slaves, worker for reform, defender of a hopeless cause that by the awful
judgment of war became a winning cause. And always and everywhere he had
been a man, one who did his duty as he saw it, spake truth as he believed
it, and kept his conscience clean, his heart pure, his faith unshaken. All
this was in his verse and ennobled even his faults, which were part of his
plain humanity. As Longfellow was by study of European literatures the poet
of books and culture, so Whittier was by experience the poet of life. The
homely quality of his verse, which endears it to common men, is explained
on the ground that he was nearer than any other American poet to the body
and soul of his countrymen.
* * * * *
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL (1819-1891)
The work of Lowell is unusual and his rank or position hard to define.
Though never a great or even a popular writer, he was regarded for a
considerable part of his life as the most prominent man of letters in
America. At the present time his reputation is still large, but historians
find it somewhat easier to praise his works than to read them. As poet,
critic, satirist, editor and teacher he loomed as a giant among his
contemporaries, overtopping Whittier and Longfellow at one time; but he
left no work comparable to _Snow-Bound_ or _Hiawatha_, and one is
puzzled to name any of his poems or essays that are fairly certain to give
pleasure. To read his volumes is to meet a man of power and brilliant
promise, but the final impression is that the promise was not fulfilled,
that the masterpiece of which Lowell was capable was left unwritten.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. Lowell came from a distinguished family that
had "made history" in America. His father was a cultured clergyman;
he grew up in a beautiful home, "Elmwood," in the college town of
Cambridge; among his first companions were the noble books that
filled the shelves of the family library. From the beginning,
therefore, he was inclined to letters; and though he often turned
aside for other matters, his first and last love was the love of
poetry.
At fifteen he entered Harvard, where he read almost everything, he
said, except the books prescribed by the faculty. Then he studied
law and opened an office in Boston, where he found few clients,
being more interested in writing verses than in his profession.
With his marriage in 1844 the first strong purpose seems to have
entered his indolent life. His wife was zealous in good works, and
presently Lowell, who had gayly satirized all reformers, joined in
the antislavery campaign and proceeded to make as many enemies as
friends by his reform poems.
[Illustration: JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL]
[Sidenote: VARIED TASKS]
Followed then a period of hard, purposeful work, during which he
supported himself by editing _The Pennsylvania Freeman_ and by
writing for the magazines. In 1848, his banner year, he published
his best volume of _Poems_, _Sir Launfal_, _A Fable for
Critics_ and the first series of _The Biglow Papers_. It
was not these volumes, however, but a series of brilliant lectures
on the English poets that caused Lowell to be called to the chair
in Harvard which Longfellow had resigned. He prepared for this work
by studying abroad, and for some twenty years thereafter he gave
courses in English, Italian, Spanish and German literatures. For a
part of this time he was also editor in turn of _The Atlantic
Monthly_ and _The North American Review_.
[Sidenote: LIFE ABROAD]
In the simpler days of the republic, when the first question asked
of a diplomat was not whether he had money enough to entertain
society in a proper style, the profession of letters was honored by
sending literary men to represent America in foreign courts, and
Lowell's prominence was recognized by his appointment as ambassador
to Spain (1877) and to England (1880). It was in this patriotic
service abroad that he won his greatest honors. In London
especially he made his power felt as an American who loved his
country, as a democrat who believed in democracy, and as a cultured
gentleman who understood Anglo-Saxon life because of his
familiarity with the poetry in which that life is most clearly
reflected. Next to keeping silence about his proper business,
perhaps the chief requirement of an ambassador is to make speeches
about everything else, and no other foreign speaker was ever
listened to with more pleasure than the witty and cultured Lowell.
One who summed up his diplomatic triumph said tersely that he found
the Englishmen strangers and left them all cousins.
He was recalled from this service in 1885. The remainder of his
life was spent teaching at Harvard, writing more poetry and editing
his numerous works. His first volume of poems, _A Year's
Life_, was published in 1841; his last volume, _Heartsease and
Rue_, appeared almost half a century later, in 1888. That his
death occurred in the same house in which he was born and in which
he had spent the greater part of his life is an occurrence so rare
in America that it deserves a poem of commemoration.
LOWELL'S POETRY. There are golden grains everywhere in Lowell's verse but
never a continuous vein of metal. In other words, even his best work is
notable for occasional lines rather than for sustained excellence. As a
specific example study the "Commemoration Ode," one of the finest poems
inspired by the Civil War. The occasion of this ode, to commemorate the
college students who had given their lives for their country, was all that
a poet might wish; the brilliant audience that gathered at Cambridge was
most inspiring; and beyond that local audience stood a nation in mourning,
a nation which had just lost a million of its sons in a mighty conflict. It
was such an occasion as Lowell loved, and one who reads the story of his
life knows how earnestly he strove to meet it. When the reading of his poem
was finished his audience called it "a noble effort," and that is precisely
the trouble with the famous ode; it is too plainly an effort. It does not
sing, does not overflow from a full heart, does not speak the inevitable,
satisfying word. In consequence (and perhaps this criticism applies to most
ambitious odes) we are rather glad when the "effort" is at an end. Yet
there are excellent passages in the poem, notably the sixth and the last
stanzas, one with its fine tribute to Lincoln, the other expressive of
deathless loyalty to one's native land.
[Sidenote: LYRICS]
The best of Lowell's lyrics may be grouped in two classes, the first
dealing with his personal joy or grief, the second with the feelings of the
nation. Typical of the former are "The First Snowfall" and a few other
lyrics reflecting the poet's sorrow for the loss of a little
daughter,--simple, human poems, in refreshing contrast with most others of
Lowell, which strive for brilliancy. The best of the national lyrics is
"The Present Crisis" (1844). This was at first a party poem, a ringing
appeal issued during the turmoil occasioned by the annexation of Texas; but
now, with the old party issues forgotten, we can all read it with pleasure
as a splendid expression of the American heart and will in every crisis of
our national history.
In the nature lyrics we have a double reflection, one of the external
world, the other of a poet who could not be single-minded, and who was
always confusing his own impressions of nature or humanity with those other
impressions which he found reflected in poetry. Read the charming "To a
Dandelion," for example, and note how Lowell cannot be content with his
Dear common flower that grow'st beside the way,
Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold,
but must bring in Eldorado and twenty other poetic allusions to glorify a
flower which has no need of external glory. Then for comparison read
Bryant's "Fringed Gentian" and see how the elder poet, content with the
flower itself, tells you very simply how its beauty appeals to him. Or read
"An Indian-Summer Reverie" with its scattered lines of gold, and note how
Lowell cannot say what he feels in his own heart but must search everywhere
for poetic images; and then, because he cannot find exactly what he seeks
or, more likely, because he finds a dozen tempting allusions where one is
plenty, he goes on and on in a vain quest that ends by leaving himself and
his reader unsatisfied.
