History of American Literature Part 22

In _The Scarlet Letter_ it was shown that the moral law forces evildoers to pay the last farthing of the debt of sinning. _In The Marble Faun_ the effect of sin in developing character is emphasized, and Donatello, the thoughtless creature of the woods is portrayed in his stages of growth after his moral nature has first been roused by a great crime. The question is raised, Can the soul be developed and strengthened by sin? The problem is handled with Hawthorne's usual moral earnestness of purpose, and is expressed in his easiest and most flexible style. Nevertheless this work has not the suppressed intensity, completeness of outline, and artistic symmetry possessed by _The Scarlet Letter_. The chief defects of _The Marble Faun_ are a vagueness of form, a distracting variety of scene, and a lack of the convincing power of reality. The continued popularity of this romance, however, is justly due to its poetic conception, its atmosphere of ancient mystery, and its historic Roman background.

_The Blithedale Romance_ and the cooperative settlement described in it were suggested to Hawthorne by his Brook Farm experience, although he disclaims any attempt to present an actual picture of that community. The idea of the division of labor, the transcendental conversations, and many of the incidents owe their origin to his sojourn at Brook Farm (p. 166).

Although _The Blithedale Romance_ does not equal the three romances already described, it contains one character, Zen.o.bia, who is the most original and dramatic of Hawthorne's men and women, and some scenes which are as powerful as any drawn by him.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.--Hawthorne gave the Puritan to literature. This achievement suggests Irving's canonization of the Knickerbockers and Cooper's of the pioneer and the Indian. Himself a Unitarian and out of sympathy with the Puritans' creed, Hawthorne nevertheless says, "And yet, let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their nature have intertwined themselves with mine." He and they had the same favorite subject,--the human soul in its relation to the judgment day. He could no more think of sin unrelated to the penalty, than of a serpent without shape or color. Unlike many modern novelists, his work never wanders beyond a world where the Ten Commandments rule. Critics have well said that he never painted a so-called man of the world, because such a man, by Hawthorne's definition, would really be a man out of the great moral world, which to Hawthorne seemed the only real world.

He is preeminently a writer of romance. He was always powerfully influenced by such romantic materials as may be found in the world of witchcraft and the supernatural, or such as are suggested by dim foreshadowings of evil and by the many mysteries for which human philosophy does not account. For this reason, his works are removed from the commonplace and enveloped in an imaginative atmosphere. He subjects his use of these romantic materials--the unusual, the improbable, and the supernatural--to only one touchstone. He is willing to avail himself of these, so long as he does not, in his own phrase, "swerve aside from the truth of the human heart."

His stories are frequently symbolic. He selects some object, token, or utterance, in harmony with his purpose, and uses it as a symbol to prefigure some moral action or result. The symbol may be an embroidered mantle, indicative of pride; a b.u.t.terfly, typical of emergence from a dead chrysalis to a state of ideal beauty; or the words of a curse, which prophesy a ghastly death. His choice of scene, plot, and character is in harmony with the moral purpose indicated by the symbol. Sometimes this purpose is dimly veiled in allegory, but even when his stories are sermons in allegory, like _The Snow Image_, he so invests them with poetic fancy or spiritual beauty as to make them works of art. His extensive use of symbolism and allegory has been severely criticized. It is unfortunate that he did not learn earlier in life what _The Scarlet Letter_ should have taught him, that he did not need to rely on these supports. He becomes one of the great masters when he paints character from the inside with a touch so vivid and compelling that the symbolism and the allegory vanish like a dissolving picture and reveal human forms. When he has breathed into them the creator's breath of life, he walks with them hand in hand in this lost Eden. He ascends the pillory with Hester Prynne, and writhes with Arthur Dimmesdale's agony. He plays on the seash.o.r.e with little Pearl. He shares Hepzibah Pyncheon's solitude and waits on the customers in the cent shop with Phoebe. He eats two dromedaries and a gingerbread locomotive with little Ned Higgins.

Hawthorne did not care much for philosophical systems, and never concerned himself with the intricacies of transcendentalism. Yet he was affected by that philosophy, as is shown by his personal isolation and that of his characters. His intense belief in individuality is also a transcendental doctrine. He holds that the individual is his own jailer, his own liberator, the preserver or loser of his own Eden. Moral regeneration seems to him an individual, not a social, affair.

