The White Mr. Longfellow

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LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--The White Mr. Longfellow

by William Dean Howells



THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW

We had expected to stay in Boston only until we could find a house in Old
Cambridge. This was not so simple a matter as it might seem; for the
ancient town had not yet quickened its scholarly pace to the modern step.
Indeed, in the spring of 1866 the impulse of expansion was not yet
visibly felt anywhere; the enormous material growth that followed the
civil war had not yet begun. In Cambridge the houses to be let were few,
and such as there were fell either below our pride or rose above our
purse. I wish I might tell how at last we bought a house; we had no
money, but we were rich in friends, who are still alive to shrink from
the story of their constant faith in a financial future which we
sometimes doubted, and who backed their credulity with their credit. It
is sufficient for the present record, which professes to be strictly
literary, to notify the fact that on the first day of May, 1866, we went
out to Cambridge and began to live in a house which we owned in fee if
not in deed, and which was none the less valuable for being covered with
mortgages. Physically, it was a carpenter's box, of a sort which is
readily imagined by the Anglo-American genius for ugliness, but which it
is not so easy to impart a just conception of. A trim hedge of
arbor-vita; tried to hide it from the world in front, and a tall board
fence behind; the little lot was well planted (perhaps too well planted)
with pears, grapes, and currants, and there was a small open space which
I lost no time in digging up for a kitchen-garden. On one side of us
were the open fields; on the other a brief line of neighbor-houses;
across the street before us was a grove of stately oaks, which I never
could persuade Aldrich had painted leaves on them in the fall. We were
really in a poor suburb of a suburb; but such is the fascination of
ownership, even the ownership of a fully mortgaged property, that we
calculated the latitude and longitude of the whole earth from the spot we
called ours. In our walks about Cambridge we saw other places where we
might have been willing to live; only, we said, they were too far off: We
even prized the architecture of our little box, though we had but so
lately lived in a Gothic palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, and were
not uncritical of beauty in the possessions of others. Positive beauty
we could not have honestly said we thought our cottage had as a whole,
though we might have held out for something of the kind in the brackets
of turned wood under its eaves. But we were richly content with it; and
with life in Cambridge, as it began to open itself to us, we were
infinitely more than content. This life, so refined, so intelligent, so
gracefully simple, I do not suppose has anywhere else had its parallel.




I.

It was the moment before the old American customs had been changed by
European influences among people of easier circumstances; and in
Cambridge society kept what was best of its village traditions, and chose
to keep them in the full knowledge of different things. Nearly every one
had been abroad; and nearly every one had acquired the taste for olives
without losing a relish for native sauces; through the intellectual life
there was an entire democracy, and I do not believe that since the
capitalistic era began there was ever a community in which money counted
for less. There was little show of what money could buy; I remember but
one private carriage (naturally, a publisher's); and there was not one
livery, except a livery in the larger sense kept by the stableman Pike,
who made us pay now a quarter and now a half dollar for a seat in his
carriages, according as he lost or gathered courage for the charge. We
thought him extortionate, and we mostly walked through snow and mud of
amazing depth and thickness.

The reader will imagine how acceptable this circumstance was to a young
literary man beginning life with a fully mortgaged house and a salary of
untried elasticity. If there were distinctions made in Cambridge they
were not against literature, and we found ourselves in the midst of a
charming society, indifferent, apparently, to all questions but those of
the higher education which comes so largely by nature. That is to say,
in the Cambridge of that day (and, I dare say, of this) a mind cultivated
in some sort was essential, and after that came civil manners, and the
willingness and ability to be agreeable and interesting; but the question
of riches or poverty did not enter. Even the question of family, which
is of so great concern in New England, was in abeyance. Perhaps it was
taken for granted that every one in Old Cambridge society must be of good
family, or he could not be there; perhaps his mere residence tacitly
ennobled him; certainly his acceptance was an informal patent of
gentility. To my mind, the structure of society was almost ideal, and
until we have a perfectly socialized condition of things I do not believe
we shall ever have a more perfect society. The instincts which governed
it were not such as can arise from the sordid competition of interests;
they flowed from a devotion to letters, and from a self-sacrifice in
material things which I can give no better notion of than by saying that
the outlay of the richest college magnate seemed to be graduated to the
income of the poorest.