[Sidenote: SIR LAUNFAL]
The most popular of Lowell's works is _The Vision of Sir Launfal_
(1848), in which he invents an Arthurian kind of legend of the search for
the Holy Grail. Most of his long poems are labored, but this seems to have
been written in a moment of inspiration. The "Prelude" begins almost
spontaneously, and when it reaches the charming passage "And what is so
rare as a day in June?" the verse fairly begins to sing,--a rare occurrence
with Lowell. Critical readers may reasonably object to the poet's
moralizing, to his imperfect lines and to his setting of an Old World
legend of knights and castles in a New World landscape; but uncritical
readers rejoice in a moral feeling that is fine and true, and are content
with a good story and a good landscape without inquiring whether the two
belong together. Moreover, _Sir Launfal_ certainly serves the first
purpose of poetry in that it gives pleasure and so deserves its continued
popularity among young readers.
[Sidenote: SATIRES]
Two satiric poems that were highly prized when they were first published,
and that are still formally praised by historians who do not read them, are
_A Fable for Critics_ and _The Biglow Papers_. The former is a
series of doggerel verses filled with grotesque puns and quips aimed at
American authors who were prominent in 1848. The latter, written in a
tortured, "Yankee" dialect, is made up of political satires and conceits
occasioned by the Mexican and Civil wars. Both works contain occasional
fine lines and a few excellent criticisms of literature or politics, but
few young readers will have patience to sift out the good passages from the
mass of glittering rubbish in which they are hidden.
Much more worthy of the reader's attention are certain neglected works,
such as Lowell's sonnets, his "Prometheus," "Columbus," "Agassiz,"
"Portrait of Dante," "Washers of the Shroud," "Under the Old Elm" (with its
noble tribute to Washington) and "Stanzas on Freedom," It is a pity that
such poems, all of which contain memorable lines, should be kept from the
wide audience they deserve, and largely because of the author's
digressiveness. To examine them is to conclude that, like most of Lowell's
works, they are not simple enough in feeling to win ordinary readers, like
the poetry of Longfellow, and not perfect enough in form to excite the
admiration of critics, like the best of Poe's melodies.
[Illustration: LOWELL'S HOUSE, CAMBRIDGE, IN WINTER]
LOWELL'S PROSE. In brilliancy at least Lowell has no peer among American
essayists, though others excel him in the better qualities of originality
or charm or vigor. The best of his prose works are the scintillating essays
collected in _My Study Window_ and _Among My Books_. In his
political essays he looked at humanity with his own eyes, but the titles of
the volumes just named indicate his chief interest as a prose writer, which
was to interpret the world's books rather than the world's throbbing life.
For younger readers the most pleasing of the prose works are the
comparatively simple sketches, "My Garden Acquaintance," "Cambridge Thirty
Years Ago" and "On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners." In these
sketches we meet the author at his best, alert, witty and so widely read
that he cannot help giving literary flavor to whatever he writes. Among the
best of his essays on literary subjects are those on Chaucer, Dante Keats,
Walton and Emerson.
[Sidenote: QUALITY OF THE ESSAYS]
One who reads a typical collection of Lowell's essays is apt to be divided
between open admiration and something akin to resentment. On the one hand
they are brilliant, stimulating, filled with "good things"; on the other
they are always digressive, sometimes fantastic and too often
self-conscious; that is, they call our attention to the author rather than
to his proper subject. When he writes of Dante he is concerned to reveal
the soul of the Italian master; but when he writes of Milton he seems
chiefly intent on showing how much more he knows than the English editor of
Milton's works. When he presents Emerson he tries to make us know and
admire the Concord sage; but when he falls foul of Emerson's friends,
Thoreau and Carlyle, his personal prejudices are more in evidence than his
impersonal judgment. In consequence, some of the literary essays are a
better reflection of Lowell himself than of the men he wrote about.
An author must be finally measured, however, by his finest work, by his
constant purpose rather than by his changing mood; and the finest work of
Lowell, his critical studies of the elder poets and dramatists, are perhaps
the most solid and the most penetrating that our country has to show. He
certainly kept "the great tradition" in criticism, a tradition which
enjoins us, in simple language, to seek only the best and to reverence it
when we find it. As he wrote:
Great truths are portions of the soul of man;
Great souls are portions of eternity;
Each drop of blood that e'er through true heart ran
With lofty message, ran for thee and me.
* * * * *
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (1809-1894)
It is a sad fate for a writer to be known as a humorist; nobody will take
him seriously ever afterward. Even a book suffers from such a reputation,
the famous _Don Quixote_ for example, which we read as a type of
extravagant humor but which is in reality a tragedy, since it portrays the
disillusionment of a man who believed the world to be like his own heart,
noble and chivalrous, and who found it filled with villainy. Because Holmes
(who was essentially a moralist and a preacher) could not repress the
bubbling wit that was part of his nature, our historians must set him down
as a humorist and name the "One-Hoss Shay" as his most typical work. Yet
his best poems are as pathetic as "The Last Leaf," as sentimental as "The
Voiceless," as patriotic as "Old Ironsides," as worshipful as the "Hymn of
Trust," as nobly didactic as "The Chambered Nautilus"; his novels are
studies of the obscure problems of heredity, and his most characteristic
prose work, _The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_, is an original
commentary on almost everything under the sun.
Evidently we prize a laugh above any other product of literature, and
because there is a laugh or a smile hidden in many a work of Holmes he must
still keep the place assigned to him as an "American" humorist. Even so, he
is perhaps our most representative writer in this field; for he is as
thoroughly American as a man can be, and his rare culture and kindness are
in refreshing contrast to the crude horseplay or sensationalism that is
unfortunately trumpeted abroad as New World humor.
A PLACID LIFE. Though Holmes never wrote a formal autobiography he
left a very good reflection of himself in his works, and it is in
these alone that we become acquainted with him,--a genial, witty,
observant, kind-hearted and pure-hearted man whom it is good to
know.
He belonged to what he called "the Brahmin caste" of intellectual
aristocrats (as described in his novel, _Elsie Venner_), for
he came from an old New England family extending back to Anne
Bradstreet and the governors of the Bay Colony. He was born in
Cambridge; he was educated at Andover and Harvard; he spent his
life in Boston, a city which satisfied him so completely that he
called it "the hub of the solar system." Most ambitious writers
like a large field with plenty of change or variety, but Holmes was
content with a small and very select circle with himself at the
center of it.
For his profession he chose medicine and studied it four years, the
latter half of the time in Paris. At that period his foreign
training was as rare in medicine as was Longfellow's in poetry. He
practiced his profession in Boston and managed to make a success of
it, though patients were a little doubtful of a doctor who wrote
poetry and who opened his office with the remark that "small
fevers" would be "gratefully received." Also he was for thirty-five
years professor of anatomy at the Harvard Medical School. What with
healing or teaching or learning, this doctor might have been very
busy; but he seems to have found plenty of leisure for writing, and
the inclination was always present. "Whoso has once tasted type" he
said, "must indulge the taste to the end of his life."
