John Harris and Longfellow

Several papers and articles in the past few years have drawn attention to John Harris as a ‘Cornish’ poet. This is an admirable context in which to view him, for he loved and praised his native land throughout his life. What Cornish poet implies in terms of language – what constitutes the semantic stamp or signum of such a creature as opposed to someone born at the same time in Yorkshire or Somerset - is a trickier thing to define. One does not talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, say, as a Devonshire poet, although he was undoubtedly born at Ottery St Mary and kept close to the West Country for most of his life. Harris’s Cornishness tends to be brought to the fore because his reputation has been confined to his native land – he has not yet managed to break through into the wider scene. A ‘regional’ approach to literature has much merit. It is a ‘home-based’ way of looking at things that redresses the tendency to promote national or international reputations without sufficiently allowing for the fact that all these figures started out from some modest pocket of earth that shaped and encouraged their early growth and outlook. A river has its source; a poet also has his pool of original inspiration which scholars and biographers must bear in mind if they are to do justice to their subjects. And, of course, first and foremost, Harris stayed and worked in Cornwall by choice. Under no circumstances would he have moved to London and become a jobbing journalist or one-volume-a-year poet.

But whether he wrote like a Cornishman or a mid-Victorian man of letters is more debatable. Frequently his imagery - elves and fairies, mossy rocks, clear streams, silken hair and craggy mounts - utilises the poeticisms of the period. Nor does his overuse of the adjectives ‘little’, ‘sweet’, ‘solemn' and ‘glorious’ isolate him from his contemporaries. Furthermore, in his later writings, he had a conforming predilection for what I will call ‘the Victorian shout’ or ‘dramatic exclamation’ that plunged the reader into a tense situation: “The fog is thickening, mother” or “A telegram! God bless him!” Such mannerisms, also found in the visual arts, dropped out of fashion as ‘action writing’ became taken over by the novelist and short story writer.

Where John Harris does become indisputably Cornish is where his observation is so precise and localised that only a man present at that particular historical moment could have written it. An example is the passage in Carn Brea when he “trick’d old Labour” and rose early one morning and saw the cottagers at work on the slopes with their spades, ploughs and harrows. The lines physically take the reader back 150 years to a community of miners and part-time smallholders; they recreate a past that is otherwise irrecoverable.

This then is the Cornish side, the alert first-hand observer taking down what he saw and felt as old technologies clashed with new and became absorbed, but poets seldom manage to keep up such intensity and zeal throughout their careers. They run out of material or do not experience enough new sensations. The familiar dulls on them, and their language deteriorates or becomes slick or inert. Often they cannot work up their youthful intensity (although, when John Harris wrote his late poetic autobiography Monro, he proved he could recall and recover the pivotal incidents of his career with remarkable joy and intensity) and turn to other subjects, plunder themes from history and folklore, in order to supply a new angle to their work. John Harris himself wrote poems set in Australia and America; not by any means his best work, but they served to stimulate his imagination and keep the poetic mill grinding.

A Versatile Poet

His early Red Indian romance Chanochet and Wetamoe featured in Lays from Mine, Moor and Mountain which appeared in 1853. It reflected the influence of the once-fashionable Thomas Campbell (1785 – 1806) and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 – 82) who was the living poet John Harris most admired and on whom these present observations will be focused. Harris found in Longfellow’s work a massive variety of forms and styles. The technical mastery was impressive: narrative, didactic, sonnet, lyric, translations from Dante and European writers. Furthermore there were innovative excursions like Hiawatha and verse-novels like Evangeline and The Courtship of Miles Standish. Longfellow wrote plainly, vividly and honestly – none of, say, Browning’s contortions or crabbed syntax. Entranced by this straight-shouldered, morally committed author, John Harris wrote the equivalent of fan mail, and the American reciprocated by dashing off a poetic tribute to Harris reproduced in the Luton Times:

The land of song within thee lies
Watered by living springs;
The lids of Fancy’s sleepless eyes
Are gates unto that paradise:
Holy thoughts, like stars, arise;
Its clouds are angels’ wings. (Men Who Have Risen)