In those days, the men whose names have given splendor to Cambridge were
still living there. I shall forget some of them in the alphabetical
enumeration of Louis Agassiz, Francis J. Child, Richard Henry Dana, Jun.,
John Fiske, Dr. Asa Gray, the family of the Jameses, father and sons,
Lowell, Longfellow, Charles Eliot Norton, Dr. John G. Palfrey, James
Pierce, Dr. Peabody, Professor Parsons, Professor Sophocles. The variety
of talents and of achievements was indeed so great that Mr. Bret Harte,
when fresh from his Pacific slope, justly said, after listening to a
partial rehearsal of them, "Why, you couldn't fire a revolver from your
front porch anywhere without bringing down a two-volumer!" Everybody had
written a book, or an article, or a poem; or was in the process or
expectation of doing it, and doubtless those whose names escape me will
have greater difficulty in eluding fame. These kindly, these gifted folk
each came to see us and to make us at home among them; and my home is
still among them, on this side and on that side of the line between the
living and the dead which invisibly passes through all the streets of the
cities of men.




II.

We had the whole summer for the exploration of Cambridge before society
returned from the mountains and the sea-shore, and it was not till
October that I saw Longfellow. I heard again, as I heard when I first
came to Boston, that he was at Nahant, and though Nahant was no longer so
far away, now, as it was then, I did not think of seeking him out even
when we went for a day to explore that coast during the summer. It seems
strange that I cannot recall just when and where I saw him, but early
after his return to Cambridge I had a message from him asking me to come
to a meeting of the Dante Club at Craigie House.

Longfellow was that winter (1866-7) revising his translation of the
'Paradiso', and the Dante Club was the circle of Italianate friends and
scholars whom he invited to follow him and criticise his work from the
original, while he read his version aloud. Those who were most
constantly present were Lowell and Professor Norton, but from time to
time others came in, and we seldom sat down at the nine-o'clock supper
that followed the reading of the canto in less number than ten or twelve.

The criticism, especially from the accomplished Danteists I have named,
was frank and frequent. I believe they neither of them quite agreed with
Longfellow as to the form of version he had chosen, but, waiving that,
the question was how perfectly he had done his work upon the given lines:
I myself, with whatever right, great or little, I may have to an opinion,
believe thoroughly in Longfellow's plan. When I read his version my
sense aches for the rhyme which he rejected, but my admiration for his
fidelity to Dante otherwise is immeasurable. I remember with equal
admiration the subtle and sympathetic scholarship of his critics, who
scrutinized every shade of meaning in a word or phrase that gave them
pause, and did not let it pass till all the reasons and facts had been
considered. Sometimes, and even often, Longfellow yielded to their
censure, but for the most part, when he was of another mind, he held to
his mind, and the passage had to go as he said. I make a little haste to
say that in all the meetings of the Club, during a whole winter of
Wednesday evenings, I myself, though I faithfully followed in an Italian
Dante with the rest, ventured upon one suggestion only. This was kindly,
even seriously, considered by the poet, and gently rejected. He could
not do anything otherwise than gently, and I was not suffered to feel
that I had done a presumptuous thing. I can see him now, as he looked up
from the proof-sheets on the round table before him, and over at me,
growing consciously smaller and smaller, like something through a
reversed opera-glass. He had a shaded drop-light in front of him, and in
its glow his beautiful and benignly noble head had a dignity peculiar to
him.

All the portraits of Longfellow are likenesses more or less bad and good,
for there was something as simple in the physiognomy as in the nature of
the man. His head, after he allowed his beard to grow and wore his hair
long in the manner of elderly men, was leonine, but mildly leonine, as
the old painters conceived the lion of St. Mark. Once Sophocles, the
ex-monk of Mount Athos, so long a Greek professor at Harvard, came in for
supper, after the reading was over, and he was leonine too, but of a
fierceness that contrasted finely with Longfellow's mildness. I remember
the poet's asking him something about the punishment of impaling, in
Turkey, and his answering, with an ironical gleam of his fiery eyes,
"Unhappily, it is obsolete." I dare say he was not so leonine, either,
as he looked.

