Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The following is by Longfellow:—

It is curious to notice that Chasles makes the same criticism on “Evangeline” that Holmes made on Lowell’s “Vision of Sir Launfal;” namely, that there is in it a mixture of the artificial and the natural. The result is, we may infer, that on the whole one still thinks of it as a work of art and does not—as, for instance, with Tolstoi’s “Cossacks”—think of all the characters as if they lived in the very next street. Yet it is in its way so charming, he finds that although as he says, “There is no passion in it,” still there is a perpetual air of youth and innocence and tenderness. M. Chasles is also impressed as a Catholic with the poet’s wide and liberal comprehension of the Christian ideas. It is not, he thinks, a masterpiece (Il y a loin d’Evangéline à un chef-d’œuvre), but he points out, what time has so far vindicated, that it has qualities which guarantee to it something like immortality. When we consider that Chasles wrote at a time when all our more substantial literature seemed to him to consist of uninteresting state histories and extensive collections of the correspondence of American presidents—a time when he could write sadly: “All America does not yet possess a humorist” 198 (Toute l’Amérique ne possède pas un humoriste), one can place it to the credit of Longfellow that he had already won for himself some sort of literary standing in the presence of one Frenchman. At the time of this complaint, it may be noticed that Mr. S. L. Clemens was a boy of fifteen. The usual European criticism at the present day is not that America produces so few humorists, but that she brings forth so many.

The work which came next from Longfellow’s pen has that peculiar value to a biographer which comes from a distinct, unequivocal, low-water mark in the intellectual product with which he has to deal. This book, “Kavanagh,” had the curious fate of bringing great disappointment to most of his friends and admirers, and yet of being praised by the two among his contemporaries personally most successful in fiction, Hawthorne and Howells. Now that the New England village life has proved such rich material in the hands of Mary Wilkins, Sarah Jewett, and Rowland Robinson, it is difficult to revert to “Kavanagh” (1849) without feeling that it is from beginning to end a piece of purely academic literature without a type of character, or an incident—one might almost say without a single phrase—that gives quite the flavor of real life. Neither the joys nor the griefs really reach the reader’s heart for one 199 moment. All the characters use essentially the same dialect, and every sentence is duly supplied with its anecdote or illustration, each one of which is essentially bookish at last. It has been well said of it that it is an attempt to look at rural society as Jean Paul would have looked at it. Indeed, we find Longfellow reading aloud from the “Campaner Thal” while actually at work on “Kavanagh,” and he calls the latter in his diary “a romance.”[78] When we consider how remote Jean Paul seems from the present daily life of Germany, one feels the utter inappropriateness of his transplantation to New England. Yet Emerson read the book “with great contentment,” and pronounced it “the best sketch we have seen in the direction of the American novel,” and discloses at the end the real charm he found or fancied by attributing to it “elegance.” Hawthorne, warm with early friendship, pronounces it “a most precious and rare book, as fragrant as a bunch of flowers and as simple as one flower.... Nobody but yourself would dare to write so quiet a book, nor could any other succeed in it. It is entirely original, a book by itself, a true work of genius, if ever there was one.” Nothing, I think, so well shows us the true limitations of American literature at that period as these curious phrases. It is 200 fair also to recognize that Mr. W. D. Howells, writing nearly twenty years later, says with almost equal exuberance, speaking of “Kavanagh,” “It seems to us as yet quite unapproached by the multitude of New England romances that have followed it in a certain delicate truthfulness, as it is likely to remain unsurpassed in its light humor and pensive grace.”[79]

The period following the publication of “Evangeline” seemed a more indeterminate and unsettled time than was usual with Longfellow. He began a dramatic romance of the age of Louis XIV., but did not persist in it, and apart from the story of “Kavanagh” did no extended work. He continued to publish scattered poems, and in two years (1850) there appeared another volume called “The Seaside and the Fireside” in which the longest contribution and the most finished—perhaps the most complete and artistic which he ever wrote—was called “The Building of the Ship.” To those who remember the unequalled voice and dramatic power of Mrs. Kemble, it is easy to imagine the enthusiasm with which her reading of this poem was received by an audience of three thousand, and none the less because at that troubled time the concluding appeal to the Union had a distinct bearing on the conflicts of the time. For 201 the rest of the volume, it included the strong and lyric verses called “Seaweed,” which were at the time criticised by many, though unreasonably, as rugged and boisterous; another poem of dramatic power, “Sir Humphrey Gilbert;” and one of the most delicately imaginative and musical among all he ever wrote, “The Fire of Drift-Wood,” the scene of which was the Devereux Farm at Marblehead. There were touching poems of the fireside, especially that entitled “Resignation,” written in 1848 after the death of his little daughter Fanny, and one called “The Open Window.” Looking back from this, his fourth volume of short poems, it must be owned that he had singularly succeeded in providing against any diminution of power or real monotony. Nevertheless his next effort was destined to be on a wider scale.

