Part 12

‘Berenice,’ ‘Ligeia,’ and ‘Morella’ are highly successful experiments in the realm of the morbidly imaginative, and might be grouped under Browning’s discarded title of ‘Madhouse Cells.’ The themes are monstrous, and are only saved from being absurd by the author’s consummate ability to carry the reader with him. Poe could scale a fearful and slippery height, maintaining himself with the slenderest excuse for a foot-hold. A dozen times you would say he must fall, and a dozen times he passes the perilous point with masterly ease. In the hands of a lesser artist than he, how utterly absurd would be a scene like that in ‘Ligeia’ where the opium-eater watches by the bedside of his dead wife.

‘Metzengerstein’ and ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’ are stories of metempsychosis. ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ and ‘Hop-Frog’ turn on the motive of revenge. ‘The Pit and the Pendulum,’ an episode of the Inquisition, is a study of the preternatural acuteness of the mind while the body undergoes torture. ‘The Assignation’ is a Venetian tale of love and intrigue, and would have been conventional enough in the hands of any one but Poe. The most powerful story in the group is ‘The Red Death,’ a lurid drama of revelry in the midst of pestilence.

Difficult as are the themes, and skilful as is the handling, these tales are in a way surpassed by the extraordinary group of romances in which Poe describes the meeting of disembodied spirits. ‘The Power of Words,’ ‘The Colloquy of Monos and Una,’ and ‘The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion’ are excursions into a world unknown to the rank and file of literary explorers, a world where the most adventurous might well question his ability to penetrate far. In these supermundane pieces, in the prose-poems ‘Silence’ and ‘Shadow,’ in ‘Ligeia,’ and in ‘The Domain of Arnheim,’ Poe’s art is indeed magical.

Poe seems to have been fully persuaded in his own mind that he had the gift of humor. The extravaganzas and farcical pieces bulk rather large in his collected writings. In too many of them the author cuts extraordinary mental capers in the most mirthless way. ‘The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.,’ ‘How to write a Blackwood Article’ and its sequel, ‘A Predicament,’ satires all on the ways of editors and men of letters, are examples of Poe’s manner as a humorist. The rattling monologue and dry, hard, uncontagious laughter of a music-hall comedian is the nearest parallel. The effect is wholly disproportionate to the bewildering activity of the performer.

In farces like ‘The Spectacles,’ ‘Loss of Breath,’ and ‘The Man that was Used up,’ the motives would be revolting were not the characters manifestly constructed of wood or papier-maché. The figures are neither more nor less than marionettes. If Madame Stephanie Lalande (aged eighty-one) dashes her wig on the ground with a yell and dances a fandango upon it, ‘in an absolute ecstasy and agony of rage,’ it is what may be expected in a pantomime. Whoever wishes to laugh at the hero of the Bugaboo and Kickapoo campaign, when he is discovered sans scalp, sans palate, sans arm, leg, and shoulders, is at liberty to do so, but he must laugh as do children when Punch beats his wife.

There is no question of the vivacity displayed in these pieces. ‘Bon-Bon,’ ‘The Duc de l’Omelette,’ ‘Lionizing,’ ‘Never bet the Devil your Head,’ ‘X-ing a Paragrab,’ ‘Diddling Considered as one of the Exact Sciences,’ ‘The Business Man,’ and ‘The Angel of the Odd’ are sprightly with an uncanny sprightliness. It must always be a matter for astonishment that Poe could have written them. The mystery of their being read is explained by the taste of the times.

On the other hand, ‘The Devil in the Belfry’ is genuinely amusing. The description of the peaceful estate of the pleasant Dutch toy village of Vondervotteimitiss, where the very pigs wore repeaters tied to their tails with ribbons, and the sad story of the destruction of all order and regularity by the advent of the foreign-looking young man in black kerseymere knee-breeches, are most agreeably set forth. This extravaganza is not only the best of Poe’s humorous sketches, but ranks with the work of men who were better equipped and more gifted in such work than was Poe.