When Longfellow read verse, it was with a hollow, with a mellow resonant
murmur, like the note of some deep-throated horn. His voice was very
lulling in quality, and at the Dante Club it used to have early effect
with an old scholar who sat in a cavernous armchair at the corner of the
fire, and who drowsed audibly in the soft tone and the gentle heat. The
poet had a fat terrier who wished always to be present at the meetings of
the Club, and he commonly fell asleep at the same moment with that dear
old scholar, so that when they began to make themselves heard in concert,
one could not tell which it was that most took our thoughts from the text
of the Paradiso. When the duet opened, Longfellow would look up with an
arch recognition of the fact, and then go gravely on to the end of the
canto. At the close he would speak to his friend and lead him out to
supper as if he had not seen or heard anything amiss.




III.

In that elect company I was silent, partly because I was conscious of my
youthful inadequacy, and partly because I preferred to listen. But
Longfellow always behaved as if I were saying a succession of edifying
and delightful things, and from time to time he addressed himself to me,
so that I should not feel left out. He did not talk much himself, and I
recall nothing that he said. But he always spoke both wisely and simply,
without the least touch of pose, and with no intention of effect, but
with something that I must call quality for want of a better word; so
that at a table where Holmes sparkled, and Lowell glowed, and Agassiz
beamed, he cast the light of a gentle gaiety, which seemed to dim all
these vivider luminaries. While he spoke you did not miss Fields's story
or Tom Appleton's wit, or even the gracious amity of Mr. Norton, with his
unequalled intuitions.

The supper was very plain: a cold turkey, which the host carved, or a
haunch of venison, or some braces of grouse, or a platter of quails, with
a deep bowl of salad, and the sympathetic companionship of those elect
vintages which Longfellow loved, and which he chose with the inspiration
of affection. We usually began with oysters, and when some one who was
expected did not come promptly, Longfellow invited us to raid his plate,
as a just punishment of his delay. One evening Lowell remarked, with the
cayenne poised above his bluepoints, "It's astonishing how fond these
fellows are of pepper."

The old friend of the cavernous arm-chair was perhaps not wide enough
awake to repress an "Ah?" of deep interest in this fact of natural
history, and Lowell was provoked to go on. "Yes, I've dropped a red
pepper pod into a barrel of them, before now, and then taken them out in
a solid mass, clinging to it like a swarm of bees to their queen."

"Is it possible?" cried the old friend; and then Longfellow intervened to
save him from worse, and turned the talk.

I reproach myself that I made no record of the talk, for I find that only
a few fragments of it have caught in my memory, and that the sieve which
should have kept the gold has let it wash away with the gravel. I
remember once Doctor Holmes's talking of the physician as the true seer,
whose awful gift it was to behold with the fatal second sight of science
the shroud gathering to the throat of many a doomed man apparently in
perfect health, and happy in the promise of unnumbered days. The thought
may have been suggested by some of the toys of superstition which
intellectual people like to play with.

I never could be quite sure at first that Longfellow's brother-in-law,
Appleton, was seriously a spiritualist, even when he disputed the most
strenuously with the unbelieving Autocrat. But he really was in earnest
about it, though he relished a joke at the expense of his doctrine, like
some clerics when they are in the safe company of other clerics. He told
me once of having recounted to Agassiz the facts of a very remarkable
seance, where the souls of the departed outdid themselves in the
athletics and acrobatics they seem so fond of over there, throwing large
stones across the room, moving pianos, and lifting dinner-tables and
setting them a-twirl under the chandelier. "And now," he demanded, "what
do you say to that?" "Well, Mr. Appleton," Agassiz answered, to
Appleton's infinite delight, "I say that it did not happen."

One night they began to speak at the Dante supper of the unhappy man
whose crime is a red stain in the Cambridge annals, and one and another
recalled their impressions of Professor Webster. It was possibly with a
retroactive sense that they had all felt something uncanny in him, but,
apropos of the deep salad-bowl in the centre of the table, Longfellow
remembered a supper Webster was at, where he lighted some chemical in
such a dish and held his head over it, with a handkerchief noosed about
his throat and lifted above it with one hand, while his face, in the pale
light, took on the livid ghastliness of that of a man hanged by the neck.

