Εικόνες σελίδας
PDF
Ηλεκτρ. έκδοση

T

CHAPTER XII.

'O see one's friends aging is sadder than to feel old.

In 1864 Nathaniel Hawthorne, "grey and grand,” fell out of the ranks of America's great men. Longfellow's monody on Hawthorne's death appeared in the volume called "Flower-de-Luce and Other Poems" (1867). Felton was gone, too. One day Agassiz sat down in Longfellow's study and wept like a child, because he had lost his power to work: then he rallied for a space, and died in harness. A few chilly entries in the diary show how much the poet felt his increased loneliness; he was sitting out the fire. But, meanwhile, he did not slacken in his literary efforts; on the contrary, he busied himself overmuch.

In 1868 his publishers brought out "The New England Tragedies." The first of these tragedies, "John Endicott," deals with the persecution of the Quakers, and the other, "Giles Corey of the Salem Farms," was a study of the witchcraft mania. Both poems, written in blank verse, the intentionally plain style of which occasionally becomes comically bald, contain passages of gloomy power, but they fail in dramatic verve, and have no chance of

living. In truth, the subjects of these Tragedies were too irredeemably gloomy for poetic treatment; and Longfellow did not try to recast the grim stories; this work is just a metrical version of the old colonial chronicles. Years afterwards Longfellow composed a dramatic study of the Gospels, and called it "The Divine Tragedy" (1872); and then he arranged "The Divine Tragedy,” “The Golden Legend," and "The New England Tragedies," as a trilogy called "Christus "; but "The Golden Legend" is the only section of the trilogy that can be called a success in any sense. The idea of the trilogy was, of course, the representation of Christianity in three forms-in its origin, in its mediæval power, and in its Western development through Puritanism. The transition to this last stage is too abrupt; and it does not give us a sense of the blessed fulness of the Gospel that the conclusion to a history of the Divine idea should convey. It had once been Longfellow's intention to make the third part consist of a poem founded on the Moravian settlement at Bethlehem; and this would certainly have furnished a fitter sequel to the other tragedies. "The Divine Tragedy" is as rigid in method as possible, and into the mouth of the Sacred Hero the poet put no words but those of Scripture. The whole poem was a hazardous experiment. On the one hand, many people hesitated to read any character-poem founded on Christ's career; on the other, critics felt that the limits the author had imposed upon himself made it impossible for him to claim imaginative merit of a definite character. The action of the Tragedy is direct and swift; the best effort at characterization lies in some of the passages that describe Pilate, of whom a view is

taken far nobler than that expressed in Bacon's sneer. In "Three Books of Song" there had appeared a tragedy in five acts called "Judas Maccabeus," but this interested nobody.

In May of 1868, Longfellow sailed for Europe, and in England he began an enjoyable tour that extended through eighteen months. Cambridge University gladly took occasion to bestow upon him the degree of LL.D. In London he was pulled about by all the celebrated people, and Mr. Gladstone proposed his health at a great dinner. Returning from Italy, he obtained further academic recognition from our country—this time in the Oxford degree of D.C.L.

He was then a fine type of the American scholar, in appearance. His long beard was blanched, like Priam's ; his head was covered with milky locks; his eyes were soft and bright; his complexion was pure, although the skin was wrinkled, especially about the eyes. His finelyshaped head, one may be pardoned for pointing out, was thoroughly English in character. Spurzheim once said that, "The general shape of your head shows your capabilities: your face shows what you have done with those capabilities." Any Oxford youth who had the opportunity of looking into Longfellow's face as he marched up erect and hale, to receive his degree, must have noted how healthy and worthy a record lay in the face of the new D.C.L.

The Queen sent for him, and the republican shook Her Majesty simply by the hand, on being introduced. At last, a little wearied of being made so much of, he longingly hied back to his native land, paid his taxes as

soon as he reached Craigie House, and thus "felt at home again."

For many years Longfellow had been labouring zestfully at a translation of Dante's "Divine Comedy." This rendering, which is in verse, caused the formation of a Dante Club, at the meetings of which Lowell and Norton carefully criticized every canto of their friend's workwhose reputation as a skilled translator was beyond all question. The result is a wonderful rendering of the Florentine's immortal song of Heaven and Hell. The version lacks heat and light. Dante's mystic raptures, his apprehension of the infinite possibilities of woe, his occasionally exquisite sympathy with errors of the human heart, his hate that could search hell for an enemy's face like fierce lightning, his whole range of extreme passions were far different indeed from any moods of the gentle American bard. But Longfellow luckily elected to attempt elegant literalness, rather than reproduction of the impassioned spirit; and in this attempt he has succeeded so astonishingly that it may well be doubted whether there is in the world another metrical translation from any author, at once so literal and so natural in diction. He adopts Dante's arrangement of metres, but drops the rhymes. Day by day, with a steady pulse, Longfellow's hand added half a dozen or a dozen lines to his loved labour, before breakfast-time; and in this way the translation was methodically achieved. Any one beginning the study of Dante in the original tongue could not do better than use Longfellow's version for dictionary and "crib." Take these lines, for instance, selected at random from the thirty-first canto of the "Purgatory":

"Volgi, Beatrice, volgi gli occhi santi,
Era la sua canzone, al tuo fidele

Che, per vederti, ha mossi passi tanti."

Longfellow translates thus:

"Turn, Beatrice, O turn thy holy eyes,'

Such was their song, 'unto thy faithful one,
Who has to see thee ta'en so many steps.'

Literalness could hardly go further in a verse rendering. The value of Longfellow's published version is greatly enhanced by the body of notes which he appended to each section. In February of 1865, the first volume-of advance sheets--went to Italy, in commemoration of the six hundredth anniversary of Dante's birth. The publication of the translation was completed in 1870.

The New York Ledger paid Longfellow three thousand dollars for the right to publish his "Hanging of the Crane"-a domestic idyl, which afterwards appeared as an illustrated book, in 1874. There are about two hundred lines in this poem, which, with its excellently idealized description of a housewarming, proved that the author of "Evangeline" still held the pen firmly in hand. It is said that "The Hanging of the Crane" was written in honour of Thomas Bailey Aldrich and his young wife. In 1875 came "The Masque of Pandora and Other Poems." "The Masque" was recast and put on the stage at Boston in 1881, but utterly failed, by reason of its inherent weakness. Among the "Other Poems was that song of the poet's noble old age, "Morituri Salutamus." There, too, was printed the "Sonnet to Sumner;" for Sumner now was dead, and the "Five of Clubs" belonged to the chronicles of old.

[ocr errors]
« ΠροηγούμενηΣυνέχεια »