[Illustration: OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES]
[Sidenote: THE WRITER]
His literary work began at twenty-one, when he wrote "Old
Ironsides" in protest against the order to dismantle the frigate
_Constitution_, which had made naval history in the War of
1812. That first poem, which still rings triumphantly in our ears,
accomplished two things: it saved the glorious old warship, and it
gave Holmes a hold on public attention which he never afterward
lost. During the next twenty-five years he wrote poetry, and was so
much in demand to furnish verses for special occasions that he was
a kind of poet-laureate of his college and city. He was almost
fifty when the _Atlantic Monthly_ was projected and Lowell
demanded, as a condition of his editorship, that Holmes be engaged
as the first contributor. Feeling in the mood for talk, as he
commonly did, Holmes responded with _The Autocrat_. Thereafter
he wrote chiefly in prose, making his greatest effort in fiction
but winning more readers by his table talk in the form of essays.
His last volume, _Over the Teacups_, appeared when he was past
eighty years old.
[Sidenote: PET PREJUDICES]
We have spoken of the genial quality of Holmes as revealed in his
work, but we would hardly be just to him did we fail to note his
pet prejudices, his suspicion of reformers, his scorn of
homeopathic doctors, his violent antipathy to Calvinism. Though he
had been brought up in the Calvinistic faith (his father was an
old-style clergyman), he seemed to delight in clubbing or
satirizing or slinging stones at it. The very mildest he could do
was to refer to "yon whey-faced brother" to express his opinion of
those who still clung to puritanic doctrines. Curiously enough, he
still honored his father and was proud of his godly ancestors, who
were all stanch Puritans. The explanation is, of course, that
Holmes never understood theology, not for a moment; he only
disliked it, and was consequently sure that it must be wrong and
that somebody ought to put an end to it. In later years he mellowed
somewhat. One cannot truthfully say that he overcame his prejudice,
but he understood men better and was inclined to include even
reformers and Calvinists in what he called "the larger humanity
into which I was born so long ago."
WORKS OF HOLMES. In the field of "occasional" poetry, written to celebrate
births, dedications, feasts and festivals of every kind, Holmes has never
had a peer among his countrymen. He would have made a perfect
poet-laureate, for he seemed to rise to every occasion and have on his lips
the right word to express the feeling of the moment, whether of patriotism
or sympathy or sociability. In such happy poems as "The Boys," "Bill and
Jo," "All Here" and nearly forty others written for his class reunions he
reflects the spirit of college men who gather annually to live the "good
old days" over again. [Footnote: It may add a bit of interest to these
poems if we remember that among the members of the Class of '29 was Samuel
Smith, author of "America," a poem that now appeals to a larger audience
than the class poet ever dreamed of.] He wrote also some seventy other
poems for special occasions, the quality of which may be judged from "Old
Ironsides," "Under the Violets," "Grandmother's Story" and numerous
appreciations of Lowell, Burns, Bryant, Whittier and other well-known
poets.
Among poems of more general interest the best is "The Chambered Nautilus,"
which some read for its fine moral lesson and others for its beautiful
symbolism or almost perfect workmanship. Others that deserve to be
remembered are "The Last Leaf" (Lincoln's favorite), "Nearing the Snow
Line," "Meeting of the Alumni," "Questions and Answers" and "The
Voiceless,"--none great poems but all good and very well worth the reading.
[Sidenote: HUMOROUS POEMS]
"The Deacon's Masterpiece, or the Wonderful One-Hoss Shay" is the most
popular of the humorous poems. Many readers enjoy this excellent skit
without thinking what the author meant by calling it "a logical story." It
is, in fact, the best pebble that he hurled from his sling against his
_bete noire_; for the old "shay" which went to pieces all at once was
a symbol of Calvinistic theology. That theology was called an iron chain of
logic, every link so perfectly forged that it could not be broken at any
point. Even so was the "shay" built, unbreakable in every single part; but
when the deacon finds himself sprawling and dumfounded in the road beside
the wrecked masterpiece the poet concludes:
End of the wonderful one-hoss shay.
Logic is logic. That's all I say.
Other typical verses of the same kind are "The Height of the Ridiculous,"
"Daily Trials," "The Comet" and "Contentment." In the last-named poem
Holmes may have been poking fun at the Brook Farmers and other enthusiasts
who were preaching the simple life. Poets and preachers of this gospel in
every age are apt to insist that to find simplicity one must return to
nature or the farm, or else camp in the woods and eat huckleberries, as
Thoreau did; but Holmes remembered that some people must live in the city,
while others incomprehensibly prefer to do so, and wrote his "Contentment"
to express their idea of the simple life:
Little I ask; my wants are few;
I only wish a hut of stone
(A _very plain_ brown stone will do)
That I may call my own;
And close at hand is such a one,
In yonder street that fronts the sun.
I care not much for gold or land;
Give me a mortgage here and there,
Some good bank-stock, some note of hand,
Or trifling railroad share.
I only ask that Fortune send
A _little_ more than I shall spend.
[Sidenote: THE AUTOCRAT]
The most readable of the prose works is _The Autocrat of the Breakfast
Table_ (1858), a series of monologues in which Holmes, who was called
the best talker of his age, transferred his talk in a very charming way to
paper. As the book professes to record the conversation at the table of a
certain Boston boarding-house, it has no particular subject; the author
rambles pleasantly from one topic to another, illuminating each by his
wisdom or humor or sympathy. Other books of the same series are _The
Professor at the Breakfast Table_, _The Poet at the Breakfast
Table_ and _Over the Teacups_. Most critics consider _The
Autocrat_ the best and _The Poet_ second best of the series; but
there is a tender vein of sentiment and reminiscence in the final volume
which is very attractive to older readers.
The slight story element in the breakfast-table books probably led Holmes
to fiction, and he straightway produced three novels, _Elsie Venner_,
_The Guardian Angel_ and _A Mortal Antipathy_. These are studies
of heredity, of the physical element in morals, of the influence of mind
over matter and other subjects more suitable for essays than for fiction;
but a few mature readers who care less for a story than for an observation
or theory of life will find _The Guardian Angel_ an interesting novel.
And some will surely prize _Elsie Venner_ for its pictures of New
England life, its description of boarding school or evening party or social
hierarchy, at a time when many a New England family had traditions to which
it held as firmly and almost as proudly as any European court.
[Illustration: OLD COLONIAL DOORWAY
Holmes's birthplace, at Cambridge]
THE QUALITY OF HOLMES. The intensely personal quality of the works just
mentioned is their most striking characteristic; for Holmes always looks at
a subject with his own eyes, and measures its effect on the reader by a
previous effect produced upon himself. "If I like this," he says in
substance, "why, you must like it too; if it strikes me as absurd, you
cannot take any other attitude; for are we not both human and therefore
just alike?" It never occurred to Holmes that anybody could differ with him
and still be normal; those who ventured to do so found the Doctor looking
keenly at them to discover their symptoms. In an ordinary egoist or
politician or theologian this would be insufferable; but strange to say it
is one of the charms of Holmes, who is so witty and pleasant-spoken that we
can enjoy his dogmatism without the bother of objecting to it. In one of
his books he hints that talking to certain persons is like trying to pet a
squirrel; if you are wise, you will not imitate that frisky little beast
but assume the purring-kitten attitude while listening to the Autocrat.