Another night the talk wandered to the visit which an English author (now
with God) paid America at the height of a popularity long since toppled
to the ground, with many another. He was in very good humor with our
whole continent, and at Longfellow's table he found the champagne even
surprisingly fine. "But," he said to his host, who now told the story,
"it cawn't be genuine, you know!"

Many years afterwards this author revisited our shores, and I dined with
him at Longfellow's, where he was anxious to constitute himself a guest
during his sojourn in our neighborhood. Longfellow was equally anxious
that he should not do so, and he took a harmless pleasure in
out-manoeuvring him. He seized a chance to speak with me alone, and
plotted to deliver him over to me without apparent unkindness, when the
latest horse-car should be going in to Boston, and begged me to walk him
to Harvard Square and put him aboard. "Put him aboard, and don't leave
him till the car starts, and then watch that he doesn't get off."

These instructions he accompanied with a lifting of the eyebrows, and a
pursing of the mouth, in an anxiety not altogether burlesque. He knew
himself the prey of any one who chose to batten on him, and his
hospitality was subject to frightful abuse. Perhaps Mr. Norton has
somewhere told how, when he asked if a certain person who had been
outstaying his time was not a dreadful bore, Longfellow answered, with
angelic patience, "Yes; but then you know I have been bored so often!"

There was one fatal Englishman whom I shared with him during the great
part of a season: a poor soul, not without gifts, but always ready for
more, especially if they took the form of meat and drink. He had brought
letters from one of the best English men alive, who withdrew them too
late to save his American friends from the sad consequences of welcoming
him. So he established himself impregnably in a Boston club, and came
out every day to dine with Longfellow in Cambridge, beginning with his
return from Nahant in October and continuing far into December. That was
the year of the great horse-distemper, when the plague disabled the
transportation in Boston, and cut off all intercourse between the suburb
and the city on the street railways. "I did think," Longfellow
pathetically lamented, "that when the horse-cars stopped running, I
should have a little respite from L., but he walks out."

In the midst of his own suffering he was willing to advise with me
concerning some poems L. had offered to the Atlantic Monthly, and after
we had desperately read them together he said, with inspiration, "I think
these things are more adapted to music than the magazine," and this
seemed so good a notion that when L. came to know their fate from me, I
answered, confidently, "I think they are rather more adapted to music."
He calmly asked, "Why?" and as this was an exigency which Longfellow had
not forecast for me, I was caught in it without hope of escape. I really
do not know what I said, but I know that I did not take the poems, such
was my literary conscience in those days; I am afraid I should be weaker
now.




IV.

The suppers of the Dante Club were a relaxation from the severity of
their toils on criticism, and I will not pretend that their table-talk
was of that seriousness which duller wits might have given themselves up
to. The passing stranger, especially if a light or jovial person, was
always welcome, and I never knew of the enforcement of the rule I heard
of, that if you came in without question on the Club nights, you were a
guest; but if you rang or knocked, you could not get in.

Any sort of diversion was hailed, and once Appleton proposed that
Longfellow should show us his wine-cellar. He took up the candle burning
on the table for the cigars, and led the way into the basement of the
beautiful old Colonial mansion, doubly memorable as Washington's
headquarters while he was in Cambridge, and as the home of Longfellow for
so many years. The taper cast just the right gleams on the darkness,
bringing into relief the massive piers of brick, and the solid walls of
stone, which gave the cellar the effect of a casemate in some fortress,
and leaving the corners and distances to a romantic gloom. This basement
was a work of the days when men built more heavily if not more
substantially than now, but I forget, if I ever knew, what date the
wine-cellar was of. It was well stored with precious vintages, aptly
cobwebbed and dusty; but I could not find that it had any more charm than
the shelves of a library: it is the inside of bottles and of books that
makes its appeal. The whole place witnessed a bygone state and luxury,
which otherwise lingered in a dim legend or two. Longfellow once spoke
of certain old love-letters which dropped down on the basement stairs
from some place overhead; and there was the fable or the fact of a
subterranean passage under the street from Craigie House to the old
Batchelder House, which I relate to these letters with no authority I can
allege. But in Craigie House dwelt the proud fair lady who was buried in
the Cambridge church-yard with a slave at her head and a slave at her
feet.