V

THE CRITIC

Poe brought into American criticism a pungency which it had hitherto lacked. He was entirely independent, and had urbanity companioned independence the value of his critical work would have been greatly augmented. He could praise with warmth and condemn with asperity; he could not maintain an even temper. Swayed by his likes and his dislikes, he was but too apt to grow extravagantly commendatory or else spiteful. ‘He had the judicial mind but was rarely in the judicial state of mind.’[27] He was not unwilling to give pain, and easily persuaded himself that he did so in a just cause. There was a pleasurable sense of power in the consciousness of being feared. Yet the pleasure thus derived can never be other than ignoble. A man of Poe’s genius can ill afford to waste his time in attacking other men of genius whose conceptions of literary art differ from his own. Still less can he afford to assail the swarm of petty authors whose works will perish the sooner for being let alone. Of all harmless creatures authors are the most harmless and should be allowed to live their innocent little lives. But Poe took literature hard, and authors had a disquieting effect on him.

Accused of ‘mangling by wholesale,’ Poe denied the charge, declaring that among the many critiques he had written during a given period of ten years not one was ‘wholly fault-finding or wholly in approbation.’ And he maintained that to every opinion expressed he had attempted to give weight ‘by something that bore the semblance of a reason.’ Is there another writer in the land who ‘can of his own criticisms conscientiously say the same’? Poe prided himself on an honesty of motive such as animated Wilson and Macaulay. He denied that his course was unpopular, pointing to the fact that during his editorship of the ‘Messenger’ and ‘Graham’s’ the circulation of the one had risen from seven hundred to five thousand, and of the other ‘from five to fifty-two thousand subscribers.’ ‘Even the manifest injustice of a Gifford is, I grieve to say, an exceedingly popular thing.’[28]

Poe’s critical writings take the form of reviews of books (‘Longfellow’s Ballads,’ ‘Moore’s “Alciphron,”’ ‘Horne’s “Orion,”’ ‘Miss Barrett’s “A Drama of Exile,”’ ‘Hawthorne’s Tales,’ etc.), polemical writings (‘A Reply to “Outis”’), essays on the theory of literary art (‘The Poetic Principle,’ ‘The Rationale of Verse’), brief notes (‘Marginalia’), and short and snappy articles on contemporary writers (‘The Literati’).

His theory of literary art may be studied in the lecture entitled ‘The Poetic Principle,’ where he maintains that there is no such thing as a long poem, the very phrase being ‘a contradiction of terms.’ A poem deserves its title ‘only inasmuch as it excites by elevating the soul.’ This excitement is transient. When it ceases, that which is written ceases to be poetical. Poe even sets the precise limit of the excitement--‘half an hour at the very utmost.’

He then attacks ‘the heresy of The Didactic,’ protesting against the doctrine that every poem should contain a moral and the poetical merit estimated by the moral. ‘The incitements of Passion, or the precepts of Duty, or even the lessons of Truth, may be introduced into a poem with advantage, but the true artist will always contrive to tone them down in proper subjection to that Beauty which is the atmosphere and the real essence of the poem.’

Poe then proceeds to his definition of the ‘poetry of words,’ which is, he says, ‘_The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty_.’ Its sole arbiter is Taste. ‘With the Intellect, or with the Conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with Duty or with Truth.’

In his concrete criticism Poe never hesitated to prophesy. ‘I most heartily congratulate you upon having accomplished a work which will _live_,’ he wrote to Mrs. E. A. Lewis. Of some poem of Longfellow’s he said that it would ‘not live.’ Possibly he was right in both cases, but how could he know? Here is shown the weakness of Poe’s critical temper. He affirmed positively that which cannot positively be affirmed.

He was a monomaniac on plagiarism, forever raising the cry of ‘Stop thief.’ Yet Poe, like Molière, whom he resembled in no other

## particular, ‘took his own’ whenever it pleased him to do so, and he was

not over solicitous to advertise his sources. He was in the right. If poets advertised their sources, what would be left for the commentators to do? Poe hinted that Hawthorne appropriated his ideas, and he flatly accused Longfellow of so doing. He was punished grotesquely, for Chivers, the author of _Eonchs of Ruby_, accused Poe (after the latter’s death, when it was quite safe to do so) of getting many of his best ideas from Chivers.

