The White Mr. Longfellow (from Literary Friends and Acquaintance) — A Closer Reading

The Poet's Reticence

Howells notes that Longfellow rarely spoke of himself, and almost never of grievances. The memoirist is struck by a silence that is not coldness but a kind of artistic discipline: Longfellow would not discuss contemporaries like Hawthorne, Whittier, or Emerson. Howells interprets this as the reserve of a fine artist who, if he praised, must do so with the reservations of an honest man. The poet's reluctance to criticize others extended even to his own work; he saved early notices of his poems, but in later years read only those that fell in his way, cutting them out for scrapbooks. This self-containment, Howells suggests, was not aloofness but a form of integrity, a refusal to let literary dislikes embitter his heart.

Gentleness with a Backbone

Howells is careful to distinguish Longfellow's mildness from softness. The poet was 'most manly and firm,' braced by the New England conscience. As evidence, Howells recounts a dinner during the pro-slavery era when Longfellow rose to defend his friend Charles Sumner, telling the company he must leave if they continued to assail him. The anecdote is told without embellishment, its force coming from the contrast between Longfellow's usual gentleness and this sudden, quiet assertion. Howells also notes that Longfellow could not understand rudeness; he perceived ill-will as something 'distressful, angular,' like Swedenborg's most celestial angels perceiving evil. The metaphor is Howells's own, but it captures the poet's almost otherworldly patience.

The Foreigners and the Autographs

Longfellow's Cambridge home became a destination for visitors from abroad, who 'thronged upon him at their pleasure, apparently, and with perfect impunity.' Howells records with dry amusement the Englishman who came because there were no ruins in America—a story the poet himself told, with 'very, very kindly' humor. The memoirist observes that Longfellow had no prejudice against Englishmen, even when British criticism began to sneer at his 'delicate art.' The poet's response to such attacks was not rancor but a kind of bewilderment; he could not comprehend rudeness. Howells contrasts this with Poe's public charge of 'Longfellow and other Plagiarists,' noting that Longfellow helped keep Poe alive through loans that became gifts. The detail is offered without moralizing, but it quietly underscores the poet's generosity.

The Limits of Intimacy

Howells, himself an outsider to Boston's inner circles, observes that Longfellow was 'not to that manner born.' He lacked the final intimacies that come of birth and lifelong association; he was 'Longfellow' to friends who were 'James, and Charles, and Wendell' to one another. This observation is not a criticism but a recognition of a certain distance, even in a town where conversation ran to 'large, impersonal topics' and characters rather than individuals. Howells suggests that Longfellow's reticence about his contemporaries was partly due to his reluctance from criticism—he was 'the finest artist of them all,' and praise would have required reservations. Yet with younger writers, Longfellow was willing enough to speak; no new contributor to the magazine went unnoted by him. The portrait is of a man who held himself apart, not from coldness, but from a fastidious artistic conscience.

Howells's Longfellow is a figure of contradictions: a poet of universal kindness who kept a careful distance, a man of gentle patience who could rise in defense of a friend, an artist who shrank from criticism yet helped his harshest critics. The memoir does not attempt to resolve these tensions; instead, it lets them stand as the texture of a real character. Readers coming to this sketch should expect not a biography but a series of glimpses—a portrait built from the small, telling moments that Howells, with his novelist's eye, knew were worth recording.

Reading Howells’s quiet portrait of Longfellow, I recalled my grandfather’s reticent kindness—how he’d answer my chatter with a nod, a soft correction, never a raised voice. That same gentle firmness surfaced later in Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Essays; Vol. 6 With a Memoir and Index — Themes and Context, where a footnote on a forgotten scholar suddenly felt like a hand on my shoulder, asking me to listen slower.