History of American Literature Part 23

_Evangeline_ is the tale of a love "that hopes and endures and is patient."

The metrical form, dactylic hexameter, is one that few of our poets have successfully used, and many have thought it wholly unfitted to English verse. Longfellow has certainly disproved their theory, for his success with this meter is p.r.o.nounced. The long, flowing lines seem to be exactly adapted to give the scenes the proper atmosphere and to narrate the heroine's weary search. The poem became immediately popular. It was the first successful long narrative poem to appear in the United States.

Whittier had studied the same subject, but had delayed making verses on it until he found that it had been suggested to Longfellow. In a complimentary review of the poem, Whittier said, "Longfellow was just the one to write it. If I had attempted it, I should have spoiled the artistic effect of the poem by my indignation at the treatment of the exiles by the colonial government."

From the moment that Evangeline appears, our interest does not lag.

"Fair was she to behold, that maiden of seventeen summers.

When she had pa.s.sed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music."

[Ill.u.s.tration: LONGFELLOW'S STUDY]

The imagery of the poem is pleasing, no matter whether we are listening to "the murmuring pines and the hemlocks," the softly sounding Angelus, the gossiping looms, the whir of wings in the drowsy air, or seeing the barns bursting with hay, the air filled with a dreamy and mystical light, the forest arrayed in its robes of russet and scarlet and yellow, and the stars, those "forget-me-nots of the angels," blossoming "in the infinite meadows of heaven."

[Ill.u.s.tration: HIAWATHA]

_The Song of Hiawatha_ was begun by Longfellow in 1854, after resigning the professors.h.i.+p of modern languages at Harvard. He seemed to revel in his new freedom, and in less than a year he had produced the poem by which he will probably be longest known to posterity. He studied Schoolcraft's _Algic Researches_ and the same author's _History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States_, and familiarized himself with Indian legends. The simplicity of Longfellow's nature and his ability as a poetic artist seemed rarely suited to deal with these traditions of a race that never wholly emerged from childhood.

Longfellow's invitation to hear this _Song_ does not include all, but only

"Ye whose hearts are fresh and simple, Who have faith in G.o.d and nature."

Those who accept this invitation will rejoice to accompany Shawondasee, the South-Wind, when he sends northward the robin, bluebird, and swallow. They will also wish to go with Kabibonokka, the North-Wind, as he paints the autumn woods with scarlet and sends the snowflakes through the forests.

They will be glad to be a child with Hiawatha, to hear again the magical voices of the forest, the whisper of the pines, the lapping of the waters, the hooting of the owl, to learn of every bird and beast its language, and especially to know the joy of calling them all brothers. They will gladly accompany Hiawatha to the land of the Dacotahs, when he woos Minnehaha, Laughing Water, and hears Owaissa, the bluebird, singing:--

"Happy are you, Hiawatha, Having such a wife to love you!"

But the guests will be made of stern stuff if their eyes do not moisten when they hear Hiawatha calling in the midst of the famine of the cold and cruel winter:--

"Give your children food, O father!

Give us food or we must peris.h.!.+

Give me food for Minnehaha, For my dying Minnehaha."

_Hiawatha_ overflows with the elemental spirit of childhood. The sense of companions.h.i.+p with all earth's creatures, the mystery of life and of Minnehaha's departure to the Kingdom of Ponemah, make a strong appeal to all who remember childhood's Eden.

_The Courts.h.i.+p of Miles Standish_ (1858), in the same meter as _Evangeline_, is a romantic tale, the scene of which is laid

"In the Old Colony days, in Plymouth, the land of the Pilgrims."

We see Miles Standish, the incarnation of the Puritan church militant, as he

"... wistfully gazed on the landscape, Washed with a cold gray mist, the vapory breath of the east-wind, Forest and meadow and hill, and the steel-blue rim of the ocean, Lying silent and sad in the afternoon shadows and suns.h.i.+ne."

Priscilla Mullins, the heroine of the poem, is a general favorite.

