REFERENCES:
F. H. Underwood: The Poet and the Man: Recollections and Appreciations of James Russell Lowell, 1893.
E. E. Hale: James Russell Lowell and his Friends, 1899.
H. E. Scudder: James Russell Lowell, a Biography, 1901.
Ferris Greenslet: James Russell Lowell, his Life and Work, 1905.
I
HIS LIFE
The Lowells of New England are descendants of Percival Lowell, a prosperous Bristol merchant who came to America in 1639 and settled at Newbury, Massachusetts. The family has been distinguished through its various representatives for public spirit and business acumen as well as for a devotion to letters. The grandfather of the poet, Judge John Lowell, was author of the clause in the Bill of Rights abolishing slavery in Massachusetts. One of his sons was founder of the great manufacturing city on the Merrimac which bears his name. A grandson established the Lowell Institute, a system of popular instruction by free courses of lectures,—a system unique, in that it aims to bring to its audiences representative scholars, chosen less for their skill in the graceful but often specious art of public speaking than for solid attainments.
James Russell Lowell, the youngest son of the Reverend Charles Lowell, minister of the West Church in Boston, was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the colonial mansion known as ‘Elmwood,’ on February 22, 1819. His mother, Harriet (Spence) Lowell, was a daughter of Keith Spence, of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.[63]
Under William Wells (an English pedagogue of the old school) Lowell prepared for college, entered Harvard, and after some disciplinary tribulations was graduated with his class (1838). He studied law and was admitted to the bar (August, 1840), but remained briefless during the few months of his efforts to begin a practice.
While waiting for clients, he busied himself with literature. He was early a rhymer. At twelve years of age his skill in making verse had astonished his schoolfellows, one of whom rushed home in great excitement to announce that ‘Jemmy Lowell thought he was going to be a poet.’
With the fearlessness of youth and in the hope of bettering himself financially, Lowell, aided by his friend Robert Carter, started a magazine, ‘The Pioneer.’ According to the prospectus, dated October 15, 1842, the editors proposed to supply ‘the intelligent and reflecting portion of the Reading Public with a substitute for the enormous quantity of thrice diluted trash, in the shape of namby-pamby love tales and sketches, which is monthly poured out to them....’ Only three numbers of ‘The Pioneer’ were issued.[64] The ‘Reading Public’ was joined to its idols and declined to encourage ‘a healthy and manly Periodical Literature.’
In 1841 was published A Year’s Life, Lowell’s first volume of verse; it was followed by Poems (1844), by a volume of prose, Conversations on Some of the Old Poets (1845), and by Poems, ‘second series’ (1848).
The ‘Ianthe’ of A Year’s Life was easily identified with Maria White, the gifted and beautiful girl who, in December, 1844, became the poet’s wife. The first year of their married life was passed in Philadelphia, whither Lowell had taken his bride to protect her from the harsh New England winter. Their financial resources were few, but of gayety and courage there was no lack. Lowell aspired to live by his pen. What with the small sums paid him (rather against his will) for editorial work on ‘The Pennsylvania Freeman,’ what with the hardly larger sums for contributions to ‘Graham’s Magazine’ and ‘The Broadway Journal,’ he managed to subsist.
Nevertheless, it seemed best for a number of reasons that the young people return to Cambridge and make a common home at ‘Elmwood’ with Lowell’s parents. In June of this year (1846) appeared ‘A Letter from Mr. Ezekiel Biglow of Jaalam to the Hon. Joseph T. Buckingham, editor of the Boston Courier, inclosing a poem of his son, Mr. Hosea Biglow.’ This was the first of The Biglow Papers, the initial attack of many attacks Lowell was to make on slavery with the weapons of satire and ridicule. During 1847 three more ‘papers’ were printed in the ‘Courier;’ the remaining five appeared in ‘The National Anti-Slavery Standard.’
When the ‘Standard’ passed from the control of a board of editors into the hands of Sydney Howard Gay, Lowell became a salaried contributor, and for a time his name appeared as corresponding editor. He was allowed a free hand. Abolitionist though he was, his abolitionism was tempered with a deal of sympathy for slaveholders. And he had interests which most reformers of the time lacked, a passionate love of letters, for example. Hence it was that in the midst of leader-writing he was penning A Fable for Critics and The Vision of Sir Launfal.
