With a distinctive

air.

His cosmo

politanism,

similation of its treasures. But originality is of more than one kind. As we say of some people that they have a genius for friendship, so his sympathy with the beautiful, wherever he found it, was unique and tantamount to a special inspiration. The proof of his originality, however, even where he was least inventive, hardly requires this paradox: it did not consist in word or motive, but in the distinctive tone of the singer, the sentiment of voice which made his performances in a sense new songs; in an air, a suffused quality, which rendered every phrase unmistakable. If he borrowed freely, he was freely drawn upon by others in their turn. Scores of followers have caught a manner that shows to poor advantage when transferred; but his position for years, at the head of even a sentimental school, indicated that Longfellow was not without a genius of his own.

Apart from certain exceptions already noted, his bent was cosmopolitan. He had the Anglo-Saxon longing of the pine for the palm, a love for the softer winds and skies, the pliant languages, of Italy and Spain. Besides the example of his works, we have his written theory of what our literature should be. His Mr. Churchill, in "Kavanagh," declares that in literaAnd ideal ture" Nationality is a good thing to a certain extent, of a nabut universality is better. All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them, but what is universal. Their roots are in their native soil; but their branches wave in the unpatriotic air that speaks the same language unto all men. . . . I prefer what is natural. Mere nationality is often ridiculous." And again, "Our literature is not an imitation, but a continuation of the English." He insists upon originality, but "without spasms and convulsions." "A national literature is not the growth of a day.

tional literature.

See pp. 510, 96, 97.

VIEWS ON NATIONALITY.

219

Centuries must contribute their dew and sunshine to it. . . . As for having it so savage and wild as you want it, . . . all literature, as well as all art, is the result of culture and intellectual refinement. . . As the blood of all nations is mingling with our own, so will their thoughts and feelings finally mingle in our literature. We shall draw from the Germans tenderness, from the Spanish passion, from the French vivacity, to mingle more and more with our English solid sense. And this will give us universality, so much to be desired." With regard to all this, it may be said that Longfellow's service, important as it was in his time, is not that required of his successors. The greatest poets have been those who conveyed the spirit of their respective nationalities. That poetry is truest which is universal in its passion and thought, but national in motive and in all properties of the craft. The final outcome of American ideality will depend on conditions which our best thinkers are investigating, and which give rise to conflicting theories. Herbert Spencer's recent utterance is somewhat in ac-"Herbert cordance with Longfellow's views: "Because of its Spencer on size, and the heterogeneity of its components, the Americans." ican nation will be a long time in evolving its ultimate York, form, but its ultimate form will be high." And again : 1882. "From biological truths it is to be inferred that the eventual mixture of the allied varieties of the Aryan race forming the population will produce a finer type of man than has hitherto existed." This agreeable prediction may seem too optimistic; but the future type of poetry certainly will represent the future type of man. Without debating the question whether we now are forming loam for a distinct growth, or whether our literature is to be a "continuation" merely, we may be sure that both here and in foreign lands new

the Amer

New

Longfel low a pioneer of taste.

In what

sense a

poet of the middle

classes."

types of genius will appear, we know not how or why,
and add new species to the world's flora symbolica of
art and song.
Longfellow, if not a prophet, was a
pioneer, by choice an apostle of the best traditional
culture. His verse is not of a kind to make its ad-
mirers indifferent to any other, an effect, whether
for good or ill, sometimes produced by Browning's,
Emerson's, and Whitman's, but that which, however
elementary, promotes a taste for higher ideals. It is
due to such as he that we have passed the age of
nursing, and are now less satisfied with what is not
primarily our own. That the best equipped section
of the country should produce him was in the order
of events other things being equal, that region is
most American which has been so the longest, and
the frontier steadily grows to resemble it.

