February 27
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807)
It was on this date, February 27, 1807, that the first American professional poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was born in coastal Portland, Maine. Although his father steered him toward a legal career, Henry was too in love with language to turn down the newly founded chair in modern languages at Bowdoin College. He was only 19 when it was offered and he accepted, in part because he would be allowed to travel to further his education. From 1826-1829 he traveled in Spain, Italy, France, Germany, and England, not only to meet his academic peers, but to meet the people of the inns and cottages.
It is true that he met his first wife, Mary Storer Potter, at church. Longfellow married her in 1831, settling in to translate and write travel essays before taking a professorship at Harvard in 1834. While abroad, his wife died and he memorialized her in "Footsteps of Angels" (1838). Other works of that period include Hyperion (1839, a romantic novel) and The Spanish Student (1840, a drama in five acts).
In 1845 Longfellow married Frances Appleton. He published "Evangeline," a narrative poem from an outline by his friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, in 1847. Longfellow's literary output, hampered by his teaching duties at Harvard until his resignation in 1854, swelled with such later works as "The Song of Hiawatha" (1855), "The Courtship of Miles Standish" (1858), "Paul Revere's Ride" (1860), "Tales of a Wayside Inn" (1863), a translation of Dante's Divine Comedy (1865-67) and Christus: a Mystery (1872), a trilogy dealing with the beginnings of Christianity.
Although Longfellow is typically described as a Christian, his fellow poet and friend William Dean Howells writes, "I think that as he grew older his hold upon anything like a creed weakened, though he remained of the Unitarian philosophy concerning Christ"* — that is, he denied the divinity of Christ. Longfellow died in Cambridge on 24 March 1882 at age 75 — probably a Rationalist, as Howells notes that the poet "did not latterly go to church."**
* William Dean Howells, Literary Friends and Acquaintances, 1901, p. 202.
** Ibid. You can read the full text of many of Longfellow's poems at this link.
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Ernest Renan (1823)
It was also on this date, February 27, 1823, that French scholar Joseph Ernest Renan was born in Trier, Brittany, to a Breton father and a Gascon mother. He lost his father at age five and only his industry and the help of his sister Henriette (who was even more deeply skeptical than he) made him the greatest Orientalist of his day. Destined for the priesthood, and having taken minor orders, Renan gave up those studies (6 October 1845) after reading German philosophy. He remained a Pantheist throughout his life.
His essay on Semitic languages won Renan the Volney Prize and won him a Government mission to the East, on which his sister accompanied him. Henriette died and Renan returned to become professor of Hebrew, Syriac, and Chaldaic at Paris University. But he angered the clergy and lost this position by publishing his Life of Jesus (Vie de Jésus, 1863) — which, nevertheless, sold 300,000 copies in France alone and was translated into nearly every European language. In it, Renan wrote:
None of the miracles with which the old histories are filled took place under scientific conditions. Observation, which has never once been falsified, teaches us that miracles never happen but in times and countries in which they are believed, and before persons disposed to believe them. No miracle ever occurred in the presence of men capable of testing its miraculous character.*Although Renan was a Pantheist with Agnostic tendencies, he would still refer to "God" and the divinity (in the Romantic sense) of Jesus in his writings. His work helped to enlighten and secularize France by destroying the supernatural idea of Jesus. He won back his chair at Paris University in 1871, due in part to brilliant works on early Christianity, but held his tongue against criticizing religion out of respect for the royalist Weltanschauung.
While decrying his skepticism with the vehemence of the intellectually vulnerable, even his detractors had to admit, "Renan's personal life was irreproachable."** Renan died in Paris on 2 October 1892 at age 69. Ernest Renan, who did not believe in a future life, once said, "I know that when I am dead nothing of me will remain."†
* Ernest Renan, Life of Jesus, 1863. A full-text translation of this work, dedicated to his late sister, can be read at this link.
** Philip Schaff, "Preterist Commentaries by Futurists," in "What Others Have Said," n.d., at this link.
† Henriette Psichari (ed.), Oeuvres complètes de Ernest Renan, 1947-1961.
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