The winter of 1851–52 Lowell spent with his family in Italy, and the following spring and summer in journeyings through France, England, Scotland, and Wales. In October he sailed for home, having as ship companions Thackeray and Arthur Hugh Clough. Just a year later Mrs. Lowell died (October 27, 1853). For months afterward Lowell was in ‘great agony of mind, and he had to force himself into those laborious hours which one instinctively feels contain a wise restorative.’[65]
He abounded in literary plans, some of which (and among them a novel) were never carried out, whereas others, his papers in ‘Putnam’s Magazine’ and his lectures on English Poetry, before the Lowell Institute, were in a high degree successful. Each lecture of the Institute course had to be given twice, so great was the demand for tickets. Lowell was very nervous over his first platform experience, and not a little pleased when he found that he could hold the audience an hour and a quarter (‘they are in the habit of going out at the end of the hour’). The singular merit of the lectures led to his being appointed to the chair of belles-lettres at Harvard, just resigned by Longfellow. After a year’s study abroad the new professor entered on his academic duties (September, 1856).
In 1857 Lowell married Miss Frances Dunlap, of Portland, Maine. She was a woman of reserved though gracious manners and rare beauty, who through her serene temper and fine critical sagacity, together with a keen sense of the humorous, exerted a most beneficent influence on Lowell’s life.
The burdens of college work were not so heavy as to prevent Lowell’s assuming the editorship of ‘The Atlantic Monthly,’ a new literary magazine with an anti-slavery bias. He held this post from 1857 to 1861, and proved to be one of the best of editors, though routine was irksome to him, and the vagaries of contributors called for more patience than he could at all times command. Two years after leaving the ‘Atlantic’ he undertook to edit the ‘North American Review’ in company with Charles Eliot Norton, on whom fell the chief responsibilities. Lowell, for his part, contributed to the ‘Review’ many notable papers on politics and literature.
The Civil War called out much of Lowell’s most spirited prose and not a little of his best poetry. A second series of Biglow Papers appeared in the ‘Atlantic,’ and for the commemoration of sons of Harvard who had fought for the Union, Lowell wrote his magnificent Commemoration Ode. This noble performance was literally an improvisation, written in a single night.
At this point we may take note of Lowell’s publications, subsequent to the Poems, ‘second series.’ They are: A Fable for Critics, 1848; The Biglow Papers, 1848; Fireside Travels, 1864; The Biglow Papers, ‘second series,’ 1866; Under the Willows and Other Poems, 1869; The Cathedral, 1870; Among My Books, 1870; My Study Windows, 1871; Among My Books, ‘second series,’ 1876; Three Memorial Poems, 1877; Democracy and Other Addresses, 1887; Political Addresses, 1888; Heartsease and Rue, 1888.
There appeared posthumously Latest Literary Essays, 1891; The Old English Dramatists, 1892; Letters of James Russell Lowell, edited by C. E. Norton, 1893; Last Poems, 1895; The Anti-Slavery Papers of James Russell Lowell, 1902.
Lowell resigned his professorship in 1872 and went abroad for two years. Oxford conferred on him the degree of D. C. L. and Cambridge that of LL. D.; it pleased him to regard the Cambridge degree ‘as in a measure a friendly recognition of the University’s daughter in the American Cambridge.’ In 1874 he returned home, and on the opening of college was persuaded to resume his lectures.
During the presidential campaign of 1876 Lowell became politically active in ways new to him. He was a delegate to the Republican National convention and a presidential elector. His fellow-townsmen had wished him to accept a nomination for representative in Congress; but Lowell refused, believing himself unqualified for the post.
Not long after his inauguration President Hayes, at the instance of W. D. Howells, offered Lowell the Austrian mission, an honor the poet felt impelled to decline; when, however, it was learned that he would be very willing to go to Spain, the appointment was made. He arrived in Madrid on August 14, 1878. Two years later he was transferred to England. Reappointed by President Garfield, he held this important charge until the close of President Arthur’s administration.