"Dust is in her beautiful eyes,"

and whether it was they that smiled or wept in their time over those
love-letters, I will leave the reader to say. The fortunes of her Tory
family fell with those of their party, and the last Vassal ended his days
a prisoner from his creditors in his own house, with a weekly enlargement
on Sundays, when the law could not reach him. It is known how the place
took Longfellow's fancy when he first came to be professor in Harvard,
and how he was a lodger of the last Mistress Craigie there, long before
he became its owner. The house is square, with Longfellow's study where
he read and wrote on the right of the door, and a statelier library
behind it; on the left is the drawing-room, with the dining-room in its
rear; from its square hall climbs a beautiful stairway with twisted
banisters, and a tall clock in their angle.

The study where the Dante Club met, and where I mostly saw Longfellow,
was a plain, pleasant room, with broad panelling in white painted pine;
in the centre before the fireplace stood his round table, laden with
books, papers, and proofs; in the farthest corner by the window was a
high desk which he sometimes stood at to write. In this room Washington
held his councils and transacted his business with all comers; in the
chamber overhead he slept. I do not think Longfellow associated the
place much with him, and I never heard him speak of Washington in
relation to it except once, when he told me with peculiar relish what he
called the true version of a pious story concerning the aide-de-camp who
blundered in upon him while he knelt in prayer. The father of his
country rose and rebuked the young man severely, and then resumed his
devotions. "He rebuked him," said Longfellow, lifting his brows and
making rings round the pupils of his eyes, "by throwing his scabbard at
his head."

All the front windows of Craigie House look, out over the open fields
across the Charles, which is now the Longfellow Memorial Garden. The
poet used to be amused with the popular superstition that he was holding
this vacant ground with a view to a rise in the price of lots, while all
he wanted was to keep a feature of his beloved landscape unchanged. Lofty
elms drooped at the corners of the house; on the lawn billowed clumps of
the lilac, which formed a thick hedge along the fence. There was a
terrace part way down this lawn, and when a white-painted balustrade was
set some fifteen years ago upon its brink, it seemed always to have been
there. Long verandas stretched on either side of the mansion; and behind
was an old-fashioned garden with beds primly edged with box after a
design of the poet's own. Longfellow had a ghost story of this quaint
plaisance, which he used to tell with an artful reserve of the
catastrophe. He was coming home one winter night, and as he crossed the
garden he was startled by a white figure swaying before him. But he knew
that the only way was to advance upon it. He pushed boldly forward, and
was suddenly caught under the throat-by the clothes-line with a long
night-gown on it.

Perhaps it was at the end of a long night of the Dante Club that I heard
him tell this story. The evenings were sometimes mornings before the
reluctant break-up came, but they were never half long enough for me. I
have given no idea of the high reasoning of vital things which I must
often have heard at that table, and that I have forgotten it is no proof
that I did not hear it. The memory will not be ruled as to what it shall
bind and what it shall loose, and I should entreat mine in vain for
record of those meetings other than what I have given. Perhaps it would
be well, in the interest of some popular conceptions of what the social
intercourse of great wits must be, for me to invent some ennobling and
elevating passages of conversation at Longfellow's; perhaps I ought to do
it for the sake of my own repute as a serious and adequate witness. But
I am rather helpless in the matter; I must set down what I remember, and
surely if I can remember no phrase from Holmes that a reader could live
or die by, it is something to recall how, when a certain potent cheese
was passing, he leaned over to gaze at it, and asked: "Does it kick? Does
it kick?" No strain of high poetic thinking remains to me from Lowell,
but he made me laugh unforgettably with his passive adventure one night
going home late, when a man suddenly leaped from the top of a high fence
upon the sidewalk at his feet, and after giving him the worst fright of
his life, disappeared peaceably into the darkness. To be sure, there was
one most memorable supper, when he read the "Bigelow Paper" he had
finished that day, and enriched the meaning of his verse with the beauty
of his voice. There lingers yet in my sense his very tone in giving the
last line of the passage lamenting the waste of the heroic lives which in
those dark hours of Johnson's time seemed to have been