It was the sophisticated side of Harris, the side that absorbed influences, mannerisms and subject matter from others, that turned gratefully to Longfellow’s works and found much of inspiration and interest. In John Harris’s day, Longfellow’s standing was high. He shared the upper slopes of Parnassus with Tennyson with whom he was often compared. But as poetry entered the turbulent waters of the 20th century, Tennyson held his place on the peak while Longfellow was toppled and shrank to a definitely minor figure. Always a modest man, he tended to be cautious about the high praise he received during his lifetime. Critics began sniping and taking his verses apart and parodies of Hiawatha – the first was by Lewis Carroll – began to pile up like a heap of superior smirks. The verdict on Longfellow – by no means a fair one - was that he too smooth and predictable a poet. He showed too much high-minded vacuousness, too much harking on about the emergent soul of man, too much smug faith in the essential goodness of humanity. Tennyson fared far better because he could penetrate, as in Maud, painful, contorted psychological states, in which faith and hope struggled against appalling doubts and a modern sense of meaninglessness. He could write immaculate blank verse and reproduce the visual process with astonishing exactitude. Longfellow also liked to explore gloom and despair but not with Tennyson’s painful exactitude. He refused to be anything other than ultimately positive, for he fundamentally believed in mankind perfecting itself through religiously inspired social change.

Social Crusading

Harris agreed with Longfellow’s positive outlook. Both had a reforming zeal and a faith in the future. Longfellow was erudite and widely travelled whereas John Harris was more evangelistic and narrower in his range, but he absorbed the spirit of the American and sometimes imitated his rhymes and language. In his prize-winning poem on Shakespeare his debt to Longfellow is apparent:

He solved the human heart
Like a mariner his chart,
And passion’s every phase was known to him;
And when the full time came,
Forth burst the mighty flame;
To blaze and brighten till the stars are dim. (Shakespeare)

This is surely taken from Longfellow’s The Building of the Ship:

He knew the chart
Of the sailor’s heart,
All its pleasures and its griefs,
All its shallows and rocky reefs…

By loan or adaptation of these lines, Harris was half-consciously paying a compliment to his master. Similarly, the substance of other of his verses holds an echo of the older man. Longfellow wrote a poem The Two Angels, meaning life and death, while Harris wrote a collection entitled The Two Giants, namely drink and war. Longfellow praised the seaside town of his youth and Harris responded with uplifting verses on the beauties of Falmouth. Like Harris, Longfellow looked forward to a time when man would no longer spill blood in brutal, mechanised warfare. To this end he wrote The Arsenal at Springfield, ending with the memorable fanfare:

Peace! and no longer from its brazen portals
The blast of War’s great organ shake the skies!
But beautiful as songs of the immortals,
The holy melodies of love arise.

The sentiments are similar to Harris’s The Cannon in the Lane:

“O what a clime of happiness
Our jarring globe will be
When every gun in every place
Is laid as low as thee:
When not a missile more is driven
Against the brow of love,
And dwells the human brotherhood
As angels do above!”

Both Harris and Longfellow upheld the dignity implicit in manual labour. Longfellow’s Village Blacksmith, with his brawny arms and sweat-drenched brow, finds a parallel in the hardworking men and women of Harris’s poetic sketches. In poems like The Dying Labour Lord, Harris highlights dilemma of those who literally worked themselves to death. Worn-out, neglected and forgotten, the honest worker expires in a poor-house, but life goes on oblivious to the massive contribution he has made to the prosperity of others:

Men passed along outside;
The rich, the great swept by;
But none enquired for the labour-lord
Who was so soon to die.

He oft had tilled their fields;
He oft had reaped their grain;
The profits swelled their shining hoards,
But his the crushing pain. (The Dying Labour-Lord)

The formula of the latter, incidentally, has something in common with Longfellow The Slave’s Dream in which death liberates an African slave from the fetters of his existence. As he fades away, he glimpses the glorious landscape of his native land.

Before him, like a blood-red flag,
The bright flamingos flew;
From morn till night he followed their flight,
O’er plains where the tamarind grew,
Till he saw the roofs of Caffre huts
And the ocean rose to view. (The Slave’s Dream)

In John Harris’s The Fall of Slavery the resemblance is, if anything, more marked, the fourth verse mentioning “whip” and “fetter”, nouns also present in The Slave’s Dream. But the tone of Harris is more of a generalised public address – a celebration of the breaking of long years of bondage - while Longfellow’s poem is tragic, a life-review of someone doomed and disinherited.