Few ministers have been as popular as he. And not the least factor of his popularity in England was his sturdy patriotism. Lowell was the author of the essay ‘On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners,’ an essay which an ingratiating Anglican clergyman[66] says was meant to be ‘overheard’ in England. It were more exact to say that the essay was meant to be heard, and heard distinctly. ‘They honor stoutness in each other,’ said Emerson, noting the traits of the English people. And it is not unreasonable to believe that they also admire the same virtue in others.
The summer of 1885 Lowell passed at Southborough, forty miles from Boston, the home of his daughter, Mrs. Burnett. He made a number of public addresses, gave a Lowell Institute course of lectures on the ‘Old English Dramatists,’ argued the question of International Copyright before a committee of the Senate, and is believed to have had real influence in persuading representatives of this great country that stealing is a sin. He found himself inveigled into an author’s reading, and humorously bewailed his weakness in ever having written a line of poetry. The demands upon him were enormous. It was now an effort for him to do things, and if the grasshopper had not yet become a burden, public occasions had, and more than once he was obliged to beg off from keeping a promise inconsiderately made.
He enjoyed being in England for the summer, and usually divided his time between London and Whitby. The last of these visits took place in 1889. The ensuing winter he gave to a careful revision of his writings. In the spring of 1890 he was ill for six weeks, and though he recovered enough to be able to move about a little and to welcome his friends, serious work was out of the question. He wrote two or three short papers, and had strong inducements held out to him to write more, but the time for writing was past, and he knew it.
His sufferings during his last illness were great, but he bore them like the man he was. Lowell died at ‘Elmwood,’ Cambridge, on August 12, 1891.
II
LOWELL’S CHARACTER
‘I am a kind of twins myself, divided between grave and gay,’ said Lowell, in one of those rare moments when he condescended to self-analysis. The duality of temperament here pointed at is one secret of the fascination he exerted on all who were privileged to know him intimately. The fascination was certainly great and the tributes to it numerous. Lowell’s personality was so winning, and the man was so genuine, human, and lovable, that it is difficult to speak of him in terms having even the semblance of impartiality. Although strong-willed and positive, not indisposed now and then to indulge himself in the luxury of stubbornness, he was open-minded, wholly unselfish, kind-hearted, affectionate, and gentle; and while he had his reserves he was democratic in all the best senses of the word, for his democracy sprang from the depths of his nature. Changeable in his moods, he could be teasing, whimsical, irritating; but when he was most mocking and perverse he was most delightful.
There is something very attractive in Lowell’s attitude toward literature and literary fame. Books were an essential part of his life. He had mastered that difficult art of reading as few men have mastered it. He was rarely endowed as a poet and prose-writer. And yet Lowell, the most complete illustration we have of the literary man, showed no inclination to magnify the importance of letters.
As to his individual achievements, he not only never thought of himself more highly than he ought to think, but was the rather inclined to place too low an estimate on the value of his work. Self-distrust increased with years. Nevertheless, Lowell indulged himself in no philosophy of despair. He had had much to be grateful for. ‘I have always believed that a man’s fate is born with him, and that he cannot escape from it nor greatly modify it’ (Lowell once wrote to his friend Charles Eliot Norton) ‘and that consequently every one gets in the long run exactly what he deserves, neither more nor less.’ Lowell goes on to say that the creed is a ‘cheerful’ one; he might have added that it is no less sensible and manly than it is cheerful.
Whether he found his creed satisfactory at all times or was always conscious that he had a creed, we cannot know, but he could be the blithest of fatalists when it pleased him to be.
III
POET AND PROSE WRITER
Lowell’s prose is manly, direct, varied, flexible, generally harmonious, abounding in passages marked by grace, beauty, and sweetness, and capable of rising to genuine eloquence. In its overflowing vitality and human warmth it is an adequate expression of the man, imaging his mocking and humorous moods no less than his deep sincerity, his strength of purpose, and his passion. Much of it has the confidence and ease that go with successful improvisation. If Lowell was ‘willing to risk the prosperity of a verse upon a lucky throw of words,’ he was even more willing to take like chances with his prose.
His thought ran easily into figurative form, and the making of metaphor was as natural to him as breathing. He would even amuse himself with conceits, for he loved to play with language, to force words into shapes he might perchance have condemned had he found them in the work of another. But if style is to be representative, this playfulness, however annoying to Lowell’s critics, is a virtue. A Lowell chastened in his English and wholly academic would not be the Lowell we rejoice in.
