On December 17, 1877, Mark Twain delivered an after-dinner speech at a banquet of graybeards gathered in a Boston hotel to celebrate John Greenleaf Whittier’s seventieth birthday and the twentieth anniversary of the founding of The Atlantic Monthly. Seated at the head table along with Whittier were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—a band of authors, one newspaper worshipfully noted, who bathed the place in an “almost holy air.”
Twain was introduced by The Atlantic’s editor, William Dean Howells, and proceeded to entertain the assembled literati with a lengthy tale he thought pretty funny at the time. Three seedy characters calling themselves Emerson, Holmes, and Longfellow enter a lonely miner’s cabin at the foot of the Sierras. They chug his whiskey, cheat at cards, and by spewing famous lines from one another’s work, they hoodwink the old miner, who doesn’t know these “littery swells” are impostors. “This is the forest primeval,” shouts the sham Longfellow as he dances around the cabin. “Here once the embattled farmers stood/And fired the shot heard round the world,” the sham Emerson replies. Early the next morning, just before the scoundrels take off, Longfellow grabs the miner’s only pair of boots and quotes another of the poet’s best-loved lines: these boots will lay “footprints on the sands of Time.”
The audience laughed, perhaps with embarrassment, but many newspapers took offense. “Literary men in America, where so much is tolerated, ought to aim higher than the gutter,” scolded the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican. Howells was horrified: Twain might actually have been suggesting that those venerable men weren’t all they were cracked up to be.
Nicholas Basbanes doesn’t include this anecdote in Cross of Snow, his affectionate new biography of Longfellow. To Basbanes, it was “modernism” that exiled the once best-selling Longfellow to the antechambers of literary history, demoting him from beloved bard to “fireside” or “schoolroom” poet. Critically acclaimed as well as hugely popular, by the time of his death in 1882 Longfellow’s verse had been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish, and he was meeting most of the prominent and fashionable figures of the day (except Abraham Lincoln, though Lincoln read him), from Harriet Beecher Stowe to the emperor of Brazil. Shortly after Longfellow’s death, a marble bust of the poet was placed in Westminster Abbey.
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