His style is easy, exact, flowing, and it shows the skill of a literary artist. He never strains after effect, never uses excessive ornament, never appears hurried. There was not another nineteenth-century prose master on either side of the Atlantic who could in fewer words or simpler language have secured the effect produced by _The Scarlet Letter_. He wished to be impressive in describing Phoebe, that sunbeam in _The House of the Seven Gables_, but he says simply:--

"She was like a prayer, offered up in the homeliest beauty of one's mother tongue."

Sincerity is the marked characteristic of this simplicity in style, and it makes an impression denied to the mere striver after effect, however cunning his art.

A writer of imperishable romances, a sympathetic revealer of the soul, a great moralist, a master of style, Hawthorne is to be cla.s.sed with the greatest masters of English fiction. His artist's hand

"Wrought in a sad sincerity; Himself from G.o.d he could not free."

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, 1807-1882

[Ill.u.s.tration: HENRY W. LONGFELLOW]

LIFE--Longfellow, the most widely read of American poets, was born in Portland, Maine, in 1807. His father was a Harvard graduate, and his mother, like Bryant's, was descended from John and Priscilla Alden of Plymouth. Longfellow, when three years old, began to go to school, and, like Bryant, he published at the ripe age of thirteen his first poem, _Battle of Lovell's Pond_, which appeared in the _Portland Gazette_.

Portland made a great impression on the boy. To his early life there is due the love of the sea, which colors so much of his poetry. In his poem, _My Lost Youth_, he says:--

"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 s.h.i.+ps, And the magic of the sea."

He went to Bowdoin College, Maine, where he had Nathaniel Hawthorne for a cla.s.smate. In his senior year Longfellow wrote to his father, "I most eagerly aspire after future eminence in literature; my whole soul burns most ardently for it, and every earthly thought centers in it." His father replied, "There is not enough wealth in this country to afford encouragement and patronage to merely literary men. And as you have not had the fortune ... to be born rich, you must adopt a profession which will afford you subsistence as well as reputation." The son then chose the law, saying, "This will support my real existence; literature, my ideal one."

Bowdoin College, however, came to the rescue, and offered him the professors.h.i.+p of modern languages on condition that he would go abroad for study. He accepted the offer, and remained abroad three years. His travel sketches on this trip were published in book form in 1835, under the t.i.tle of _Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage beyond the Sea_. This is suggestive of the _Sketch Book_ (p. 119), the earliest book which he remembered reading.

After five years' service at Bowdoin, he accepted Harvard's offer of the professors.h.i.+p of modern languages and again went abroad. This journey was saddened by the death of his first wife. His prose romance; _Hyperion_, was one of the fruits of this sojourn abroad. The second Mrs. Longfellow, whose real name was Frances Appleton, appears in this book under the name of Mary Ashburton. Her father bought the Craigie House, which had been Was.h.i.+ngton's headquarters in Cambridge, and gave it to Longfellow as a residence. In 1854, after eighteen years' teaching at Harvard, he resigned, for his means were then ample to enable him to devote his full time to literature.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LONGFELLOW'S HOME, CRAIGIE HOUSE, CAMBRIDGE]

From 1854 until 1861 he lived in reality the ideal existence of his youthful dreams. In 1861 his wife's summer dress caught fire, and although he struggled heroically to save her, she died the next day, and he himself was so severely burned that he could not attend her funeral. Years afterwards he wrote:--

"Here in this room she died; and soul more white Never through martyrdom of fire was led To its repose."

Like Bryant, he sought refuge in translating. Longfellow chose Dante, and gave the world the fine rendering of his _Divine Comedy_ (1867).

Outside of these domestic sorrows, Longfellow's life was happy and prosperous. His home was blessed with attractive children. Loved by friends, honored by foreigners, possessed of rare sweetness and lovableness of disposition, he became the most popular literary man in America. He desired freedom from turmoil and from constant struggling for daily bread, and this freedom came to him in fuller measure than to most men.