202

CHAPTER XVII
RESIGNATION OF PROFESSORSHIP—TO DEATH OF MRS. LONGFELLOW

On the last day of 1853, Longfellow wrote in his diary, “How barren of all poetic production and even prose production this last year has been! For 1853 I have absolutely nothing to show. Really there has been nothing but the college work. The family absorbs half the time, and letters and visits take out a huge cantle.” Yet four days later he wrote, January 4, 1854, “Another day absorbed in the college. But why complain? These golden days are driven like nails into the fabric. Who knows but they help it to hold fast and firm?” On February 22, he writes, “You are not misinformed about my leaving the professorship. I am ‘pawing to get free.’” On his birthday, February 27, he writes, in the joy of approaching freedom, “I am curious to know what poetic victories, if any, will be won this year.” On April 19 he writes, “At eleven o’clock in No. 6 University Hall, I delivered my last lecture—the last I shall ever deliver, here 203 or anywhere.”[80] The following are the letters explaining this, and hitherto unpublished, but preserved in the Harvard College archives.

Cambridge, February 16, 1854.

Gentlemen,—In pursuance of conversations held with D^r. Walker, the subject of which he has already communicated to you,—I now beg leave to tender you my resignation of the “Smith Professorship of the French and Spanish Languages and Literatures,” which I have held in Harvard College since the year 1835.

Should it be in your power to appoint my successor before the beginning of the next Term, I should be glad to retire at once. But if this should be inconvenient, I will discharge the duties of the office until the end of the present Academic Year.

I venture on this occasion, Gentlemen, to call your attention to the subject of the salaries paid to the several Instructors in this Department, and to urge, as far as may be proper, such increase as may correspond to the increased expenses of living in this part of the country at the present time.

With sentiments of the highest regard, and sincere acknowledgments of your constant courtesy 204 and kindness, during the eighteen years of my connection with the College,

I have the honor to be, Gentlemen,
Your Obt. Servt.

Henry W. Longfellow.[81]

To the President and Corporation of Harvard University.

[TO PRESIDENT WALKER.]

Cambridge, Feb. 16, 1854.

My dear Sir,—I inclose you my note to the Corporation. Will you be kind enough to look at it, before handing it to them; for if it is not in proper form and phrase, I will write it over again.

I also inclose the letters of Schele de Vere, and remain,

Very faithfully Yours

Henry W. Longfellow[82]

P. S. I have not assigned any reasons for my resignation, thinking it better to avoid a repetition of details, which I have already explained to you.

[TO THE PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE.]

Gentlemen,—Having last Winter signified to you my intention of resigning my Professorship 205 at the close of the present College year, I now beg leave to tender you my resignation more formally and officially.

It is eighteen years since I entered upon the duties of this Professorship. They have been to me pleasant and congenial; and I hope I have discharged them to your satisfaction, and to the advantage of the College in whose prosperity I shall always take the deepest interest.

In dissolving a connection, which has lasted so long, and which has been to me a source of so much pleasure and advantage, permit me to express to you my grateful thanks for the confidence you have reposed in me, and the many marks of kindness and consideration which I have received at your hands.

With best wishes for the College and for yourselves, I have the honor to be, Gentlemen,

Your Obedient Servant

Henry W. Longfellow

Smith Professor of French and Spanish, and Professor of Belles Lettres.[83]

Cambridge, August 23, 1854.

[TO PRESIDENT WALKER.]

Nahant, Aug. 23, 1854.

My dear Sir,—I inclose you the Letter of resignation we were speaking of yesterday. I 206 have made it short, as better suited to College Records; and have said nothing of the regret, which I naturally feel on leaving you, for it hardly seems to me that I am leaving you; and little of my grateful acknowledgments; for these I hope always to show, by remaining the faithful friend and ally of the College.

I beg you to make my official farewells to the members of the Faculty at their next meeting, and to assure them all and each of my regard and friendship, and of my best wishes for them in all things.