In England, Longfellow has been styled the poet of the middle classes. Those classes include, however, the majority of intelligent readers, and Tennyson had an equal share of their favor. The English middle classes furnish an analogue to the one great class of American readers, among whom our poet's success was so evident. This was because he used his culture not to veil the word, but to make it clear. He drew upon it for the people in a manner which they could relish and comprehend. Would not any poet whose work might lack the subtlety that commends itself to professional readers be relegated by University critics to the middle-class wards? Caste and literary priesthood have something to do with this. Tennyson. Were it not for Lucretius and In Memoriam," the author of "The May Queen" and "Locksley Hall” and "Enoch Arden " would be in the same category; as it is, he scarcely escapes it in the judgment of both the psychologic and neo-Romantic schools. Yet the

66

66

UNIMPASSIONED SONG.

221

their scho

liasts.

low's ethics

poetry of analytics has not outlasted, in the past, that Poets and which came without gloss or obscurity, and whose melody and meaning appealed to one and all. That a poet's verse should require a commentary in its own day is not, all things considered, the best omen for its hold upon the future. But the point taken with respect to Longfellow is not unjust. So far as com- Longfel fort, virtue, domestic tenderness, and freedom from and doextremes of passion and incident are characteristicsmesticity. of the middle classes, he has been their minstrel. And it is true that a cold, or even temperate quality is deadening to the higher forms of art. The creative soul abhors ennui; it glows in dramatic self-abandonment. Poets "of of passion and of pain" concentrate their lives in some burning focus whose dazzling heat devours them; they suffer, but mount on their own flame. Without passion and its expiations, without the mad waste of life, and even crime and terror, where are our noble tragedies, our high dramatic themes? The compensation of man's anguish is that it lifts him. beyond the ordinary. Superlative joy and woe alike were foreign to the verse of Longfellow. It came nei-Wanting ther from the heights nor out of the depths, but along and drathe even tenor of a fortunate life. I do not mean matic insight. that he was exempt from mortal ills; he had his dark experiences, but at the mature age that has learned "what life and death is," and of them he gave little sign. If sorrow and rapture are from within, rather than from without, it may be that our benignant poet, alike through circumstance and temperament, was spared the full extremity of discipline signified in the translation from Goethe:

"Who ne'er his bread in sorrow ate,

Who ne'er the mournful midnight hours
Weeping upon his bed has sate,

He knows you not, ye Heavenly Powers."

in ecstasy

con

Not his the agony and bloody sweat. We may conjecture that, aside from one or two fierce episodes, he was less tried in the furnace than poets are wont to Fortune's be. From the first he had what he desired, favorite. genial work and associations, advancement, the love of women and friends, appreciative criticism, the pure wheat and sweet waters of life in plenitude. He had lovely things about him, and gratified his artist nature to the full, while so many makers of the beautiful are condemned to Vulcan's cavern of toil and smoke. He had the best, as by right; and in truth the world, if it but knew it, can afford to keep a poet or an artist in some luxury, like a flower for its perfume, a hound for beauty, a bird for song. If Longfellow's regard fell upon ugliness and misery, it certainly did not linger there. "The cry of the human" did not haunt his ear. When he avails himself of a piteous situation, he does so as tranquilly as the nuns who broider on tapestry the torments of the doomed in hell. He wrote few love poems, none full of longing, or "wild with all regret "; but this might come from the absolute content of his soul, — he had gained the woman whom he idolized, and songs of passion are the cry of unfulfilled desire. His song flows on an equal course, from sunny fountain-head to darkling sea; and even upon that sea he finds repose, for its billows rock to sleep, and no cradle is more peaceful than the grave. Thus fair, gentle, fortunate, —

A sympa

thetic

voice, un

perturbed by human passion

and con

flict.

could such a poet answer to the deepest needs of men? Allowing for the factor of imagination, we still see that Longfellow shrank from efforts that would react too keenly upon his sensibilities. He touched the average heart by the sympathetic quality of a voice adjusted to the natural scale. People above or apart from the average-sufferers, aspirants, questioners