[Sidenote: FIRST-HAND IMPRESSIONS]
Another interesting quality of Holmes is what we may call his rationalism,
his habit of taking nothing for granted, of judging every matter by
observation rather than by tradition or sentiment or imagination; and
herein he is in marked contrast with Longfellow and other romantic writers
of the period. We shall enjoy him better if we remember his bent of mind.
As a boy he was fond of tools and machinery; as a man he was interested in
photography, safety razors, inventions of every kind; as a physician he
rebelled against drugs (then believed to have almost magical powers, and
imposed on suffering stomachs in horrible doses) and observed his patients
closely to discover what mentally ailed them; and as boy or man or
physician he cared very little for books but a great deal for his own
observation of life. Hence there is always a surprise in reading Holmes,
which comes partly from his flashes of wit but more largely from his
independent way of looking at things and recording his first-hand
impressions. His _Autocrat_ especially is a treasure and ranks with
Thoreau's _Walden_ among the most original books of American
literature.
* * * * *
SIDNEY LANIER (1842-1881)
The name of Lanier is often associated with that of Timrod, and the two
southern poets were outwardly alike in that they struggled against physical
illness and mental depression; but where we see in Timrod the tragedy of a
poet broken by pain and neglect, the tragedy of Lanier's life is forgotten
in our wonder at his triumph. It is doubtful if any other poet ever raised
so pure a song of joy out of conditions that might well have occasioned a
wail of despair.
[Illustration: SIDNEY LANIER]
The joyous song of Lanier is appreciated only by the few. He is not popular
with either readers or critics, and the difficulty of assigning him a place
or rank may be judged from recent attempts. One history of American
literature barely mentions Lanier in a slighting reference to "a small cult
of poetry in parts of America"; [Footnote: Trent, _History of American
Literature_ (1913), p. 471.] another calls him the only southern poet
who had a national horizon, and accords his work ample criticism;
[Footnote: Moses, _Literature of the South_ (1910), pp 358-383] a
third describes him as "a true artist" having "a lyric power hardly to be
found in any other American," but the brief record ends with the cutting
criticism that his work is "hardly national." [Footnote: Wendell,
_Literary History of America_ (1911), pp 495-498.] And so with all
other histories, one dismisses him as the author of a vague rhapsody called
"The Marshes of Glynn," another exalts him as a poet who rivals Poe in
melody and far surpasses him in thought or feeling. Evidently there is no
settled criticism of Lanier, as of Bryant or Longfellow; he is not yet
secure in his position among the elder poets, and what we record here is
such a personal appreciation as any reader may formulate for himself.
LIFE. America has had its Puritan and its Cavalier writers, but
seldom one who combines the Puritan's stern devotion to duty with
the Cavalier's joy in nature and romance and music. Lanier was such
a poet, and he owed his rare quality to a mixed ancestry. He was
descended on his mother's side from Scotch-Irish and Puritan
forbears, and on his father's side from Huguenot (French) exiles
who were musicians at the English court. One of his ancestors,
Nicholas Lanier, is described as "a musician, painter and engraver"
for Queen Elizabeth and King James, and as the composer of music
for some of Ben Jonson's masques.
[Sidenote: EARLY TRAITS]
His boyhood was spent at Macon, Georgia, where he was born in 1842.
A study of that boyhood reveals certain characteristics which
reappear constantly in the poet's work. One was his rare purity of
soul; another was his brave spirit; a third was his delight in
nature; a fourth was his passion for music. At seven he made his
first flute from a reed, and ever afterwards, though he learned to
play many instruments, the flute was to him as a companion and a
voice. With it he cheered many a weary march or hungry bivouac;
through it he told all his heart to the woman he loved; by it he
won a place when he had no other means of earning his bread. Hence
in "The Symphony," a poem which fronts one of life's hard problems,
it is the flute that utters the clearest and sweetest note.
[Sidenote: IN WAR TIME]
Lanier had finished his course in Oglethorpe University (a
primitive little college in Midway, Georgia) and was tutoring there
when the war came, and the college closed its doors because
teachers and students were away at the first call to join the army.
For four years he was a Confederate soldier, serving in the ranks
with his brother and refusing the promotion offered him for gallant
conduct in the field. There was a time during this period when he
might have sung like the minstrels of old, for romance had come to
him with the war. By day he was fighting or scouting with his life
in his hand; but when camp fires were lighted he would take his
flute and slip away to serenade the girl who "waited for him till
the war was over."
We mention these small incidents with a purpose. There is a
delicacy of feeling in Lanier's verse which might lead a reader to
assume that the poet was effeminate, when in truth he was as manly
as any Norse scald or Saxon scop who ever stood beside his chief in
battle. Of the war he never sang; but we find some reflection of
the girl who waited in the poem "My Springs."
[Sidenote: WAR'S AFTERMATH]
Lanier was at sea, as signal officer on a blockade runner, when his
ship was captured by a Federal cruiser and he was sent to the
military prison at Point Lookout (1864). A hard and bitter
experience it was, and his only comfort was the flute which he had
hidden in his ragged sleeve. When released the following year he
set out on foot for his home, five hundred miles away, and reached
it more dead than alive; for consumption had laid a heavy hand upon
him. For weeks he was desperately ill, and during the illness his
mother died of the same wasting disease; then he rose and set out
bravely to earn a living,--no easy matter in a place that had
suffered as Georgia had during the war.
[Sidenote: THE GLEAM]
We shall not enter into his struggle for bread, or into his
wanderings in search of a place where he could breathe without
pain. He was a law clerk in his father's office at Macon when,
knowing that he had but a slender lease of life, he made his
resolve. To the remonstrances of his father he closed his ears,
saying that music and poetry were calling him and he must follow
the call. The superb climax of Tennyson's "Merlin and the Gleam"
was in his soul:
O young mariner,
Down to the haven
Call your companions,
Launch your vessel
And crowd your canvas,
And, ere it vanishes
Over the margin,
After it, follow it,
Follow the Gleam!
Thus bravely he went northward to Baltimore, taking his flute with
him. He was evidently a wonderful artist, playing not by the score
but making his instrument his voice, so that his audience seemed to
hear a soul speaking in melody. His was a magic flute. Soon he was
supporting himself by playing in the Peabody Orchestra, living
joyously meanwhile in an atmosphere of music and poetry and books;
for he was always a student, determined to understand as well as to
practice his art. He wrote poems, stories, anything to earn an
honest dollar; he gave lectures on music and literature; he planned
a score of books that he did not and could not write, for he was
living in a fever of mind and body. Music and poetry were surging
within him for expression; but his strength was failing, his time
short.