He practised the art of poetry in many forms and always with success. Of everything he wrote you might say that it had been his study, though you might refrain from saying that ‘it had been all in all his study.’ In other words, as we read Lowell the question never arises whether or not the poet is working in unfamiliar materials, but whether he might not have given his product a higher finish, the materials and the form remaining the same. He was no aspirant after flawless beauty. He wrote spontaneously and was for the time wholly possessed by his theme. But what he had written he had written; and if never content with the result he at least compelled himself to be philosophical. He made a few changes, to be sure, but (as was said of a far greater poet) he would correct with an afterglow of poetic inspiration, not with a painful tinkering of the verse.
It is by tinkering with the verse, however (the ‘higher’ tinkering), that perfection is attained. And he who wrote with evident ease so many lovely and felicitous lines could as easily have bettered lines that are wanting in finish. It was not Lowell’s way. Too much may not be required of a man who often felt the utmost repugnance to reading his own writings, once they were in print.
IV
POEMS, THE BIGLOW PAPERS, FABLE FOR CRITICS, VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL
Lowell’s first poetic flights were strong-winged. ‘Threnodia,’ ‘The Sirens,’ ‘Summer Storm,’ ‘To Perdita, Singing,’ whatever their faults, have a richness, a melody, a freedom of structure, an almost careless grace, that are captivating. Here was no painful effort in production with the inevitable result of frigidity and hardness.
The poet’s gift matured rapidly. There is strength in such poems as ‘Prometheus,’ ‘Columbus,’ ‘A Glance behind the Curtain,’ rare beauty in ‘A Legend of Brittany,’ ‘Hebe,’ and ‘Rhœcus,’ a mystical power in the haunting lines of ‘The Sower,’ passion and uplift in ‘The Present Crisis,’ ‘Anti-Apis,’ the lines ‘To W. L. Garrison,’ and the ‘Ode to France,’ while in ‘An Interview with Miles Standish’ is a promise of that satirical power which was presently to find complete expression in The Biglow Papers.
Early in his career Lowell announced his theory of the poet’s office, which is to inspire to high thought and noble action, not merely to please with pretty fancies and melodious verse. The ‘Ode,’ written in 1841, is an expression of his poetic faith. The ethical and reforming bent in Lowell’s character was so strong as to make it difficult for him, true bard though he was, to look on poetry as an art to be cultivated for itself alone.
Inspiriting as were stanzas like ‘The Present Crisis,’ Lowell’s power became most effective in the anti-slavery struggle when the outbreak of the Mexican War led to the writing of The Biglow Papers. Printed anonymously in a journal, copied into other newspapers, the question of their authorship much debated, these satires were at last adjudicated to the man who wrote them, but not until he himself had heard it demonstrated ‘in the pauses of a concert’ that he was wholly incapable of such a performance.
Of the characters of the little drama, Hosea Biglow, the country youth, stands for the plain common-sense of New England, opposed to the extension of slavery whatever the means employed, and above all by legalized murder with an accompaniment of drums and fifes. The Reverend Homer Wilbur acts as ‘chorus,’ and by his learned comments surrounds the productions of the country muse with an atmosphere of scholarship. Birdofredom Sawin is the clown of the little show.
Many finer touches have become obscure by the lapse of time, and The Biglow Papers is now provided with historical notes; but the energy, the spirit, and the unfailing humor of the work are perennial. Lowell was most fortunate in his verbal felicities. Who could have foreseen that so much danger lurked in a middle initial, or that a plain name of the sort borne by the former senator from Middlesex contained such comic potentialities?
We were gittin’ on nicely up here to our village,
With good old idees o’ wut’s right an’ wut aint,
We kind o’ thought Christ went agin war an’ pillage,
An’ thet eppyletts worn’t the best mark of a saint;
But John P.
Robinson he
Sez this kind o’ thing’s an exploded idee.
Lowell was surprised at his own success. What he at first thought ‘a mere fencing stick’ proved to be a weapon. The blade was two-edged, and the Yankees did well to fall back a little when he lifted it against the enemy. For in writing The Biglow Papers Lowell took real delight in noting the oddities and laughing at the foibles of his own New Englanders, a people whom he loved with all tenderness, but to whose faults he was not in the least blind.