The children of the country felt that he was their own special poet. The public schools of the United States celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday, February 27, 1882. Less than a month later he died, and was laid to rest in Mount Auburn cemetery, Cambridge.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LONGFELLOW AS A YOUNG MAN]

"LAUREATE OF THE COMMON HUMAN HEART."--"G.o.d must love the common people,"

said President Lincoln, "because he has made so many of them." Longfellow wrote for "the common human heart." In him the common people found a poet who could gild the commonplace things of life and make them seem more attractive, more easily borne, more important, more full of meaning.

In his first published volume of poems, _Voices of the Night_ (1839), he shows his aim distinctly in such poems as _A Psalm of Life_. Its lines are the essence of simplicity, but they have instilled patience and n.o.ble purpose into many a humble human soul. The two stanzas beginning

"Life is real! Life is earnest,"

and

"Lives of great men all remind us,"

can be repeated by many who know but little poetry, and these very stanzas, as well as many others like them, have affected the lives of large numbers of people. Those born a generation ago not infrequently say that the following stanza from _The Ladder of St. Augustine_ (1850) has been the stepping-stone to their success in life:--

"The heights by great men reached and kept Were not attained by sudden flight, But they, while their companions slept, Were toiling upward in the night."

His poem, _The Rainy Day_ (1841), has developed in many a person the qualities of patience, resignation, and hopefulness. Repet.i.tion makes the majority of things seem commonplace, but even repet.i.tion has not robbed lines like these of their power:--

"Be still, sad heart! and cease repining, Behind the clouds is the sun still s.h.i.+ning; Thy fate is the common fate of all; Into each life some rain must fall, Some days must be dark and dreary."

Nine days before he died, he wrote his last lines with the same simplicity and hopefulness of former days:--

"Out of the shadows of night The world rolls into light.

It is daybreak everywhere."

As we examine these typical poems, we shall find that all of them appeal to our common experiences or aspirations, and that all are expressed in that simple language which no one need read twice to understand.

BALLADS.--Longfellow knew how to tell a story which preserved the simplicity and the vigor of the old ballad makers. His _The Wreck of the Hesperus_ (1839) starts in the true fas.h.i.+on to make us wish to finish the tale:--

"It was the schooner Hesperus, That sailed the wintry sea; And the skipper had taken his little daughter To bear him company."

Longfellow says that he wrote this ballad between twelve and three in the morning and that the composition did not come to him by lines, but by stanzas.

Even more vigorous is his ballad of _The Skeleton in Armor_ (1840). The Viking hero of the tale, like young Lochinvar, won the heart of the heroine, the blue-eyed daughter of a Norwegian prince.

"When of old Hildebrand I asked his daughter's hand, Mute did the minstrels stand To hear my story."

The Viking's suit was denied. He put the maiden on his vessel before he was detected and pursued by her father. Those who think that the gentle Longfellow could not write poetry as energetic as Scott's _Lochinvar_ should read the following stanza:--

"As with his wings aslant, Sails the fierce cormorant, Seeking some rocky haunt, With his prey laden,-- So toward the open main, Beating to sea again, Through the wild hurricane, Bore I the maiden."

Those who are fond of this kind of poetry should turn to Longfellow's _Tales of a Wayside Inn_ (1863), where they will find such favorites as _Paul Revere's Ride_ and _The Birds of Killingworth_.

LONGER POEMS.--No other American poet has equaled Longfellow's longer narrative poems. Bryant and Poe would not attempt long poems. The flights of Whittier and Emerson were comparatively short. It is unusually difficult to write long poems that will be read. In the case of _Evangeline_ (1847), _Hiawatha_ (1855), and _The Courts.h.i.+p of Miles Standish_ (1858), Longfellow proved an exception to the rule.

_Evangeline_ is based upon an incident that occurred during the French and Indian War. In 1755 a force of British and colonial troops sailed from Boston to Acadia (Nova Scotia) and deported the French inhabitants.

Hawthorne heard the story, how the English put Evangeline and her lover on different s.h.i.+ps and how she began her long, sad search for him. When Hawthorne and Longfellow were discussing this one day at dinner at the Craigie House, the poet said, "If you really do not want this incident for a tale, let me have it for a poem." Hawthorne consented to give his cla.s.smate all poetical rights to the story.