Longfellow and Bryant were both proud to trace their descent from her. This poem introduces her

"Seated beside her wheel, and the carded wool like a snow-drift Piled at her knee, her white hands feeding the ravenous spindle, While with her foot on the treadle she guided the wheel in its motion.

She, the Puritan girl, in the solitude of the forest, Making the humble house and the modest apparel of homespun Beautiful with her beauty, and rich with the wealth of her being!"

This story has more touches of humor than either _Evangeline_ or _Hiawatha_. Longfellow uses with fine effect the contradiction between the preaching of the bluff old captain, that you must do a thing yourself if you want it well done, and his practice in sending by John Alden an offer of marriage to Priscilla. Her reply has become cla.s.sic:

"Why don't you speak for yourself, John?"

Longfellow's _Christus, a Mystery_, was the t.i.tle finally given by him to three apparently separate poems, published under the t.i.tles, _The Golden Legend_ (1851), _The Divine Tragedy_ (1871), and _The New England Tragedies_ (1868). His idea was to represent the origin, the medieval aspect, and the Puritan conception of Christianity--a task not well suited to Longfellow's genius. _The Golden Legend_ is the most poetic, but _The New England Tragedies_ is the most likely to be read in future years, not for its poetic charms, but because it presents two phases of New England's colonial history, the persecution of the Quakers and the Salem witchcraft delusion.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.--An eminent Scotch educator says that Longfellow has probably taught more people to love poetry than any other nineteenth-century poet, English or American. He is America's best and most widely read story-teller in verse. Success in long narrative poems is rare in any literature. Probably the majority of critics would find it difficult to agree on any English poet since Chaucer who has surpa.s.sed Longfellow in this field.

He has achieved the unusual distinction of making the commonplace attractive and beautiful. He is the poet of the home, of the common people, and of those common objects in nature which in his verses convey a lesson to all. He has proved a moral stimulus to his age and he has further helped to make the world kindlier and its troubles more easily borne. This was his message:--

"Bear through sorrow, wrong and ruth In thy heart the dew of youth, On thy lips the smile of truth."

His poetry is usually more tinctured with feeling than with thought.

Diffuseness is his greatest fault. The _Sonnets_ of his later years and an occasional poem, like _Morituri Salutamus_ (1875), show more condensation, but parts of even _Hiawatha_ would be much improved if told in fewer words.

Some complain that Longfellow finds in books too much of the source of his inspiration; that, although he did not live far from Evangeline's country, he never visited it, and that others had to tell him to subst.i.tute pines or hemlocks for chestnut trees. Many critics have found fault with his poetry because it does not offer "sufficient obstruction to the stream of thought,"--because it does not make the mind use its full powers in wrestling with the meaning. It is a mistake, however, to underestimate the virtues of clearness and simplicity. Many great men who have been unsuccessful in their struggle to secure these qualities have consequently failed to reach the ear of the world with a message. While other poets should be read for mental development, the large heart of the world still finds a place for Longfellow, who has voiced its hopes that

"... the night shall be filled with music, And the cares that infest the day, Shall fold their tents like the Arabs, And as silently steal away."

Like most Puritans, Longfellow is usually over-anxious to teach a lesson; but the world must learn, and no one has surpa.s.sed him as a poetic teacher of the ma.s.ses.

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, 1807-1892

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOHN G. WHITTIER]

Life.--Whittier says that the only unusual circ.u.mstance about the migration of his Puritan ancestor to New England in 1638 was the fact that he brought over with him a hive of bees. The descendants of this very hive probably suggested the poem, _Telling the Bees_, for it was an old English custom to go straightway to the hive and tell the bees whenever a member of the family died. It was believed that they would swarm and seek another home if this information was withheld. The poet has made both the bees and the snows of his northern home famous. He was born in 1807 in the same house that his first American ancestor built in East Haverhill, about thirty-two miles northwest of Boston. The Whittiers were farmers who for generations had wrung little more than a bare subsistence from the soil. The boy's frail health was early broken by the severe labor. He had to milk seven cows, plow with a yoke of oxen, and keep busy from dawn until dark.