VI

THE POET

Poe’s claim to mastership in verse rests on a handful of lyrics distinguished for exquisite melody and a haunting beauty of phrase. That part of the public which estimates a poet by such pieces as find their way into anthologies regards Poe primarily as the author of ‘The Bells’ and ‘The Raven.’ If popularity were the final test of merit, these strikingly original performances would indeed crown his work. After sixty years, neither has lost in appreciable degree the magical charm it exerted when first the weird melody fell upon the ear. Each is hackneyed beyond description; each has been parodied unmercifully, murdered by raw elocutionists, and worse than murdered by generations of school-children droning from their readers, about the ‘midnight dreary’ and the ‘Runic rhyme.’ But it is yet possible to restore in a measure the feeling of astonished delight with which lovers of poetry greeted the advent of these studies in the musical power of words.

The practical and earnest soul will find little to comfort him in the poetry of Poe. It teaches nothing, emphasizes no moral, never inspires to action. The strange unearthly melodies must be enjoyed for the reason that they are strange and unearthly and melodious. The genius of the poet has travelled

By a route obscure and lonely, Haunted by ill angels only, Where an Eidolon, named Night, On a black throne reigns upright,

and we can well believe that it comes

From an ultimate dim Thule,-- From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, Out of Space--out of Time.

Wholly out of space and time was he who wrote ‘Dreamland,’ ‘The City in the Sea,’ ‘The Haunted Palace,’ ‘Israfel,’ ‘The Sleeper,’ and ‘Ulalume.’ It is idle to ask of these poems something they do not pretend to give, and it can hardly be other than uncritical to describe them as ‘very superficial.’ They are strange exotic flowers blooming under conditions the most adverse, a fresh proof that genius is independent of place and time.

* * * * *

In Poe’s work as a whole there is unquestionably too much of brooding over death, the grave, mere physical horrors. Since his genius lay that way, he must be accepted as he was. But it is permitted to regret, if not the thing in itself (the domain of art being wide), at least the excess. Poe speaks of certain themes which are ‘too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction. These the mere romanticist must eschew, if he do not wish to offend or to disgust.’ And having laid down this doctrine, Poe goes on to relate the story of ‘The Premature Burial.’ It turns out a vision. But the narrator affirms that he was cured by the experience, that he read no more ‘bugaboo tales--_such as this_. In short I became a new man and lived a man’s life.’ Without assuming that Poe spoke wholly from the autobiographical point of view, we may believe the passage to contain a measure of his actual thought.

We may claim for him a more important place in our literature than do his radical admirers whose fervent eulogy too often takes the form of the contention that Poe was greater than this or that American man of letters. His strong, sombre genius saved the literature from any danger of uniformity, relieved it at once and forever from the possible charge of colorlessness. That strangeness of flavor which a late distinguished critic notes as a mark of genius is imparted by Poe’s work to our literary product as a whole. Here indeed was ‘the blossoming of the aloe.’

FOOTNOTES:

[25] ‘... There is one thing I am anxious to caution you against, & which has been a great enemy to our family, I hope, however, in yr case, it may prove unnecessary, “A too free use of the Bottle” ...’ William Poe to E. A. Poe, 15th June, 1843. Harrison’s _Poe_, vol. ii, p. 143.

[26] G. E. Woodberry.

[27] E. C. Stedman.

[28] ‘Reply to “Outis.”’

VIII

_Henry Wadsworth Longfellow_

REFERENCES:

=Samuel Longfellow=: _Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow_, second edition, 1886, and _Final Memorials of ... Longfellow_, 1887.

=W. D. Howells=: _Literary Friends and Acquaintance_, 1900.

=G. R. Carpenter=: _Henry Wadsworth Longfellow_, ‘Beacon Biographies,’ 1901.

=T. W. Higginson=: _Henry Wadsworth Longfellow_, ‘American Men of Letters,’ 1902.

I

HIS LIFE

The Longfellows are descendants of William Longfellow of Horsforth in Yorkshire, who came to New England ‘about 1676,’ settled in Newbury, and married Anne Sewall, a sister of Samuel Sewall, the first chief-justice of Massachusetts. ‘Well educated but a little wild’ is one of several illuminating phrases used to describe this young Yorkshireman. He joined the expedition against Quebec under Sir William Phipps (1690) and perished in a wreck on the coast of Anticosti. One of his sons, Stephen, a blacksmith, had a son who was graduated at Harvard, became a schoolmaster in Falmouth (Portland), and held important offices in the town government. His son, the third Stephen, grandfather of the poet, was judge of the court of common pleas, and representative of his town in the legislature.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born at Portland, in the District of Maine, on February 27, 1807. He was the second son of Stephen Longfellow, a prominent lawyer, conspicuous in political life, a member of the Massachusetts legislature, and afterwards, when Maine acquired statehood, a representative for his state in Congress. The mother of the poet, Zilpah (Wadsworth) Longfellow, was a daughter of General Peleg Wadsworth, whose adventures during the Revolution bordered on the romantic. Through the Wadsworths the poet was a descendant of John Alden and Priscilla Mullens.