[Sidenote: THE STRUGGLE]
In 1879 he was appointed lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, and
for the first time he had an assured income, small, indeed, but
very heartening since it was enough to support his family. He began
teaching with immense enthusiasm; but presently he was speaking in
a whisper from an invalid's chair. Under such circumstances were
uttered some of our most cheering words on art and poetry. Two
years later he died in a tent among the hills, near Asheville,
North Carolina, whither he had gone in a vain search for health.
[Illustration: THE VILLAGE OF McGAHEYSVILLE, VIRGINIA
Near here Lanier spent his summers during the last years of his life]
There is in all Lanier's verse a fragmentariness, a sense of
something left unsaid, which we may understand better if we
remember that his heart was filled with the noblest emotions, but
that when he strove to write them his pen failed for weariness.
Read the daily miracle of dawn in "Sunrise," for example, and find
there the waiting oaks, the stars, the tide, the marsh with its
dreaming pools, light, color, fragrance, melody,--everything except
that the hand which wrote the poem was too weak to guide the
pencil. The rush of impressions and memories in "Sunrise," its
tender beauty and vague incompleteness, as of something left
unsaid, may be explained by the fact that it was Lanier's last
song.
WORKS OF LANIER. Many readers have grown familiar with Lanier's name in
connection with _The Boy's Froissart_, _The Boy's King Arthur_,
_The Boy's Mabinogion_ and _The Boy's Percy_, four books in which
he retold in simple language some of the old tales that are forever young.
His chief prose works, _The English Novel_ and _The Science of
English Verse_, are of interest chiefly to critics; they need not detain
us here except to note that the latter volume is devoted to Lanier's pet
theory that music and poetry are governed by the same laws. Of more general
interest are his scattered "Notes," which contain suggestions for many a
poem that was never written, intermingled with condensed criticisms. Of the
poet Swinburne he says, "He invited me to eat; the service was silver and
gold, but no food therein except salt and pepper." One might say less than
that with more words, or read a whole book to arrive at this summary of
Whitman's style and bottomless philosophy: "Whitman is poetry's butcher;
huge raw collops slashed from the rump of poetry, and never mind the
gristle, is what he feeds our souls with.... His argument seems to be that
because the Mississippi is long, therefore every American is a god."
[Sidenote: HIS BEST POEMS]
Those who read Lanier's poems should begin with the simplest, with his love
songs, "My Springs" and "In Absence," or his "Ballad of Trees and the
Master," or his outdoor poems, such as "Tampa Robins," "Song of the
Chattahoochee," "Mocking Bird," and "Evening Song." In the last-named
lyrics he began the work (carried out more fully in his later poems) of
interpreting in words the harmony which his sensitive ear detected in the
manifold voices of nature.
Next in order are the poems in which is hidden a thought or an ideal not to
be detected at first glance; for to Lanier poetry was like certain oriental
idols which when opened are found to be filled with exquisite perfumes.
"The Stirrup Cup" is one of the simplest of these allegories. It was a
custom in olden days when a man was ready to journey, for one who loved him
to bring a glass of wine which he drank in the saddle; and this was called
the stirrup or parting cup. In the cup offered Lanier was a rare cordial,
filled with "sweet herbs from all antiquity," and the name of the cordial
was Death:
Then, Time, let not a drop be spilt:
Hand me the cup whene'er thou wilt;
'T is thy rich stirrup cup to me;
I'll drink it down right smilingly.
In four stanzas of "Night and Day" he compresses the tragedy of
_Othello_, not the tragedy that Shakespeare wrote but the tragedy that
was in the Moor's soul when Desdemona was gone. In "Life and Song" he
sought to express the ideal of a poet, and the closing lines might well be
the measure of his own heroic life:
His song was only living aloud,
His work a singing with his hand.
In "How Love Looked for Hell" the lesson is hidden deeper; for the profound
yet simple meaning of the poem is that, search high or low, Love can never
find hell because he takes heaven with him wherever he goes. Another poem
of the same class, but longer and more involved, is "The Symphony." Here
Lanier faces one of the greatest problems of the age, the problem of
industrialism with its false standards and waste of human happiness, and
his answer is the same that Tennyson gave in his later poems; namely, that
the familiar love in human hearts can settle every social question when
left to its own unselfish way:
Vainly might Plato's brain revolve it,
Plainly the heart of a child might solve it.
[Sidenote: MARSHES OF GLYNN]
The longer poems of Lanier are of uneven merit and are all more or less
fragmentary. The chief impression from reading the "Psalm of the West," for
example, is that it is the prelude to some greater work that was left
unfinished. More finely wrought and more typical of Lanier's mood and
method is "The Marshes of Glynn," his best-known work. It is a marvelous
poem, one of the most haunting in our language; yet it is like certain
symphonies in that it says nothing, being all feeling,--vague,
inexpressible feeling. Some readers find no meaning or satisfaction in it;
others hail it as a perfect interpretation of their own mood or emotion
when they stand speechless before the sunrise or the afterglow or a
landscape upon which the very spirit of beauty and peace is brooding.
THE QUALITY OF LANIER. In order to sympathize with Lanier, and so to
understand him, it is necessary to keep in mind that he was a musician
rather than a poet in our ordinary understanding of the term. In his verse
he used words, exactly as he used the tones of his flute, not so much to
express ideas as to call up certain emotions that find no voice save in
music. As he said, "Music takes up the thread that language drops," which
explains that beautiful but puzzling line which closes "The Symphony":
Music is Love in search of a word.
[Sidenote: MUSIC AND POETRY]
We have spoken of "The Symphony" as an answer to the problem of industrial
waste and sorrow, but it contains also Lanier's confession of faith;
namely, that social evils arise among men because of their lack of harmony;
and that spiritual harmony, the concord of souls which makes strife
impossible, may be attained through music. The same belief appears in
_Tiger Lilies_ (a novel written by Lanier in his early days), in which
a certain character makes these professions:
"To make a _home_ out of a household, given the raw
materials--to wit, wife, children, a friend or two and a house--two
other things are necessary. These are a good fire and good music.
And inasmuch as we can do without the fire for half the year, I may
say music is the one essential."
"Late explorers say they have found some nations that have no God;
but I have not read of any that had no music." "Music means
harmony, harmony means love, love means--God!"
One may therefore summarize Lanier by saying that he was poet who used
verbal rhythm, as a musician uses harmonious chords, to play upon our
better feelings. His poems of nature give us no definite picture of the
external world but are filled with murmurings, tremblings, undertones,--all
the vague impressions which one receives when alone in the solitudes, as if
the world were alive but inarticulate:
Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-witholding and free
Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea!
Tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains and the sun,
Ye spread and span like the catholic man that hath mightily won
God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain
And sight out of blindness and purity out of a stain.