In 1861 the little puppets were taken out of the box where they had lain for fifteen years and furbished up for a new tragi-comedy. The second series of The Biglow Papers was read no less eagerly than the first had been. Quite as brilliant as their predecessors, the later poems are more impassioned, and in those touching on English hostility to the North the satire is bitterly stinging.
While the numbers of the first series were in course of publication Lowell produced a rhymed primer of contemporary American literature under the title of A Fable for Critics. It was an improvisation, and therefore the buoyancy, the jovial off-hand manner, the impudence even, were a matter of course and all in its favor. Often penetrating and just in his criticisms, Lowell was invariably amusing, and in the cleverness of the rhyme and word play quite inimitable.
Two months after the appearance of the Fable the popular Vision of Sir Launfal was published. Though undoubtedly read more for the sake of the preludes than for the slight but touching story, it is by no means certain that the preludes, brought out as independent poems, could have won the number of readers they now have. In other words, The Vision of Sir Launfal has a unity which it seems on first acquaintance to lack.
V
UNDER THE WILLOWS, THE CATHEDRAL, COMMEMORATION ODE, THREE MEMORIAL POEMS, HEARTSEASE AND RUE
‘Under the Willows’ is a poem of Nature in which the poet at no time loses sight either of the world of books or of the world of men. If he be driven indoors by the rigors of May, he is content to sit by his wood-fire and read what the poets have said in praise of that inclement month. Or if June has come and he can dream under his favorite willows, his reveries gain a zest from the interruptions of the tramp, ‘lavish summer’s bedesman,’ the scissors-grinder, that grimy Ulysses of New England, the school-children, and the road-menders,
Vexing Macadam’s ghost with pounded slate.
It is a poem of thanksgiving in which the poet voices his gratitude for the benediction of the higher mood and the human kindness of the lower.
The volume to which ‘Under the Willows’ gives its name is typical. He who prizes Lowell’s verse will hardly be content with any selection which does not include ‘Al Fresco,’ ‘A Winter-Evening Hymn to my Fire,’ ‘Invita Minerva,’ ‘The Dead House,’ ‘The Parting of the Ways,’ ‘The Fountain of Youth,’ and ‘The Nightingale in the Study.’
Its manner of contrasting To-Day with Yesterday, the genius that creates with the spirit that analyzes, makes The Cathedral an essentially American poem. The minster in its ‘vast repose,’
Silent and gray as forest-leaguered cliff,
must always seem a marvel to a dweller among temples of ‘deal and paint.’ The poem is the meditation of a New-World conservative, altogether catholic of sympathies, who holds no less firmly to the past because, under the fascination of democracy, he breathes in the presence of the ‘backwoods Charlemagne’ a braver air and is conscious of an ‘ampler manhood.’ And what, he asks, will be the faith of this new avatar of the Goth, what temples will the creature build? Very beautiful, very suggestive, and in its shifting moods entirely representative of the poet who wrote it must this fine work always seem.
The Ode recited at the Harvard Commemoration (July 21, 1865) is Lowell’s supreme achievement in verse. It breathes the most exalted patriotism, a love of native land that is intense, fiery, consuming. Though written in honor of sons of the University who had gone to the war, the spirit of the Ode is not local and particular. The poet celebrates not individual deeds alone but the sum of those deeds, not man but manhood:—
That leap of heart whereby a people rise
Up to a noble anger’s height,
And, flamed on by the Fates, not shrink, but grow more bright,
That swift validity in noble veins,
Of choosing danger and disdaining shame,
Of being set on flame
By the pure fire that flies all contact base,
But wraps its chosen with angelic might,
These are imperishable gains,
Sure as the sun, medicinal as light,
These hold great futures in their lusty reins
And certify to earth a new imperial race.
The mingling of proud humility, tenderness, and reverence, the throbbing passion and the exultant fervor of the concluding verses, lift this ode to a high place in American poetry, it may be to the highest place. To the many, however, the chief value of The Commemoration Ode lies in the stanza on Lincoln. So just as an estimate of character, so restrained in its accents of praise, American in all finer meanings of the word, splendid in its imagery and poignant in the note of grief, this beautiful tribute to the great president is final and satisfying.
The first of the Three Memorial Poems is an ‘Ode, read at the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Fight at Concord.’
