JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
A late National Review asserts with true English shrewdness that American literature is yet to be born,—that it has scarcely a substantive existence. 'Its best works,' says this modern Scaliger, 'are scarcely more than a promise of excellence; the precursors of an advent; shadows cast before, and, like most shadows, they are too vague and ill-defined, too fluctuating and easily distorted into grotesque forms, to enable us to discriminate accurately the shape from which they are flung.... The truth is, that American literature, apart from that of England, has no separate existence.... The United States have yet to sign their intellectual Declaration of Independence: they are mentally still only a province of this country.' With a gallantry too characteristic to be startling, a discernment that does all honor to his taste, and a coolness highly creditable to his equatorial regions of discussion, the critic continues by assuring his readers that Washington Irving was not an American. He admits that by an accident, for which he is not responsible, this beloved scholar, writer and gentleman claimed our country as his birthplace, and even, perhaps, had a 'full appetite to this place of his kindly ingendure,' but informs us he was an undeniable contemporary of Addison and Steele, a veritable member of the Kit-Cat Club. We may reasonably anticipate that the next investigation of this penetrative ethnologist may result in the appropriation to us of that fossil of nineteenth-century literature, Martin Farquhar Tupper, an intellectual quid pro quo, which will doubtless be received gratefully by a public already supposed to be lamenting the unexpected loss of its co-nationality with Irving.
What species of giant the watchful affection of Motherland awaits in a literature whose unfledged bantlings are Cooper, Emerson, Holmes, Motley and Lowell, our imagination does not attempt to depict. We venture, however, to predict that the National Review will not be called upon to stand sponsor for the bairn, whose advent it so pleasantly announces, and for whose christening should be erected a cathedral more vast than St. Peter's, a temple rarer than that of Baalbec. But while our sensitive cousin across the water would pin us down to a credo as absurd as that of Tertullian, and hedge us in with the adamantine wall of his own lordly fiat, let us, who fondly hope we have a literature, whose principal defect—a defect to which the one infallible remedy is daily applied by the winged mower—is youth, inquire into its leading characteristics, seeing if haply we may descry the elements of a golden maturity.
It has been asserted that we are a gloomy people; it is currently reported that the Hippocrene in which of old the Heliconian muses bathed their soft skins, is now fed only with their tears; that instead of branches of luxuriant olive, these maidens, now older grown and wise, present to their devout adorers twigs of suggestive birch and thorny staves, by whose aid these mournful priests wander gloomily up and down the rugged steeps of the past. We have begun to believe that our writers are afflicted with a sort of myopy that shuts out effectually sky and star and sea, and sees only the pebbles and thistles by the dusty roadside. Truly, the prospect is at first disheartening. The great Byron, who wept in faultless metre, and whose aristocratic maledictions flow in graceful waves that caress where they mean to stifle, has so poisoned our 'well of English undefiled,' that wise men now drink from it warily, and only after repeated filterings and skillful analyses by the Boerhaaves of the press. And Poe, who, with all the great poet's faults, possessed none of his few genial features, has painted the fatal skull and cross-bones upon our banners, [pg 177] that should own only the oriflamme. Yet it is Poe whom the English critic honors as exceeding all our authors in intensity, and approaching more nearly to genius than they all.
Now may St. Loy defend us! At the proposition of Poe's intensity we do not demur. All of us who have shrieked in infancy at the charnel-house novelettes of imprudent nurses, shivered in childhood at the mysterious abbeys and concealed tombs of Anne Radcliffe, or rushed in horror from the apparition of the dead father of the Archivarius of Hoffman, tumbling his wicked son down stairs in the midst of the onyx quarrel, will willingly and with trembling fidelity bear witness to the intensity of Poe. He was indeed our Frankenstein (of whom many prototypes do abound), wandering in the Cimmerian regions of thought, the graveyards of the mind, and veiling his monstrous creations with the filmy drapery of rhyme and the mists of a perverted reason. In his sad world eternal night reigns and the sun is never seen.
'Tristis Erinnys,
Prætulit infaustas sanguinolenta faces,'
by whose red light awed audiences see the fruit of his labors.
But what right has he to a place in our van, who never asked our sympathy, whose every effort was but to widen the gulf between him and his fellow-man, whose sword was never drawn in defence of the right? Genius! The very word is instinct with nobility and heartiness. Genius clasps hands with true souls everywhere: it wakes the chord of brotherhood in rude hearts in hovels, and quickens the pulses under the purple and ermine of palaces. It has a smile for childhood and a reverent tone for white-haired age. Its clasp takes in the frail flower bending from slender stems and the stars in their courses. There is laughter in its soul, and a huge banquet-table there to which all are welcome. And to us, on its borders, come the summer-breath of Pæstum roses and the aroma of the rich red wine of Valdepeñas; and there toasts are given to the past and to the future, for genius knows no nation nor any age. It sparkles along the current of history, and under its warm smile deserts blossom like the rose.