His poems of life have similar virtues and weaknesses: they are melodious;
they are nobly inspired; they appeal to our finest feelings; but they are
always vague in that they record no definite thought and speak no downright
message.
[Sidenote: LANIER AND WHITTIER]
The criticism may be more clear if we compare Lanier with Whittier, a man
equally noble, who speaks a language that all men understand. The poems of
the two supplement each other, one reflecting the reality of life, the
other its mysterious dreams. In Whittier's poetry we look upon a landscape
and a people, and we say, "I have seen that rugged landscape with my own
eyes; I have eaten bread with those people, and have understood and loved
them." Then we read Lanier's poetry and say, "Yes, I have had those
feelings at times; but I do not speak of them to others because I cannot
tell what they mean to me." Both poets are good, and both fail of greatness
in poetry, Whittier because he has no exalted imagination, Lanier because
he lacks primitive simplicity and strength. One poet sings a song to cheer
the day's labor, the other makes a melody to accompany our twilight
reveries.
* * * * *
"WALT" WHITMAN (1819-1892)
Since Whitman insisted upon being called "Walt" instead of Walter, so let
it be. The name accords with the free-and-easy style of his verse. If you
can find some abridged selections from that verse, read them by all means;
but if you must search the whole of it for the passages that are worth
reading, then pass it cheerfully by; for such another vain display of
egotism, vulgarity and rant never appeared under the name of poetry.
Whitman was so absurdly fond of his "chants" and so ignorant of poetry that
he preserved the whole of his work in a final edition, and his publishers
still insist upon printing it, rubbish and all. The result is that the few
rare verses which stamp him as a poet are apt to be overlooked in the
multitudinous gabblings which, of themselves, might mark him as a mere
freak or "sensation" in our modest literature.
[Illustration: WALT WHITMAN]
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. Ordinarily when we read poetry we desire to
know something of the man who wrote it, of his youth, his training,
the circumstance of his work and the personal ideals which made him
view life steadily in one light rather than in another. In dealing
with Whitman it is advisable to leave such natural curiosity
unsatisfied, and for two reasons: first, the man was far from
admirable or upright, and to meet him at certain stages is to lose
all desire to read his poetry; and second, he was so extremely
secretive about himself, while professing boundless good-fellowship
with all men, that we can seldom trust his own record, much less
that of his admirers. There are great blanks in the story of his
life; his real biography has not yet been written; and in the
jungle of controversial writings which has grown up around him one
loses sight of Whitman in a maze of extravagant or contradictory
opinions. [Footnote: Of the many biographies of Whitman perhaps the
best for beginners is Perry's _Walt Whitman_ (1906), in
American Men of Letters Series.]
[Sidenote: TRAITS AND INCIDENTS]
Let it suffice then to record, in catalogue fashion, that Whitman
was born (1819) on Long Island, of stubborn farmer stock; that he
spent his earliest years by the sea, which inspired his best verse;
that he grew up in the streets of Brooklyn and was always
fascinated by the restless tide of city life, as reflected in such
poems as "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"; that his education was scanty
and of the "picked up" variety; that to the end of his life, though
ignorant of what literary men regard as the _a-b-c_ of
knowledge, he was supremely well satisfied with himself; that till
he was past forty he worked irregularly at odd jobs, but was by
choice a loafer; that he was a man of superb physical health and
gloried in his body, without much regard for moral standards; that
his strength was broken by nursing wounded soldiers during the war,
a beautiful and unselfish service; that he was then a government
clerk in Washington until partly disabled by a paralytic stroke,
and that the remainder of his life was spent at Camden, New Jersey.
His _Leaves of Grass_ (published first in 1855, and
republished with additions many times) brought him very little
return in money, and his last years were spent in a state of
semipoverty, relieved by the gifts of a small circle of admirers.
WHITMAN'S VERSE. In a single book, _Leaves of Grass_, Whitman has
collected all his verse. This book would be a chaos even had he left his
works in the order in which they were written; but that is precisely what
he did not do. Instead, he enlarged and rearranged the work ten different
times, mixing up his worst and his best verses, so that it is now very
difficult to trace his development as a poet. We may, however, tentatively
arrange his work in three divisions: his early shouting to attract
attention (as summarized in the line "I sound my barbaric yawp over the
roofs of the world"), his war poems, and his later verse written after he
had learned something of the discipline of life and poetry.
The quality of his early work may be judged from a few disjointed lines of
his characteristic "Song of Myself":
Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her that it is just as lucky to die, and I know
it.
I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash'd babe, and am
not contain'd between my hat and boots,
And peruse manifold objects, no two alike, and every one good,
The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.
The big doors of the country barn stand open and ready,
The dried grass of the harvest-time loads the slow-drawn wagon,
The clear light plays on the brown, gray and green intertinged,
The armfuls are pack'd to the sagging mow.
I am there, I help, I came stretch'd atop of the load,
I felt its soft jolts, one leg reclined on the other,
I jump from the cross-beams and seize the clover and timothy,
And roll head over heels and tangle my hair full of wisps.
The boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stopt for me,
I tuck'd my trowser ends in my boots and went and had a good time;
You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle.
Thus he rambles on, gabbing of every place or occupation or newspaper
report that comes into his head. When he ends this grotesque "Song of
Myself" after a thousand lines or more, he makes another just like it. We
read a few words here and there, amazed that any publisher should print
such rubbish; and then, when we are weary of Whitman's conceit or bad
taste, comes a flash of insight, of imagination, of poetry:
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
These yearnings why are they? these thoughts in the darkness why are
they?
Why are there men and women that while they are nigh me the sunlight
expands my blood?
Why when they leave me do my pennants of joy sink flat and lank?
Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts
descend upon me?
There are, in short, hundreds of pages of such "chanting" with its grain of
wheat hid in a bushel of chaff. We refer to it here not because it is worth
reading but to record the curious fact that many European critics hail it
as typical American poetry, even while we wonder why anybody should regard
it as either American or poetic.
[Sidenote: FOREIGN OPINION]
The explanation is simple. Europeans have not yet rid themselves of the
idea that America is the strange, wild land Cooper's _Pioneers_, and
that any poetry produced here must naturally be uncouth, misshapen, defiant
of all poetic laws or traditions. To such critics Whitman's crudity seems
typical of a country where one is in nightly danger of losing his scalp,
where arguments are settled by revolvers, and where a hungry man needs only
to shoot a buffalo or a bear from his back door. Meanwhile America, the
country that planted colleges and churches in a wilderness, that loves
liberty because she honors law, that never saw a knight in armor but that
has, even in her plainsmen and lumberjacks, a chivalry for woman that would
adorn a Bayard,--that real America ignores the bulk of Whitman's work
simply because she knows that, of all her poets, he is the least
representative of her culture, her ideals, her heroic and aspiring life.
