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The New England Tragedies, we find that as far back as 1839, before he had conceived of
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Christus, he had thought of a drama on Cotton Mather. Then a suggestion came to him in 1856 from his German friend, Emanuel Vitalis Scherb, of whom he writes on March 16, 1856:
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Scherb wants me to write a poem on the Puritans and the Quakers. A good subject for a tragedy. On March 25 and 26 we find him looking over books on the subject, especially Besse's
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Sufferings of the Quakers; on April 2 he writes a scene of the play; on May 1 and 2 he is pondering and writing notes, and says:
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It is delightful to revolve in one's mind a new conception. He also works upon it in a fragmentary way in July and in November, and remarks, in the midst of it, that he has lying on his table more than sixty requests for autographs. As a background to all of this lie the peculiar excitements of that stormy summer of 1856, when his friend Sumner was struck down in the United States Senate and he himself, meeting with an accident, was lamed for weeks and was unable to go to Europe with his children as he had intended. The first rough draft of
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Wenlock Christison, whose title was afterwards changed to
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John Endicott, and which was the first of
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The New England Tragedies, was not finished till August 27, 1857, and the work alternated for a time with that done on
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Miles Standish; but it was more than ten years (October 10, 1868) before it was published, having first been written in prose, and only ten copies printed and afterwards rewritten in verse. With it was associated the second New England Tragedy,
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Giles Corey of the Salem farms, written rapidly in February of that same year. The volume never made a marked impression; even the sympathetic Mr. Fields, the publisher, receiving it rather coldly. It never satisfied even its author, and the new poetic idea which occurred to him on April 11, 1871, and which was to harmonize the discord of
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The New England Tragedies was destined never to be fulfilled. In the mean time, however, he carried them to Europe with him, and seems to have found their only admirer in John Forster, who wrote to him in London:
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Your tragedies are very beautiful--beauty everywhere subduing and chastening the sadness; the pictures of nature in delightful contrast to the sorrowful and tragic violence of the laws; truth and unaffectedness everywhere. I hardly know which I like best; but there are things in 'Giles Corey' that have a strange attractiveness for me. Longfellow writes to Fields from Vevey, September 5, 1868:
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I do not like your idea of calling the 'Tragedies' sketches. They are not sketches, and only seem so at first because I have studiously left out all that could impede the action. I have purposely made them simple and direct. He later adds:
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As to anybody's 'adapting' these 'Tragedies' for the stage, I do not like the idea of it at all. Prevent this if possible. I should, however, like to have the opinion of some good actor--not a sensational actor--on that point. I should like to have Booth look at them. Six weeks later, having gone over to London to secure the copyright on these poems, he writes:
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I saw also Bandmann, the tragedian, who expressed the liveliest interest in what I told him of the 'Tragedies.' Finally he says, two days later,
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Bandmann writes me a nice letter about the 'Tragedies,' but says they are not adapted to the stage. So we will say no more about that, for the present.
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Christus: A Mystery appeared as a whole in 1872, for the first time bringing together the three parts (I.
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The Divine Tragedy; II.
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The Golden Legend, and III.
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The New England Tragedies ).
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The Divine Tragedy, which now formed the first part, was not only in some degree criticised as forming an anti-climax in being placed before the lighter portions of the great drama, but proved unacceptable among his friends, and was often subjected to the charge of being unimpressive and even uninteresting. On the other hand, we have the fact that it absorbed him more utterly than any other portion of the book. He writes in his diary on January 6, 1871,
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The subject of 'The Divine Tragedy' has taken entire possession of me, so that I can think of nothing else. All day pondering upon and arranging it. And he adds next day,
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I find all hospitalities and social gatherings just now great interruptions. Yet he has to spend one morning that week in Boston at a meeting of stockholders; on another day Agassiz comes, broken down even to tears by the loss of health and strength; on another day there is
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Still another day it is so cold he can scarcely write in his study, and he has