In the opening stanzas on Freedom the poet strikes the notes of exultation fitting the time and the place, then passes to those inevitable allusions which appeal to local pride (and Lowell handles this passage with utmost skill), draws the lesson that must of necessity be drawn from the ‘home-spun deeds’ of the men of old, makes Freedom utter her warning to the men of the present, and, no prophet of evil, closes in the triumphant spirit in which he began.
‘Under the Old Elm’ is a magnificent tribute to a man so great that there is need of odes like this to help us comprehend his greatness. After calling up the scene when Washington, ‘a stranger among strangers,’ stood beneath that legendary tree to take command of his army, ‘all of captains,’ a motley rout, valorous deacons, selectmen, and village heroes among others, more skilled in debating their orders than obeying them, good fighters all, but ‘serious drill’s despair,’—the poet chants those beautiful lines in which is drawn the distinction between ‘Nation’ and ‘Country.’ The one is fashioned of computable things, good each in its kind and important in its place:—
But Country is a shape of each man’s mind
Sacred from definition, unconfined
By the cramped walls where daily drudgeries grind;
An inward vision, yet an outward birth
Of sweet familiar heaven and earth;
A brooding Presence that stirs motions blind
Of wings within our embryo being’s shell
That wait but her completer spell
To make us eagle-natured, fit to dare
Life’s nobler spaces and untarnished air.
You who hold dear this self-conceived ideal,
Whose faith and works alone can make it real,
Bring all your fairest gifts to deck her shrine
Who lifts our lives away from Thine and Mine
And feeds the lamp of manhood more divine
With fragrant oils of quenchless constancy.
When all have done their utmost, surely he
Hath given the best who gives a character
Erect and constant, which nor any shock
Of loosened elements, nor the forceful sea
Of flowing or of ebbing fates, can stir
From its deep bases in the living rock
Of ancient manhood’s sweet security....
And the poet longs for skill to praise him fitly whom he does fitly praise in the stanzas that follow. It is a thoughtful, nobly eloquent, and poetically beautiful characterization of the great Virginian, and appropriately closes with a fine apostrophe to the historic Commonwealth from which Washington sprang.
The ‘Ode for the Fourth of July, 1876,’ though not lacking in forceful lines and fine imagery, is the least happy of the three poems. The questioning and critical mood is prominent. But the spirit of confidence prevails and is voiced in the invocation with which the ode concludes.
Various notes are touched in the collection of eighty-eight poems to which its author gave the title of Heartsease and Rue. Here are verses new and old, grave and gay, satirical, humorous, sentimental, and elegiac, epigrams, inscriptions, lyrics, poems of occasion, sonnets, epistles, and, chief among them, the ode written on hearing the news of the death of Agassiz. Whether, as has been asserted, ‘this poem takes its place with the few great elegies in our language, gives a hand to “Lycidas” and to “Thyrsis,”’ is a question to be decided by the suffrages of many good critics, rather than by the dictum of one. There is no doubt, however, that by virtue of its human quality, depth of personal feeling, sincerity in the accent of bereavement, and felicity of phrase, the ‘Agassiz’ will always stand in the first rank of Lowell’s greater verse.
VI
FIRESIDE TRAVELS, MY STUDY WINDOWS, AMONG MY BOOKS, LATEST LITERARY ESSAYS
Fireside Travels is so entertaining a book as to make one wish that Lowell had chronicled more of his journeyings at home and abroad in the same amusing style. Two of the six essays—‘Cambridge Thirty Years Ago’ and ‘A Moosehead Journal’—take the form of letters addressed to the author’s friend, ‘the Edelmann Storg’ (W. W. Story). The others are grouped under the general title of ‘Leaves from my Journal in Italy and Elsewhere.’
One spirit animates the pages of this book,—a love of plain people, homely adventures, everyday sights and sounds. In a half-serious way (as if to show that he knows how to ‘do’ a tempest in the mountains or an illumination of St. Peter’s) Lowell throws in a number of unconventional passages on entirely conventional themes. But the strength of the book lies in the sympathetic and humorous accounts of that protean animal Man, who, whether he showed himself in the guise of a denizen of Old Cambridge, or of Uncle Zeb, who had been ‘to the ‘Roostick war,’ or of the Chief Mate of the packet ship, or of Leopoldo, the Italian guide, was more interesting to Lowell than any other object of his study.