With sentiments of highest esteem, I remain

Dear Sir,
Yours faithfully

Henry W. Longfellow[84]

His retirement was not a matter of ill health, for he was perfectly well, except that he could not use his eyes by candle-light. But friends and guests and children and college lectures had more and more filled up his time, so that he had no strength for poetry, and the last two years had been very unproductive. There was, moreover, all the excitement of his friend Sumner’s career, and of the fugitive slave cases in Boston, and it is no wonder that he writes in his diary, with his usual guarded moderation, “I am not, 207 however, very sure as to the result.” Meanwhile he sat for his portrait by Lawrence, and the subject of the fugitive slave cases brought to the poet’s face, as the artist testified, a look of animation and indignation which he was glad to catch and retain. On Commencement Day, July 19, 1854, he wore his academical robes for the last time, and writes of that event, “The whole crowded church looked ghostly and unreal as a thing in which I had no part.” He had already been engaged upon his version of Dante, having taken it up on February 1, 1853,[85] after ten years’ interval; and moreover another new literary project had occurred to him “purely in the realm of fancy,” as he describes it, and his freedom became a source of joy.

He had been anxious for some years to carry out his early plan of works upon American themes. He had, as will be remembered, made himself spokesman for the Indians on the college platform. His list of proposed subjects had included as far back as 1829, “Tales of the Quoddy Indians,” with a description of Sacobezon, their chief. After twenty-five years he wrote in his diary (June 22, 1854), “I have at length hit upon a plan for a poem on the American Indians which seems to be the right one and the only. It is to weave together their 208 beautiful traditions into a whole. I have hit upon a measure, too, which I think the right one and the only one for the purpose.” He had to draw for this delineation not merely upon the Indians seen in books, but on those he had himself observed in Maine, the Sacs and Foxes he had watched on Boston Common, and an Ojibway chief whom he had entertained at his house. As for the poetic measure, a suitable one had just been suggested to him by the Finnish epic of “Kalevala,” which he had been reading; and he had been delighted by its appropriateness to the stage character to be dealt with and the type of legend to be treated. “Hiawatha” was begun on June 25, 1854, and published on November 10 of that year. He enjoyed the work thoroughly, but it evidently seemed to him somewhat tame before he got through, and this tendency to tameness was sometimes a subject of criticism with readers; but its very simplicity made the style attractive to children and gave a charm which it is likely always to retain. With his usual frankness, he stated at the outset that the metre was not original with him, and it was of course a merit in the legends that they were not original. The book received every form of attention; it was admired, laughed at, parodied, set to music, and publicly read, and his fame unquestionably rests far more securely on this 209 and other strictly American poems than on the prolonged labor of the “Golden Legend.” He himself writes that some of the newspapers are “fierce and furious” about “Hiawatha,” and again “there is the greatest pother over ‘Hiawatha.’” Freiligrath, who translated the poem into German, writes him from London, “Are you not chuckling over the war which is waging in the ‘Athenæum’ about the measure from ‘Hiawatha’?” He had letters of hearty approval from Emerson, Hawthorne, Parsons, and Bayard Taylor; the latter, perhaps, making the best single encomium on the book in writing to its author, “The whole poem floats in an atmosphere of the American ‘Indian summer.’” The best tribute ever paid to it, however, was the actual representation of it as a drama by the Ojibway Indians on an island in Lake Huron, in August, 1901, in honor of a visit to the tribe by some of the children and grandchildren of the poet. This posthumous tribute to a work of genius is in itself so picturesque and interesting and has been so well described by Miss Alice Longfellow, who was present, that I have obtained her consent to reprint it in the Appendix to this volume.

Longfellow’s next poem reverted to hexameters once more, inasmuch as “Evangeline” had thoroughly outlived the early criticisms inspired by 210 this meter. The theme had crossed his mind in 1856, and he had begun to treat it in dramatic form and verse, under the name it now bears; but after a year’s delay he tried it again under the name of Priscilla, taking the name, possibly, from an attractive English Quakeress, Priscilla Green, whose sweet voice had charmed him in a public meeting, “breaking now and then,” as he says, “into a kind of rhythmic charm in which the voice seemed floating up and down on wings.” It has been thought that he transferred in some degree the personality of this worthy woman to the heroine of his story, their Christian names being the same; but he afterwards resumed the original title, “The Courtship of Miles Standish.” He wrote it with great ease between December, 1857, and March, 1858, and perhaps never composed anything with a lighter touch or more unmingled pleasure. Twenty-five thousand copies were sold or ordered of the publishers during the first week, and ten thousand in London on the first day. In both theme and treatment the story was thoroughly to his liking, and vindicated yet further that early instinct which guided him to American subjects. Longfellow was himself descended, it will be remembered, from the very marriage he described, thus guaranteeing a sympathetic treatment, while the measure is a shade crisper and more elastic than that of “Evangeline,” 211 owing largely to the greater use of trochees. It is almost needless to say that no such effort can ever be held strictly to the classic rules, owing to the difference in the character of the language. With German hexameters the analogy is closer.