[Sidenote: DRUM TAPS]
The second division of Whitman's work is made up chiefly of verses written
in war time, to some of which he gave the significant title, _Drum
Taps_. In such poems as as "Beat, Beat, Drums," "Cavalry Crossing a
Ford" and "By the Bivouac's Fitful Flame" he reflected the emotional
excitement of '61 and the stern days that followed. Note, for example, the
startling vigor of "Ethiopia Saluting the Colors," which depicts an old
negro woman by the roadside, looking with wonder on the free flag which she
sees for the first time aloft over marching men:
Who are you, dusky woman, so ancient, hardly human,
With your woolly-white and turban'd head and bare bony feet?
Why, rising by the roadside here, do you the colors greet?
Another side of the war is reflected in such poems as "Come up from the
Fields, Father," an exquisite picture of an old mother and father receiving
the news of their son's death on the battlefield. In the same class belong
two fine tributes, "O Captain, My Captain" and "When Lilacs Last in the
Dooryard Bloomed," written in moments of noble emotion when the news came
that Lincoln was dead. The former tribute, with its rhythmic swing and
lyric refrain, indicates what Whitman might have done in poetry had he been
a more patient workman. So also does "Pioneers," a lyric that is wholly
American and Western and exultant:
Have the elder races halted?
Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas?
We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson,
Pioneers! O Pioneers!
[Sidenote: LATER POEMS]
In the third class of Whitman's works are the poems written late in life,
when he had learned to suppress his blatant egotism and to pay some little
attention to poetic form and melody. Though his lines are still crude and
irregular, many of them move to a powerful rhythm, such as the impressive
"With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea," which suggests the surge and beat of
breakers on the shore. In others he gives finely imaginative expression to
an ideal or a yearning, and his verse rises to high poetic levels. Note
this allegory of the spider, an insect that, when adrift or in a strange
place, sends out delicate filaments on the air currents until one thread
takes hold of some solid substance and is used as a bridge over the
unknown:
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you, O my soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect
them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul
[Illustration: WHITMAN'S BIRTHPLACE, WEST HILLS, LONG ISLAND]
Among the best of Whitman's works are his poems to death. "Joy, Shipmate,
Joy," "Death's Valley," "Darest Thou Now, O Soul," "Last Invocation,"
"Good-Bye, My Fancy,"--in such haunting lyrics he reflects the natural view
of death, not as a terrible or tragic or final event but as a confident
going forth to meet new experiences. Other notable poems that well repay
the reading are "The Mystic Trumpeter," "The Man-of-War Bird," "The Ox
Tamer," "Thanks in Old Age" and "Aboard at a Ship's Helm."
In naming the above works our purpose is simply to lure the reader away
from the insufferable Whitmanesque "chant" and to attract attention to a
few poems that sound a new note in literature, a note of freedom, of joy,
of superb confidence, which warms the heart when we hear it. When these
poems are known others will suggest themselves: "Rise, O Days, from Your
Fathomless Deeps," "I Hear America Singing," "There was a Boy Went Forth,"
"The Road Unknown," "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." There is magic
in such names; but unfortunately in most cases the reader will find only an
alluring title and a few scattered lines of poetry; the rest is Whitman.
[Sidenote: DEMOCRACY]
The author of the "Song of Myself" proclaimed himself the poet of democracy
and wrote many verses on his alleged subject; but those who read them will
soon tire of one whose idea of democracy was that any man is as good, as
wise, as godlike as any other. Perhaps his best work in this field is "Thou
Mother with Thy Equal Brood," a patriotic poem read at "Commencement" time
in Dartmouth College (1872). There is too much of vainglorious boasting in
the poem (for America should be modest, and can afford to be modest), but
it has enough of prophetic vision and exalted imagination to make us
overlook its unworthy spread-eagleism.
[Sidenote: PRAYER OF COLUMBUS]
As a farewell to Whitman one should read what is perhaps his noblest single
work, "The Prayer of Columbus." The poem is supposed to reflect the thought
of Columbus when, as a worn-out voyager, an old man on his last expedition,
he looked out over his wrecked ships to the lonely sea beyond; but the
reader may see in it another picture, that of a broken old man in his
solitary house at Camden, writing with a trembling hand the lines which
reflect his unshaken confidence:
My terminus near,
The clouds already closing in upon me,
The voyage balk'd, the course disputed, lost,
I yield my ships to Thee
My hands, my limbs grow nerveless,
My brain feels rack'd, bewilder'd;
Let the old timbers part, I will not part,
I will cling fast to Thee, O God, though the waves buffet me,
Thee, Thee at least I know.
Is it the prophet's thought I speak, or am I raving?
What do I know of life? what of myself?
I know not even my own work past or present;
Dim ever-shifting guesses of it spread before me,
Of newer better worlds, their mighty parturition,
Mocking, perplexing me.
And these things I see suddenly, what mean they?
As if some miracle, some hand divine, unseal'd my eyes,
Shadowy vast shapes smile through the air and sky,
And on the distant waves sail countless ships,
And anthems in new tongues I hear saluting me.
* * * * *
THE PROSE WRITERS
RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882)
Emerson is the mountaineer of our literature; to read him is to have the
impression of being on the heights. It is solitary there, far removed from
ordinary affairs; but the air is keen, the outlook grand, the heavens near.
Our companions are the familiar earth by day or the mysterious stars by
night, and these are good if only to recall the silent splendor of God's
universe amid the pother of human inventions. There also the very spirit of
liberty, which seems to have its dwelling among the hills, enters into us
and makes us sympathize with Emerson's message of individual freedom.
It is still a question whether Emerson should be classed with the poets or
prose writers, and our only reason for placing him with the latter is that
his "Nature" seems more typical than his "Wood Notes," though in truth both
works convey precisely the same message. He was a great man who used prose
or verse as suited his mood at the moment; but he was never a great poet,
and only on rare occasions was he a great prose writer.
LIFE. Emerson has been called "the winged Franklin," "the Yankee
Shelley" and other contradictory names which strive to express the
union of shrewd sense and lofty idealism that led him to write
"Hitch your wagon to a star" and many another aphorism intended to
bring heaven and earth close together. We shall indicate enough of
his inheritance if we call him a Puritan of the Puritans, a
moralist descended from seven generations of heroic ministers who
had helped to make America a free nation, and who had practiced the
love of God and man and country before preaching it to their
congregations.
[Illustration: RALPH WALDO EMERSON]
The quality of these ancestors entered into Emerson and gave him
the granite steadfastness that is one of his marked
characteristics. Meeting him in his serene old age one would hardly
suspect him of heroism; but to meet him in childhood is to
understand the kind of man he was, and must be. If you would
appreciate the quality of that childhood, picture to yourself a
bare house with an open fire and plenty of books, but little else
of comfort. There are a mother and six children in the house,
desperately poor; for the father is dead and has left his family
nothing and everything,--nothing that makes life rich, everything
in the way of ideals and blessed memories to make life wealthy. The
mother works as only a poor woman can from morning till night. The
children go to school by day; but instead of playing after
school-hours they run errands for the neighbors, drive cows from
pasture, shovel snow, pick huckleberries, earn an honest penny. In
the evening they read together before the open fire. When they are
hungry, as they often are, a Puritan aunt who shares their poverty
tells them stories of human endurance. The circle narrows when an
older brother goes to college; the rest reduce their meals and
spare their pennies in order to help him. After graduation he
teaches school and devotes his earnings to giving the next brother
his chance. All the while they speak courteously to each other,
remember their father's teaching that they are children of God, and
view their hard life steadily in the light of that sublime
doctrine.