Together with Fireside Travels may be read ‘My Garden Acquaintance’ and ‘A Good Word for Winter,’ from My Study Windows, gossipy papers on Nature by one who looked on ‘a great deal of the modern sentimentalism about Nature as a mark of disease ... one more symptom of the general liver complaint.’ The sincerity of Lowell’s love of birds, beasts, flowers, trees, the sky and the landscape, admits of no question. Yet he approached Nature more or less through literature, as was becoming in a man brought up on White’s Selborne; and he seems his characteristic self when, having pulled a chair out under a tree, he sits there with a volume of Chaucer in his hands, looking up from the page now and then to watch his feathered neighbors, and make wise and humorous comments on their doings.
Among My Books is a volume of literary and historical studies, six in number, entitled respectively, ‘Dryden,’ ‘Witchcraft,’ ‘Shakespeare Once More,’ ‘New England Two Centuries Ago,’
‘Lessing,’ ‘Rousseau and the Sentimentalists.’ All are in Lowell’s best manner, and the ‘Dryden’ and ‘Shakespeare’ are particularly fine examples of those leisurely, stimulating, and always brilliant literary studies which this scholar knew so well how to write.
Of the thirteen papers in My Study Windows that on ‘Abraham Lincoln’[67] and the one ‘On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners’ have a political bearing; those on ‘A Great Public Character’ (Josiah Quincy) and ‘Emerson the Lecturer’ are studies in personality; the ‘Library of Old Authors’ is an exercise in textual criticism, a merciless arraignment of certain unfortunate editors; the ‘Carlyle,’ ‘James Gates Percival,’ ‘Thoreau,’ ‘Swinburne’s Tragedies,’ ‘Chaucer,’ and ‘Pope’ are studies in literary history and interpretation.
Among My Books, ‘second series,’ contains five essays. More than a third of the volume is devoted to a study of ‘Dante,’ elaborate and exhaustive—as the word ‘exhaustive’ might be used in speaking of an essay not of a book. Then follows a most sympathetic essay on ‘Spenser,’ together with papers on ‘Milton,’ ‘Wordsworth,’ and ‘Keats.’
Of Lowell’s critical writings as a whole it may be said that better reading does not exist; and among the virtues of these essays is their length. Lowell would have been ill at ease in the limits of three or four thousand words too often imposed by the editors of our current magazines. He might even have been scornful of a public taste which dictated to editors to dictate to their contributors limits so narrow. Writing from the fulness of a well-stored mind, he liked room in which to display his thought. Having much to say, he did not scruple to take time to say it; but the time always goes quickly. He understood perfectly the art of beguiling one into forgetting the hours as they pass.
These essays, so rich in critical suggestiveness, abound in matter-of-fact knowledge. We read for information and get it. Lowell shares with us the wealth of his acquaintance with books. His manner is unostentatious. Macaulay staggers us with his array of facts and his range of allusion. We are overwhelmed, intellectually cowed by the display of knowledge. Lowell too astonishes, but only after a while. Macaulay declaims at his reader, Lowell converses with him. All is so easy, good-humored, and witty, that the reader for a moment labors under the mistake of supposing that he is being instructed less than he would like. Later he begins to count up his mental gains, and is surprised at the display they make.
Another obvious source of pleasure is the felicity of expression. Lowell had the courage of his cleverness. Brilliancy was natural to him. He defended the practice of piquant phrasing, maintaining that a thought is not wanting in depth because it is strikingly put. Doubtless he loved an ingenious turn for its own sake, but it would be difficult to find an instance of his making a display of verbal vivacity to conceal poverty of thought.
These pages bear constant witness to Lowell’s passion for books, a passion too genuine and deep-seated to admit of any doubt on his part of the worth of literature. He had none of Emerson’s scepticism, who held that if people would only think, they might do without books. The dullest proser and most leaden-winged poet could not make Lowell despair.
A number of essays display no little of the severity which we have learned to associate with reviewing after the manner of Jeffrey and Lockhart. Yet these caustic passages were written by a man who said of himself that he had ‘to fight the temptation to be too good-natured.’ Priggishness was as absurd to him in scholarship and letters as elsewhere, and he never lost a chance to give it a touch of the whip. Happily there is little of this. Lowell was almost uniformly urbane, gracious, reasonable.