On July 10, 1861, Mrs. Longfellow died the tragic death which has been so often described, from injuries received by fire the day before. Never was there a greater tragedy within a household; never one more simply and nobly borne. It was true to Lowell’s temperament to write frankly his sorrow in exquisite verse; but it became Longfellow’s habit, more and more, to withhold his profoundest feelings from spoken or written utterance; and it was only after his death that his portfolio, being opened, revealed this sonnet, suggested by a picture of the western mountain whose breast bears the crossed furrows.

July 10, 1879.

213

CHAPTER XVIII
BIRDS OF PASSAGE

Longfellow had always a ready faculty for grouping his shorter poems in volumes, and had a series continuing indefinitely under the name of “Birds of Passage,” which in successive “flights” were combined with longer works. The first was contained in the volume called “The Courtship of Miles Standish” (1858); the second in “Tales of a Wayside Inn” (1863); flight the third appeared in connection with “Aftermath” (1873); flight the fourth in “Masque of Pandora and Other Poems” (1875), and flight the fifth in “Keramos and Other Poems” (1878). These short poems stand representative of his middle life, as “Voices of the Night” and “Ballads” did for the earlier; and while the maturer works have not, as a whole, the fervor and freshness of the first, they have more average skill of execution.

The “Tales of a Wayside Inn” was the final grouping of several stories which had accumulated upon him, large and small, and finally demanded a title-page in common. Some of them 214 had been published before and were grouped into a volume in 1863, which, making itself popular, was followed by two more volumes, finally united into one. We have what is not usually the case, the poet’s own account of them, he having written thus to a correspondent in England: “‘The Wayside Inn’ has more foundation in fact than you may suppose. The town of Sudbury is about twenty miles from Cambridge. Some two hundred years ago, an English family by the name of Howe built there a country house, which has remained in the family down to the present time, the last of the race dying but two years ago. Losing their fortune, they became innkeepers; and for a century the Red-Horse Inn has flourished, going down from father to son. The place is just as I have described it, though no longer an inn. All this will account for the landlord’s coat-of-arms, and his being a justice of the peace, and his being known as ‘the Squire,’—things that must sound strange in English ears. All the characters are real. The musician is Ole Bull; the Spanish Jew, Israel Edrehi, whom I have seen as I have painted him,” etc., etc.

Other participants in the imaginary festivities are the late Thomas W. Parsons, the translator of Dante, who appears as the poet; the theologian being Professor Daniel Treadwell of Harvard 215 University, an eminent physicist, reputed in his day to be not merely a free thinker, but something beyond it; the student being Henry Ware Wales, a promising scholar and lover of books, who left his beautiful library to the Harvard College collection; and the Sicilian being Luigi Monti, who had been an instructor in Italian at Harvard under Longfellow. Several of this group had habitually spent their summers in the actual inn which Longfellow described and which is still visible at Sudbury. But none of the participants in the supposed group are now living except Signor Monti, who still resides in Rome, as for many years back, with his American wife, a sister of the poet Parsons. All the members of the group were well known in Cambridge and Boston, especially Ole Bull, who was at seventy as picturesque in presence and bearing as any youthful troubadour, and whose American wife, an active and courageous philanthropist, still vibrates between America and India, and is more or less allied to the Longfellow family by the marriage of her younger brother, Mr. J. G. Thorp, to the poet’s youngest daughter. The volume has always been popular, even its most ample form; yet most of the individual poems are rarely quoted, and with the exception of “Paul Revere’s Ride” and “Lady Wentworth” they are not very widely read. 216 These two are, it is to be observed, the most essentially American among them. The book was originally to have been called “The Sudbury Tales,” and was sent to the printer in April, 1863, under that title, which was however changed to “Tales of a Wayside Inn,” through the urgency of Charles Sumner.