[Sidenote: THE COLLEGE BOY]
The rest of the story is easily told. Emerson was born in Boston,
then a straggling town, in 1803. When his turn came he went to
Harvard, and largely supported himself there by such odd jobs as
only a poor student knows how to find. Wasted time he called it;
for he took little interest in college discipline or college fun
and was given to haphazard reading, "sinfully strolling from book
to book, from care to idleness," as he said. Later he declared that
the only good thing he found in Harvard was a solitary chamber.
[Sidenote: THE PREACHER]
After leaving college he taught school and shared his earnings,
according to family tradition. Then he began to study for the
ministry; or perhaps we should say "read," for Emerson never really
studied anything. At twenty-three he was licensed to preach, and
three years later was chosen pastor of the Second Church in Boston.
It was the famous Old North Church in which the Mathers had
preached, and the Puritan divines must have turned in their graves
when the young radical began to utter his heresies from the ancient
pulpit. He was loved and trusted by his congregation, but presently
he differed with them in the matter of the ritual and resigned his
ministry.
Next he traveled in Europe, where he found as little of value as he
had previously found in college. The old institutions, which roused
the romantic enthusiasm of Irving and Longfellow, were to him only
relics of barbarism. He went to Europe, he said, to see two men,
and he found them in Wordsworth and Carlyle. His friendship with
the latter and the letters which passed between "the sage of
Chelsea" and "the sage of Concord" (as collected and published by
Charles Eliot Norton in his _Correspondence of Carlyle and
Emerson_) are the most interesting result of his pilgrimage.
[Sidenote: THE LECTURER]
On his return he settled in the village of Concord, which was to be
his home for the remainder of his long life. He began to lecture,
and so well was the "Lyceum" established at that time that he was
soon known throughout the country. For forty years this lecturing
continued, and the strange thing about it is that in all that time
he hardly met one audience that understood him or that carried away
any definite idea of what he had talked about. Something noble in
the man seemed to attract people; as Lowell said, they did not go
to hear what Emerson said but to hear Emerson.
[Sidenote: THE WRITER]
Meanwhile he was writing prose and poetry. His literary work began
in college and consisted largely in recording such thoughts or
quotations as seemed worthy of preservation. In his private
_Journal_ (now published in several volumes) may be found
practically everything he put into the formal works which he sent
forth from Concord. These had at first a very small circle of
readers; but the circle widened steadily, and the phenomenon is
more remarkable in view of the fact that the author avoided
publicity and had no ambition for success. He lived contentedly in
a country village; he cultivated his garden and his neighbors; he
spent long hours alone with nature; he wrote the thoughts that came
to him and sent them to make their own way in the world, while he
himself remained, as he said, "far from fame behind the birch
trees."
The last years of his life were as the twilight of a perfect day.
His mental powers failed slowly; he seemed to drift out of the
present world into another of pure memories; even his friends
became spiritualized, lost the appearance of earth and assumed
their eternal semblance. When he stood beside the coffin of
Longfellow, looking intently into the poet's face, he was heard to
murmur, "A sweet, a gracious personality, but I have forgotten his
name." To the inevitable changes (the last came in 1882) he adapted
himself with the same serenity which marked his whole life. He even
smiled as he read the closing lines of his "Terminus":
As the bird trims her to the gale,
I trim myself to the storm of time,
I man the rudder, reef the sail,
Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:
"Lowly faithful, banish fear,
Right onward drive unharmed;
The port, well worth the cruise, is near,
And every wave is charmed."
EMERSON'S POETRY. There is a ruggedness in Emerson's verse which attracts
some readers while it repels others by its unmelodious rhythm. It may help
us to measure that verse if we recall the author's criticism thereof. In
1839 he wrote:
"I am naturally keenly susceptible to the pleasures of rhythm, and
cannot believe but one day I shall attain to that splendid dialect,
so ardent is my wish; and these wishes, I suppose, are ever only
the buds of power; but up to this hour I have never had a true
success in such attempts."
One must be lenient with a poet who confesses that he cannot attain the
"splendid dialect," especially so since we are inclined to agree with him.
In the following passage from "Each and All" we may discover the reason for
his lack of success:
Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown
Of thee from the hill-top looking down;
The heifer that lows in the upland farm,
Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm;
The sexton, tolling his bell at noon,
Deems not that great Napoleon
Stops his horse, and lists with delight,
Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height;
Nor knowest thou what argument
Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent.
All are needed by each one;
Nothing is fair or good alone.
I thought the sparrow's note from heaven,
Singing at dawn on the alder bough;
I brought him home in his nest at even;
He sings the song, but it cheers not now,
For I did not bring home the river and sky:
He sang to my ear; they sang to my eye.
The delicate shells lay on the shore;
The bubbles of the latest wave
Fresh pearls to their enamel gave,
And the bellowing of the savage sea
Greeted their safe escape to me.
I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore
With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.
Our first criticism is that the poem contains both fine and faulty lines,
and that the total impression is an excellent one. Next, we note that the
verse is labored; for Emerson was not a natural singer, like Whittier, and
was hampered by his tendency to think too much instead of giving free
expression to his emotion. [Footnote: Most good poems are characterized by
both thought and feeling, and by a perfection of form that indicates
artistic workmanship. With Emerson the thought is the main thing; feeling
or emotion is subordinate or lacking, and he seldom has the patience to
work over his thought until it assumes beautiful or perfect expression.]
Finally, he is didactic; that is, he is teaching the lesson that you must
not judge a thing by itself, as if it had no history or connections, but
must consider it in its environment, as a part of its own world.
As in "Each and All" so in most of his verse Emerson is too much of a
teacher or moralist to be a poet. In "The Rhodora," one of his most perfect
poems, he proclaims that "Beauty is its own excuse for being"; but
straightway he forgets the word and devotes his verse not to beauty but to
some ethical lesson. Very rarely does he break away from this unpoetic
habit, as when he interrupts the moralizing of his "World Soul" to write a
lyric that we welcome for its own sake:
Spring still makes spring in the mind
When sixty years are told;
Love wakes anew this throbbing heart,
And we are never old.
Over the winter glaciers
I see the summer glow,
And through the wide-piled snowdrift
The warm rosebuds below.
[Sidenote: TYPICAL POEMS]
The most readable of Emerson's poems are those in which he reflects his
impressions of nature, such as "Seashore," "The Humble-Bee," "The
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