At the age of thirteen Longfellow printed in the Portland ‘Gazette’ his boyish rhymes on ‘The Battle of Lovell’s Pond.’ He studied at private schools and at the Portland Academy, entered Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, in the Sophomore year, and was graduated in 1825, the fourth in a class of thirty-eight. That he stood so high seemed to him ‘rather a mystery.’ Before leaving college he had begun contributing to the ‘United States Literary Gazette,’ a new bi-monthly, published in Boston and edited by Theophilus Parsons. In one year seventeen of his poems appeared in the ‘Gazette,’ for which payment was made at the rate of two dollars a column. Five of these early poems were reprinted in _Voices of the Night_.

At the Commencement of 1825 the trustees of Bowdoin had determined to establish a professorship of modern languages. The chair was promised Longfellow when he should have fitted himself for it by study abroad. He sailed from New York in May, 1826, provided by George Ticknor with letters of introduction to Irving, Eichhorn, and Southey. He travelled in France, Spain, Italy, and Germany, mastered the Romance languages, planned certain prose volumes, and announced to his sister Elizabeth that his poetic career was finished. In August, 1829, he was back in America.

His appointment being confirmed and the stipend fixed at eight hundred dollars (together with another hundred for services as college librarian), Longfellow entered on his duties. During the next five and a half years he corrected bad French and Italian exercises, heard worse viva voce translations, in brief, was a pedagogue in all homely and trying senses of the word. With any one save a born drill-master the class-room soon loses novelty. In spite of the knowledge that he was useful in a chosen field of work, more than happy in his home-life (he had married, in 1831, Miss Mary Storer Potter of Portland), Longfellow felt the narrowness of his surroundings. Bowdoin was a little college and Brunswick a village. The young professor was ambitious. In his own phrase, he wanted a stage on which he could ‘take longer strides and speak to a larger audience.’ At one time he thought of buying the Round Hill School, and visited Northampton to look over the ground. Fortune had something better in store for him. Ticknor was about to resign the chair of modern languages at Harvard, and proposed as his successor Longfellow, whose translation of the _Coplas_ of Manrique (1833) had attracted his notice. The position was formally offered and accepted; it was understood that Longfellow was to spend a year and a half in Europe before taking up his work.

Accompanied by his young wife, Longfellow crossed the ocean in April, 1835, and passed the summer in Stockholm and Copenhagen, studying the Scandinavian languages. In the autumn he was in Holland. Mrs. Longfellow died the last of November. Longfellow went to Heidelberg for the winter, and to Switzerland and the Tyrol for the spring and summer, and in December (1836) was at Cambridge preparing his college lectures.

He lodged at the famous colonial mansion in Brattle Street known as Craigie House, in a room that had once been Washington’s. When Longfellow first applied, old Mrs. Craigie, deceived by his youthful appearance, told him that she had ‘resolved to take no more students into the house.’ Craigie House passed into the possession of Worcester, the lexicographer. Worcester sold it to Nathan Appleton, whose daughter Longfellow married in 1843. It then became the property of Mrs. Longfellow.

At Harvard the exactions of work were not like those in the smaller college, strictly pedagogical. Longfellow had time for literature and for society. The years were richly productive, as the following bibliographical lists show.

_Outre-Mer, A Pilgrimage beyond the Sea_, 1835; _Hyperion, a Romance_, 1839; _Voices of the Night_, 1839; _Ballads and Other Poems_, 1842; _Poems on Slavery_, 1842; _The Spanish Student_, 1843; _The Waif, a Collection of Poems_, 1845 (edited); _The Poets and Poetry of Europe_, 1845 (edited); _The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems_, 1846; _The Estray, a Collection of Poems_, 1847 (edited); _Evangeline, a Tale of Acadie_, 1847; _Kavanagh, a Tale_, 1849; _The Seaside and the Fireside_, 1850; _The Golden Legend_, 1851; _The Song of Hiawatha_, 1855.