It is the common fate of those poets who live to old age, that their critics, or at least their contemporary critics, are apt to find their later work less valuable than their earlier. Browning, Tennyson, and Swinburne, to mention no others, have had to meet this fate, and Longfellow did not escape it. Whether it is that the fame of the earlier work goes on accumulating while the later has not yet been tested by time, or that contemporary admirers have grown older and more critical when they are introduced to the later verses, this is hard to decide. Even when the greatest of modern poets completed in old age the dream of his youth, it was the fashion for a long time to regard the completion as a failure, and it took years to secure any real appreciation to the second part of “Faust.” This possibility must always be allowed for, but the fact remains that the title which Longfellow himself chose for so many of his poems, “Birds of Passage,” was almost painfully suggestive of a series of minor works of which 217 we can only say that had his fame rested on those alone, it would have been of quite uncertain tenure. A very few of them, like “Keramos,” “Morituri Salutamus,” and “The Herons of Elmwood,” stand out as exceptions, and above all of these was the exquisite sonnet already printed in this volume, “The Cross of Snow,” recording at last the poet’s high water-mark, as was the case with Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar.” Apart from these, it may be truly said that the little volume called “Flower de Luce” was the last collection published by him which recalled his earlier strains. His volume “Ultima Thule” appeared in 1880, and “In the Harbor,” classed as a second part to it, but issued by others after his death. With these might be placed, though not with any precision, the brief tragedy of “Judas Maccabæus,” which had been published in the “Three Books of Song,” in 1872; and the unfinished fragment, “Michael Angelo,” which was found in his desk after death. None of his dramatic poems showed him to be on firm ground in respect to this department of poesy, nor can they, except the “Golden Legend,” be regarded as altogether successful literary undertakings. It is obvious that historic periods differ wholly in this respect; and all we can say is that while quite mediocre poets were good dramatists in the Elizabethan 218 period, yet good poets have usually failed as dramatists in later days. Longfellow’s efforts on this very ground were not less successful, on the whole, than those of Tennyson and Swinburne; nor does even Browning, tried by the test of the actual stage, furnish a complete exception.

219

CHAPTER XIX
LAST TRIP TO EUROPE

On May 27, 1868, Longfellow sailed from New York for Liverpool in the steamer Russia, with a large family party, including his son and his son’s bride, his three young daughters, his brother and two sisters, with also a brother-in-law, the brilliant Thomas G. Appleton. On arrival they went at once to the English lakes, visiting Furness Abbey, Corby Castle, and Eden Hall, where he saw still unimpaired the traditional goblet which Uhland’s ballad had vainly attempted to shatter. At Morton, near Carlisle, while staying with a friend he received a public address, to which he thus replied, in one of the few speeches of his life:—

“Mr. President and Gentlemen,—Being more accustomed to speak with the pen than with the tongue, it is somewhat difficult for me to find appropriate words now to thank you for the honor you have done me, and the very kind expressions you have used. Coming here as a stranger, this welcome makes me feel that I am not a stranger; for how can a man be a stranger 220 in a country where he finds all doors and all hearts open to him? Besides, I myself am a Cumberland man,—I was born in the County of Cumberland, in the State of Maine, three thousand miles from here,—and you all know that the familiar name of a town or country has a homelike sound to our ears.... You can think then how very grateful it is to me—how very pleasant—to find my name has a place in your memories and your affections. For this kindness I most heartily thank you, and I reciprocate all the good wishes which you have expressed for perpetual peace and amity between our two nations.”[86]

He received the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws at Cambridge, and the scene was thus described by a London reporter:—

“Amid a score or so of Heads of Houses and other Academic dignitaries conspicuous by their scarlet robes, the one on whom all eyes were turned was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The face was one which would have caught the spectator’s glance, even if not called to it by the cheers which greeted his appearance in the red robes of an LL. D. Long, white, silken hair and a beard of patriarchal whiteness enclosed a fresh-colored countenance, with fine-cut features and deep-sunken eyes, overshadowed by massive eyebrows. 221 In a few well-rounded Latin sentences, Mr. Clark, the Public Orator, recited the claims of the distinguished visitor to the privilege of an honorary degree. The names of Hiawatha and Evangeline sounded strangely amid the sonorous periods.”[87]

Another journalist wrote that the orator “drew a picture of the function of poetry to solace the ills of life and draw men from its low cares ad excelsiora. This point was caught at once by the undergraduates and drew forth hearty cheering. The degree was then conferred.”[88]