Unlike the other members of the New England group of authors, Whittier never went to college. He received only the scantiest education in the schools near his home. The family was so poor that he had to work as a cobbler, making slippers at eight cents a pair, in order to attend the Haverhill academy for six months. He calculated his expenses so exactly that he had just twenty-five cents left at the end of the term.

Two events in his youth had strong influence on his future vocation. When he was fourteen, his school-teacher read aloud to the family from the poems of Robert Burns. The boy was entranced, and, learning that Burns had been merely a plowman, felt that there was hope for himself. He borrowed the volume of poems and read them again and again. Of this experience, he says: "This was about the first poetry I had ever read (with the exception of the Bible, of which I had been a close student) and it had a lasting influence upon me. I began to make rhymes myself and to imagine stories and adventures." The second event was the appearance in print of some of his verses, which his sister had, unknown to him, sent to a Newburyport paper edited by William Lloyd Garrison. The great abolitionist thought enough of the poetry to ride out to Whittier's home and urge him to get an education.

This event made an indelible impression on the lad's memory.

Realizing that his health would not allow him to make his living on a farm, he tried teaching school, but, like Th.o.r.eau, found that occupation distasteful. Through Garrison's influence, Whittier at the age of twenty-one procured an editorial position in Boston. At various times he served as editor on more than half a dozen different papers, until his own health or his father's brought him back to the farm. Such occupation taught him how to write prose, of which he had produced enough at the time of his death to fill three good-sized volumes, but his prose did not secure the attention given to his verse. While in Hartford, editing _The New England Review_, he fell in love with Miss Cornelia Russ, and a few days before he finally left the city, he wrote a proposal to her in three hundred words of wandering prose. Had he expressed his feelings in one of his inimitable ballads, it is possible that he might have been accepted, for neither she nor he ever married. In the year of her death, he wrote his poem, _Memories_, which recounts some recollections earlier than his Hartford experiences:--

"A beautiful and happy girl, With step as light as summer air, Eyes glad with smiles, and brow of pearl Shadowed by many a careless curl Of unconfined and flowing hair; A seeming child in everything, Save thoughtful brow and ripening charms, As nature wears the smile of Spring When sinking into Summer's arms."

He was a Quaker and he came to Hartford in the homespun clothes of the cut of his sect. He may have been thinking of Miss Russ and wondering whether theology had anything to do with her refusal, when in after years he wrote:--

"Thine the Genevan's sternest creed, While answers to my spirit's need The Derby dalesman's simple truth."

[Ill.u.s.tration: WHITTIER AT THE AGE OF TWENTY-NINE]

As Whittier was a skillful politician, he had hopes of making a name for himself in politics as well as in literature. He was chosen to represent his district in the state legislature and there is little doubt that he would have been sent to the national congress later, had he not taken a step which for a long time shut off all avenues of preferment. In 1833 he joined the abolitionists. This step had very nearly the same effect on his fortunes as the public declaration of an adherence to the doctrines of anarchy would to-day have on a man similarly situated. "The best magazines at the North would not open their pages to him. He was even mobbed, and the office of an anti-slavery paper, which he was editing in Philadelphia, was sacked. He wrote many poems to aid the abolition cause. These were really editorials expressed in verse, which caught the attention in a way denied to prose. For more than thirty years such verse const.i.tuted the most of his poetical production. Lowell noticed that the Quaker doctrine of peace did not deter Whittier from his vigorous attack on slavery. In A Fable for Critics (1848), Lowell asks:--

"... O leather-clad Fox?

Can that be thy son, in the battlers mid din, Preaching brotherly love and then driving it in To the brain of the tough old Goliath of sin, With the smoothest of pebbles from Castaly's spring Impressed on his hard moral sense with a sling?"

Whittier did, however, try to keep the spirit of brotherly love warm throughout his life. He always preferred to win his cause from an enemy peacefully. When he was charged with hating the people of the South, he wrote:--