Chapter III: The Poet

Americans sometimes disturb themselves needlessly over the question whether Longfellow was a great poet. It is absolutely of no importance whether he was or was not. Of one thing they may be sure,--he was a poet. Song was his natural vehicle of expression. He had a masterly command of technical difficulties of his art. Language became pliant under his touch. Taking into account the range of his metres, the uniform precision with which he handled words, and the purity of his style, Longfellow is eminent among American poetical masters.

His sonnets are exquisite. His ballads, like ‘The Skeleton in Armor,’ have no little of the fresh unstudied character which charms us in old English ballad literature, a something not to be traced to the spirit alone but to the technique as well. The twenty-two poems of ‘The Saga of King Olaf’ show an almost extraordinary metrical power.

It must also be remembered that Longfellow popularized for modern readers the so-called English hexameter. _Evangeline_ was a metrical triumph, considering it wholly aside from the innate beauty of the story or the artistic handling of the incidents. The poet did not foresee his success. In fact, as early as 1841, in the preface to his translation of Tegnér’s _Children of the Lord’s Supper_, Longfellow speaks of the ‘inexorable hexameter, in which, it must be confessed, the motions of the English muse are not unlike those of a prisoner dancing to the music of his chains.’ But here he was hampered by his theory of translation, by his anxiety to render as literally as he could the text of the original. When he took the matter into his own hands and moulded the verse according to his own artistic sense, it became another thing. Wholly aside from the pleasure _Evangeline_ has given countless readers, it is something to have broken down prejudice against the hexameter to the extent of drawing out an indirect compliment from Matthew Arnold, whose self-restraint in the matter of giving praise was notorious.[31] Scholars have by no means withdrawn their opposition to the English hexameter. That a more liberal temper prevails is largely due to Longfellow.

_Evangeline_ had a stimulating effect on one English poet of rare genius, Arthur Hugh Clough. A reading of the Tale of Acadie immediately after a reperusal of the _Iliad_ led to the composition of _The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich_.[32]

Another of Longfellow’s triumphs was so great as to make it difficult for any one to follow him. _Hiawatha_ succeeded both because of the metre and in spite of it. Any one can master this self-writing jingle. ’Tis as easy as lying. One hardly knows how facile newspaper parodists amused themselves before they got _Hiawatha_. Holmes explained the ease of the measure on physiological grounds. We do not lisp in numbers, but breathe in them. Did we but know it, we pass our lives in exhaling four-foot rhymeless trochaics.[33] To write a poem in the metre of the _Kalevala_ still remains, with all its specious fluency, an impossible performance for any one not a poet. Thus Longfellow’s success had a negative and restraining effect. He opened the field to whoever cared to experiment with the hexameter, but closed it, for the present at least, to any rhythmical inventions calculated however remotely to suggest the metre of his Indian edda.