After eighteen years of service at Harvard, Longfellow, in 1855, resigned his professorship, handing over its responsibilities to a worthy successor, James Russell Lowell. Released from academic duties, he was able to give himself unreservedly to literary work. Even in these new conditions he enjoyed less freedom than would be supposed. Longfellow had become a world-famous poet and was compelled to pay in full measure the penalties of fame. The demands on his time were enormous. As his reputation increased there was a proportionate increase in the army of visitors which besieged his door. The uniform kindness of their reception encouraged hundreds more to come.

The beautiful serenity of Longfellow’s domestic life was broken in upon by a frightful tragedy. One July morning in 1861 Mrs. Longfellow’s dress caught fire from a lighted match. It was impossible to save her, and she died the following day. The poet never recovered from the shock of her death. How crushing the blow was may be faintly conceived from that poem, ‘The Cross of Snow,’ found among his papers after his death.

During the last quarter century of his life Longfellow published the following books: _The Courtship of Miles Standish_, 1858; _Tales of a Wayside Inn_, 1863; _Flower-de-Luce_, 1867; _The New England Tragedies_, 1868; _Dante’s Divine Comedy, a Translation_,[29] 1867–70; _The Divine Tragedy_, 1871; _Christus, a Mystery_, 1872;[30] _Three Books of Song_, 1872; _Aftermath_, 1873; _The Masque of Pandora_, and _Other Poems_, 1875; _Poems of Places_, 1876–79 (edited); _Kéramos and Other Poems_, 1878; _Ultima Thule_, 1880. The posthumous volumes were _In the Harbor_, 1882, and _Michael Angelo_, 1884.

All the customary honors with which literary achievement may be recognized were bestowed on Longfellow. Some were formal and academic, scholastic tributes to scholastic achievement. Others were spontaneous and popular, an expression of the heart. Two illustrations will suffice to show the range of the poet’s influence. In 1869, during Longfellow’s last journey in Europe, the degree of D. C. L. was conferred on him by the University of Oxford. In 1879, when the tree which overhung ‘the village smithy’ was felled, an armchair was made of the wood, and given to the poet by the school-children of Cambridge. Both these tributes were necessary. Each is the complement of the other. Taken together, they symbolize the characteristics of the man and the artist.

Of all American poets Longfellow reached the widest audience. And it was with a feeling of personal bereavement that every member of that vast audience heard the news of his death at Cambridge, on March 24, 1882.

II

LONGFELLOW’S CHARACTER

As a young man Longfellow was pretty much like other young men, fond of society and fond of dress. At Cambridge the sober-minded were a little disturbed by the brilliancy of his waistcoats. In the Thirties it was permitted men, if they would, to array themselves like birds of paradise. Longfellow appears in some degree to have availed himself of the privilege. After a visit to Dickens in London in 1842 the novelist wrote Longfellow that boot-maker, hosier, trousers-maker, and coat-cutter had all been at the point of death. ‘The medical gentlemen agreed that it was exhaustion occasioned by early rising--to wait upon you at those unholy hours!’ An English visitor who saw Longfellow in 1850 thought him too fashionably dressed with his ‘blue frock-coat of Parisian cut, a handsome waistcoat, faultless pantaloons, and primrose colored “kids.”’

In middle age his social instinct was as strong as ever, but he cared less for ‘society.’ He restricted himself to the companionship of his friends, holding always in reserve time for his dependants, of whom he had more than a fair share.

Longfellow was large-hearted. He liked people if they were likable and sympathized with them if they were unattractive or unfortunate. He was open-handed, a liberal giver. Adventurers preyed upon him. He endured them with patient strength. When their exactions became outrageous, he made an effort to be rid of them. If unsuccessful, he laughed at his own want of skill and resigned himself to be imposed on a little longer. A weaker man would have sent these bores and parasites about their business at once.

Incapable of giving pain to any living creature, he could not understand the temper which prompts another to do so. Fortunately the violence or malignity of criticism had little effect on him. He could even be amused by it. Of Margaret Fuller’s ‘furious onslaught’ on him in the ‘New York Tribune,’ Longfellow said, ‘It is what ‘might be called a bilious attack.’