Arriving in London he received a deluge of cards and invitations; visited Windsor by invitation of the Queen, and was received in one of the galleries of the castle; called by request upon the Prince of Wales; and was entertained at dinner by Mr. Bierstadt, the landscape painter, who had several hundred people to meet him. Mr. Longfellow had stipulated that there should be no speeches, but after dinner there were loud calls for Mr. Gladstone, who said in reply, according to the reporters, that “they must be permitted to break through the restrictions which the authority of their respected host had imposed upon them, and to give expression to the feelings which one and all entertained on 222 this occasion. After all, it was simply impossible to sit at the social board with a man of Mr. Longfellow’s world-wide fame, without offering him some tribute of their admiration. There was perhaps no class of persons less fitted to do justice to an occasion of this character than those who were destined to tread the toilsome and dusty road of politics. Nevertheless, he was glad to render his tribute of hearty admiration to one whom they were glad to welcome not only as a poet but as a citizen of America.”[89]

Mr. Longfellow replied that “they had taken him by surprise, a traveller just landed and with Bradshaw still undigested upon his brain, and they would not expect him to make a speech. There were times, indeed, when it was easier to speak than to act; but it was not so with him, now. He would, however, be strangely constituted if he did not in his heart respond to their kind and generous welcome. In the longest speech he could make, he could but say in many phrases what he now said in a few sincere words,—that he was deeply grateful for the kindness which had been shown him.”[90]

After visiting the House of Lords with Mr. R. C. Winthrop, on one occasion, he was accosted by a laboring man in the street, who asked permission to speak with him, and recited a verse 223 of “Excelsior,” before which the poet promptly retreated. Passing to the continent, the party visited Switzerland, crossed by the St. Gothard Pass to Italy, and reached Cadenabbia, on the Lake of Como. They returned to Paris in the autumn; then went to Italy again, staying at Florence and Rome, where they saw the Abbé Liszt and obtained that charming sketch of him by Healy, in which the great musician is seen opening the inner door and bearing a candle in his hand. In the spring they visited Naples, Venice, and Innsbruck, returning then to England, where Longfellow received the degree of D. C. L. at Oxford; and they then visited Devonshire, Edinburgh, and the Scottish lakes. He again received numberless invitations in London, and wrote to Lowell, “It is only by dint of great resolution that I escaped a dozen public and semi-public dinners.” At the very last moment before sailing, he received a note from Mr. E. J. Reed, the chief constructor to the British Navy, who pronounced his poem “The Building of the Ship” to be the finest poem on shipbuilding that ever was or ever would be written. He reached home September 1, 1869. In his letters during this period, one sees the serene head of a family, the absolutely unspoiled recipient of praise, but not now the eager and enthusiastic young pilgrim of romance. Yet he 224 writes to his friend Ferguson that if he “said his say” about York Cathedral, his friends would think him sixteen instead of sixty; and again tells his publisher Fields that he enjoys Lugano—never before visited—to the utmost, but that “the old familiar place saddened” him.[91] Many a traveller has had in later life the same experience.

225

CHAPTER XX
DANTE

We come now to that great task which Longfellow, after an early experiment, had dropped for years, and which he resumed after his wife’s death, largely for the sake of an absorbing occupation. Eighteen years before, November 24, 1843, he had written to Ferdinand Freiligrath that he had translated sixteen cantos of Dante, and there seems no reason to suppose that he had done aught farther in that direction until this new crisis. After resuming the work, he translated for a time a canto as each day’s task, and refers to this habit in his sonnet on the subject, where he says:—

The work was not fully completed until 1866, and was published in part during the following year.