Save in the very slight instance of the Shakespeare poem, I should make clear that I am not talking of ‘borrowing’ or ‘plagiarism’ but rather of two men sharing a common pool of interests. Pacifism, spiritual progress, honest toil, the defeat of slavery and the pleasure derived from a little morbid nostalgia - such preoccupations shine through their writings. It is a pity so few of John Harris’s papers have been preserved. Certainly the handful of Longfellow letters would have taken pride of place and would have been of great interest to both British and American scholars. Harris parcelled up his collections and sent them across the Atlantic to make sure the American poet kept abreast of his work. Their intermittent correspondence may have ranged from the early 1870s until Longfellow’s death in 1882, an event memorialised in Harris’s posthumously-issued Last Lays. Whether the Longfellow archives contain any letters from Harris or inscribed books of his poetry is something the John Harris Society might care to research.

Processing Grief

In common with Longfellow and many another Victorian, John Harris seemed to have liked being sad. By this, I mean poetically or contemplatively sad, trying to inject an “evening feel’ into his poems, writing elegiac pieces, in which the sun goes down, bells toll and mourners gather in the graveyard. Of course, it is no bad thing to enjoy being sad – in fact, in a sense, it means you’ve escaped or ‘got through’ the worse. Paradoxically, you need be of a fairly robust disposition to indulge such sensations. A truly poor, wretched person could never flirt with such notions - he’d be far too beset by the genuine thing to be able to trick it out with rhymes.

During his lifetime, John Harris suffered the early deaths of Eliza Thomas, his daughter Lucretia and his brother James. After enduring the numbing physical shock and period of mourning, he must have found that standing back a little from the loss and organising it into an aesthetic composition, as he did in the ‘Lucretia poems’, was not only a way of alleviating the hurt, but a way of transforming it into a thing he could share with others. Longfellow acknowledged the manner in which Harris was able through poetry to sublimate his setbacks and bereavements. “The thought uppermost in my mind is,” he wrote to Harris in 1880, “what a divine gift the benediction of song must have been to you through all your laborious life. How dark your way would have been without it! How luminous with it!”

Instead of hoarding grief indefinitely, John Harris put it to work and turned it into something that would strengthen the common bond of humanity under duress. But as he grew older, he projected his thoughts to the contemplation of his own ending, wondering if the men and women who came after him, wandering around the Treslothan area, would fondly recall the quiet-living poet “who carolled through his moors”. No doubt he would be thrilled to hear that members of the John Harris Society do not just remember him. No, better than that, they actually honour his contribution, read his works aloud to each other and retrace his footsteps around his “old granite mount” and contemplate the scenes that awakened his inspiration.

The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls

Longfellow, even more than John Harris, liked to work over feelings of transience and intimations of mortality. He suffered sorrow and bereavement when his young wife, Marry Potter, died only four years after they had got married - his second wife, Fanny, also died tragically in a fire. His career ploughed through troubled times that saw the hanging of Nat Turner, rebel slave, the storming of Mexico city by the US troops, civil war, drought and stock exchange panics. He saw rebellions and uprisings come and go in Europe and came to value virtues like courage and spiritual steadfastness. He also had a melancholy side that liked to contemplate a nice churchyard and row of tombs, and if the day was overcast and a burial was in progress, that was even better. Going through the slim selection I have on my desk, I find poems to ghosts, graveyards, shipwrecks, violent deaths and lost and undone things. Titles like My Lost Youth, The Cemetery at Newport’ A Nameless Grave, The Reaper and the Flowers, Haunted Houses and The Day is Done speak of the overarching finality of physical extinction and the yearning for an afterlife that may resolve such issues.

Undoubtedly this is what Longfellow enjoyed writing about and was best at, but he excels when he conveys meaning through sound and atmosphere alone, through hinting rather than spelling out. A good example is the much-anthologised The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls, a moving invocation of what one experiences living in a small town beside the sea. Not once in the poem is death mentioned and yet, by means of symbol and bewitching rhythm, every line is invested with a melancholy inevitability that is moving rather than oppressive. There is also a mystery in the poem – who is the traveller? – that intensifies the sense of transience and mortality.

The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveller hastens toward the town,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.

Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls; The little waves, with their soft, white hands, Efface the footprints in the sands, And the tide rises, the tide falls.

The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;
The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveller to the shore,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.

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The Meads of Love: the Life and Poetry of John Harris,
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