If his subject was a great one Lowell treated it in a great way; if circumscribed and provincial he enlarged its boundaries—as in the essay on ‘James Gates Percival,’ where a subject of small intrinsic worth becomes a study of the American literary mind at one of its periods of acute self-consciousness, useful historically and tending to present-day edification. Needless to say, Lowell enjoyed handling this topic. He liked to satirize the early American authors and critics, solemn and important over their great work of inaugurating a New-World literature and quite convinced that, since ‘that little driblet of the Avon had succeeded in producing William Shakespeare,’ something unusual was to be expected of the Mississippi River.
Although Lowell’s standing as a critic rests on such writings as his ‘Dryden,’ ‘Shakespeare,’ ‘Chaucer,’ ‘Spenser,’ ‘Pope,’ and ‘Dante,’ the amateur of good literature cannot afford to neglect anything to which this fine scholar put his hand.
The later volumes contain some of his most illuminating criticism (notably in the ‘Fielding,’ ‘Don Quixote,’ ‘Gray,’ ‘Walton,’ and ‘Landor’), and his style seems the perfection of ease and suppleness. Doubtless it is negligent now and then, but always with the winning negligence of a master in the difficult art of expression.
VII
POLITICAL ADDRESSES AND PAPERS
The Anti-Slavery Papers consists of editorial articles reprinted from ‘The Pennsylvania Freeman,’ and ‘The Anti-Slavery Standard.’[68] Witty, ironical, and pungent, these fugitive leaves are of value for the light they throw on the history of the struggle maintained by the Abolitionists against their powerful enemies both in the North and in the South, as well as for the idea they give of the militant Lowell at a time when to conviction of the justness of the cause for which he fought was added a measure of joyousness in the mere act of fighting.
Of greater significance is the volume of Political Essays, twelve papers written at intervals between 1858 and 1866. Designed for the most part to serve an immediate purpose, and betraying in every page the writer’s depth of feeling, intensity of patriotism, and strong but not bigoted Northern convictions, these essays, by their acuteness of insight, balanced judgment, admirable temper, and wealth of allusion, as well as by their literary flavor and their occasional eloquence, hold a permanent place not only among Lowell’s best writings but among the best of the innumerable political papers called out by the Civil War.
Of Lowell’s later political utterances none is more notable than the address on ‘Democracy,’ delivered at Birmingham in 1884, a cleverly phrased and thoughtful speech in which the American minister defended the democratic idea with logic as adroit as it was sound. That the source of American democracy was the English constitution must have been news to a part at least of his English audience. It was a happy thought of Lowell’s to show how stable democracy might be as a system of government. He made the argument from expediency, that ‘it is cheaper in the long run to lift men up than to hold them down, and that a ballot in their hands is less dangerous to society than a sense of wrong in their heads.’ He would not have been Lowell had he not also shown that a democracy has its finer instincts, or failed to recognize the fact that as an experiment in the art of government it must stand or fall by its own merits. And the whole address is strongly optimistic, in its insistence that ‘those who have the divine right to govern will be found to govern in the end.’
The address on ‘The Place of the Independent in Politics’ supplements the Birmingham address. As Lowell before an English audience had dwelt on ‘the good points and favorable aspect of democracy,’ so before a home audience he discussed its weak points and its dangers. He thought the system would bear investigation. At no time did he labor under the mistake of supposing that democracy was a contrivance which ran of its own accord. Parties there must be and politicians to look after them, but it is no less essential that there should be somebody to look after the politicians. The address is a plea for unselfishness in political action.
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Admirers of Lowell find it easy to believe that of all American makers of verse he had the most of what is called inspiration. With less catholic tastes he might have become a greater poet and would undoubtedly have been a finer artist. But granting that it was a matter of choice, and that Lowell had elected to make mastery in verse (with all the sacrifices involved) the object of his life, how serious then would have been the loss to criticism and to politics. The Lowell we know, with his extraordinary mental vivacity, his grasp of a multitude of interests that make for culture, is surely a more engaging figure than the hypothetical Lowell of purely poetical achievement.