The whole picture of the manner in which the work was done has long been familiar to the literary world, including the pleasing glimpse of 226 the little circle of cultivated friends, assembled evening after evening, to compare notes and suggest improvements. For many years this was regarded by students and critics as having been almost an ideal method for the production of a great work, and especially of a translation,—a task where there is always the original text at hand for reference. As time has gone on, however, the admiration for the completed work has gradually been mingled with a growing doubt whether this species of joint production was on the whole an ideal one, and whether, in fact, a less perfect work coming from a single mind might not surpass in freshness of quality, and therefore in successful effort, any joint product. Longfellow had written long before to Freiligrath that making a translation was “like running a ploughshare through the soil of one’s mind,”[92] and it would be plainly impossible to run ploughshares simultaneously through half a dozen different minds at precisely the same angle. The mind to decide on a phrase or an epithet, even in a translation, must, it would seem, be the mind from which the phrase or statement originally proceeded; a suggestion from a neighbor might sometimes be most felicitous, but quite as often more tame and guarded; and the influence of several neighbors collectively 227 might lie, as often happens in the outcome of an ordinary committee meeting, rather in the direction of caution than of vigor. Longfellow’s own temperament was of the gracious and conciliatory type, by no means of the domineering quality; and it is certainly a noticeable outcome of all this joint effort at constructing a version of this great world-poem, that one of the two original delegates, Professor Norton, should ultimately have published a prose translation of his own. It is also to be observed that Professor Norton, in the original preface to his version, while praising several other translators, does not so much as mention the name of Longfellow; and in his list of “Aids to the Study of the ‘Divine Comedy’” speaks only of Longfellow’s notes and illustrations, which he praises as “admirable.” Even Lowell, the other original member of the conference, while in his “Dante” essay he ranks Longfellow’s as “the best” of the complete translations, applies the word “admirable” only to those fragmentary early versions, made for Longfellow’s college classes twenty years before,—versions which the completed work was apparently intended to supersede.

Far be it from me to imply that any disloyalty was shown on the part of these gentlemen either towards their eminent associate or towards the work on which they had shared his labors; it is 228 only that they surprise us a little by what they do not say. It may be that they do not praise the Longfellow version because they confessedly had a share in it, yet this reason does not quite satisfy. Nothing has been more noticeable in the popular reception of the completed work than the general preference of unsophisticated readers for those earlier translations thus heartily praised by Lowell. There has been a general complaint that the later work does not possess for the English-speaking reader the charm exerted by the original over all who can read Italian, while those earlier and fragmentary specimens had certainly possessed something of that charm.

Those favorite versions, it must be remembered, were not the result of any coöperated labor, having been written by Professor Longfellow in an interleaved copy of Dante which he used in the class room. They were three in number, all from the “Purgatorio” and entitled by him respectively, “The Celestial Pilot,” “The Terrestrial Paradise,” and “Beatrice.” They were first published in “Voices of the Night” (1839), and twenty-eight years had passed before the later versions appeared. Those twenty-eight years had undoubtedly enhanced in width and depth Mr. Longfellow’s knowledge of the Italian language; their labors and sorrows had matured 229 the strength of his mind; but it is not so clear that they had not in some degree diminished its freshness and vivacity, nor is it clear that the council of friendly critics would be an influence tending to replace just those gifts.

If a comparison is to be made between the earlier and later renderings, the best way would doubtless be to place them side by side in parallel columns; and while it would be inappropriate to present such a comparison here on any large scale, it may be worth while to take a passage at random to see the effect of the two methods. Let us take, for instance, a passage from “Purgatorio,” canto xxx. lines 22 and 23. They are thus in the original:—

The following is Longfellow’s translation of 1839, made by the man of thirty-two:—

The following is the later version, made by the man of sixty, after ample conference with friendly critics:—

230

I do not see how any English-speaking reader could hesitate for a moment in finding a charm far greater in the first version than in the second, or fail to recognize in it more of that quality which has made the name of Dante immortal. If this be true, the only question that can be raised is whether this advantage has been won by a sacrifice of that degree of literalness which may fairly be demanded of a translation in poetic form. Perfect and absolute literalness, it must be remembered, can only be expected of a prose version, and even after the most perfect metrical translation a prose version may be as needful as ever. Let us consider for a moment the two examples as given above. It may be conceded at the outset that the adverb già is more strictly and carefully rendered by “ere” than by “oft,” but the difference is not important, as any one old enough to describe a daybreak has undoubtedly seen more than one. The difference between “the approach of day” and “as day began” is important, since the last moment of the approach coincides with the first moment of the beginning. In the second line, “la parte oriental” is both more literally and more tersely rendered by “the orient sky,” than by the more awkward expression “the eastern hemisphere,” unless it be claimed that “sky” does not sufficiently recognize the earth as seen 231 in the view; to which it may justly be replied that the word “hemisphere,” if applied only to the earth, equally omits the sky, and the two defects balance each other. “Tinged with rose” is undoubtedly a briefer expression for the untranslatable “rosata” than “stained with roseate hues” would be. The last line of the three finds an identical rendering in the two versions, and while “bel sereno” is more literally rendered by “fair serene” than by “light serene,” yet the earlier phrase has the advantage of being better English, serene being there used as an adjective only, whereas in the later translation it is used as a noun, a practice generally regarded as obsolete in the dictionaries. Even where the word is thus employed, they tell us, it does not describe the morning light, but indicates, like the French word “serein,” an evening dampness; as where Daniel says, “The fogs and the serene offend us.” Summing up the comparison, so far as this one example goes, it would seem that the revised version of Longfellow has but very slight advantage over its predecessor, while the loss of vividness and charm is unquestionable.

To carry the test yet farther, let us compare the three lines, in their two successive versions, with the prose version of Professor Norton, which reads as follows: “I have seen ere now at the beginning of the day the eastern region all rosy, 232 while the rest of heaven was beautiful with fair, clear sky.” Here the prose translator rightly discards the “oft” of the earlier Longfellow version, but his “at the beginning” is surely nearer to the “at the approach” of the first version than to the less literal “as day began” of the second. The prose “the eastern region” conforms to the second version “the eastern hemisphere,” but surely the Italian “la parte oriental” is more nearly met by “the orient sky” than by either of these heavier and more geographical substitutes, which have a flavor of the text-book. Both the Longfellow versions have “the other heaven,” which is a literal rendering of “l’altro ciel,” whereas “the rest of heaven” is a shade looser in expression, and “fair, clear sky” also forfeits the condensation of “light serene” or “fair serene,” of which two phrases the first seems the better, for reasons already given. On the whole, if we take Professor Norton’s prose translation as the standard, Longfellow’s later version seems to me to gain scarcely anything upon the earlier in literalness, while it loses greatly in freshness and triumphant joyousness.

Nor is this in any respect an unreasonable criticism. For what does a translation exist, after all, if not to draw us toward that quality in the original which the translator, even at his 233 best, can rarely reach? Goethe says that “the translator is a person who introduces you to a veiled beauty; he makes you long for the loveliness behind the veil,” and we have in the notes to his “West-Östliche Divan” the celebrated analysis of the three forms of translation. He there says, “Translation is of three kinds: First, the prosaic prose translation, which is useful in enriching the language of the translator with new ideas, but gives up all poetic art, and reduces even the poetic enthusiasm to one level watery plain. Secondly, the re-creation of the poem as a new poem, rejecting or altering all that seems foreign to the translator’s nationality, producing a paraphrase which might, in the primal sense of the word, be called a parody. And, thirdly, ... the highest and last, where one strives to make the translation identical with the original; so that one is not instead of the other, but in the place of the other. This sort of translation ... ‘approaches the interlinear version, and makes the understanding of the original a much easier task; thus we are led into the original,—yes, even driven in; and herein the great merit of this kind of translation lies.’”[93]

It may be doubted, however, whether Longfellow, in his remarkable paper “On the Translation of Faust” 234 even if left to himself in making his version, could ever have reached the highest point attained by Goethe, from the mere difference between the two languages with which he and his original had to deal. The charm of Longfellow’s earlier versions is, after all, an English charm, and perhaps the quality of Dante can no more be truthfully transmuted into this than we can transmute the charms of a spring morning into those of a summer afternoon, or violets into roses. Goethe, it is well known, took for his model as to the language of “Faust” the poetry of Hans Sachs, Longfellow’s “cobbler bard;” and Dante’s terse monosyllables were based upon the language of the people, which he first embodied in art. To mellow its refreshing brevities would perhaps be to destroy it, and that which Mr. Andrews finely says of the “Faust” may be still more true of the “Divina Commedia,” that it “must remain, after all, the enchanted palace; and the bodies and the bones of those who in other days strove to pierce its encircling hedge lie scattered thickly about it.” So Mr. W. C. Lawton, himself an experienced translator from the Greek, says of Longfellow’s work, “His great version is but a partial success, for it essays the unattainable.”[94] But if it be possible to win this success, it is probably destined to be 235 done by one translator working singly and not in direct coöperation with others, however gifted or accomplished. Every great literary work needs criticism from other eyes during its progress. Nevertheless it will always remain doubtful whether any such work, even though it be a translation only, can be satisfactorily done by joint labor.

After all, when others have done their best, it is often necessary to fall back upon the French Joubert for the final touch of criticism; and in his unequalled formula for translating Homer, we find something not absolutely applicable to Dantean translation, yet furnishing much food for thought. The following is the passage: “There will never be an endurable translation of Homer, unless its words are chosen with skill and are full of variety, of freshness, and of charm. It is also essential that the diction should be as antique, as simple, as are the manners, the events, and the personages portrayed. With our modern style everything attitudinizes in Homer, and his heroes seem fantastic figures which personate the grave and proud.”[95]