And Poe? With a mind neither well balanced nor unprejudiced, and an imagination that mistook the distorted fantasies of a fevered brain for the pure impulses of some mysterious muse, and gave the reins to coursers that even Phaeton would have feared to trust, he can only excite our pity where he desires our admiration. Qui non dat quod amat, non accipit ille quod optat, was an inscription on an old chequer-board of the times of Henry II. And what did Poe love? Truth shrugs her shoulders, but forbears to answer,—Himself. His were the vagaries of genius without its large-hearted charities; its nice discrimination without its honesty of purpose; its startling originality without its harmonious proportions; its inevitable errors without its persevering energies. He acknowledged no principle; he was actuated by no high aim; he even busied himself—as so many of the unfortunate great have done—with no chimera. From a mind so highly cultured, an organization so finely strung, we expected the rarest blossoms, the divinest melodies. The flowers lie before us, mere buds, from which the green calyx of immaturity has not yet curled, and in whose cold heart the perfume is not born; the melodies vibrate around us, matchless in mechanism, wondrous in miraculous accord, but as destitute of the soul of harmony as the score of Beethoven's sonata in A flat to unlearned eyes. If his analyses and criticisms are keen and graceful, they are unreliable and contradictory, for he was often influenced by private piques, and unpardonable egotism, and the opinions of those whose favor he courted. He was Byron without Byron's wonderful perceptions of nature, Byron's consciousness of the good.
And is it from a genius like this that our literature has taken its tone? Heaven forbid! Wee Apollos there may be, 'the little Crichtons of the hour,' who twist about their brows the cypress sprays that have fallen from this perverted poet's [pg 178] wreath, and fancy themselves crowned with the laurel of a nation's applause. But these men are not types of our literature. The truly great mind is never molded by the idol of a day, a clique, a sect. Pure-hearted and strong the man must be whose hands take hold of the palaces of the world's heart, who grasps the spirit of the coming time. Errors may be forgiven, vices may be forgotten, where only a noble aim has influenced, as a true creative genius gleamed.
But larger constellations have appeared in our literary sky, that burn with undimmed lustre even beside that great morning star that rose above the horizon of the Middle Ages. Historians we have, with all of Chaucer's truthfulness and luxuriance of expression, and poets with his fresh tendernesses, his flashing thoughts, and exquisite simplicity of heart. And perhaps, if we inquire for the distinguishing features of our literature, we shall discover them to be the strength and cheerfulness so pre-eminently the characteristics of Chaucer, which we have so long been accustomed to deny to ourselves. Observe the stately but flowing periods of Motley; his polished courtliness of style, the warm but not exaggerated coloring of his descriptions, the firm but never ungraceful outlines of his sketches of character that mark him the Michael Angelo among historians. In his brilliant imagery, his splendid scholarship, his fine analytical power, he is not surpassed by Macaulay, while he far exceeds him in impartiality,—that diamond of the historian,—and in his keen comprehension of the great motive-principles of the age which he describes. Neither are Prescott, Bancroft, or Irving inferior to Gibbon, Hume, or Robertson.
And over and through our poetry blow fresh and inspiring the winds from our own vast prairies. Those names, few, but honorable, that have become as household words among us, are gilded, not with the doubtful lustre of a moonlit sentimentality, but with the real gold of day-dawn. If they are few, let it be remembered that we are now but first feeling our manhood, trying our thews and sinews, and must needs stop to wonder a little at the gradual development of our unsuspected powers. The most of our great men have been but stalwart mechanics, busied with the machinery of government, using intellect as a lever to raise ponderous wheels, whereon our chariot may run to Eldorado. We have a right to be proud of our poets; their verses are the throbs of our American heart. And if we do but peer into their labyrinth of graceful windings and reach their Chrimhilde Rose-garden, we shall find it begirt with the strong, fighting men of humor. This element lurks under many a musical strophe and crowns many a regal verse. And yet in real humorous poetry we have been sadly deficient. Only of late years have the constant lions by the gate begun to rouse from their strong slumber, to shake their tawny manes, and rumble out a warning of their future prowess.
Nor is it strange that we, who were scarcely an organized people, should have lacked this great witness to the vitality and stability of a race. The features of a national character must be marked and prominent, and a strong sense of a national individuality be developed, before that last, best faculty of man is aroused, and leaps forth to maturity in verse. The one magnificent trait of true humorous poetry is, that in its very nature it is incapable of trivialities. It must grasp as its key-note some vast truth, must grapple with some great injustice, must hurl its lances at some wide-spread prejudice, or toy with the tangles of some mighty Nærea's hair. Undines and satyrs, cupids and merry fauns, may spring laughing from under the artist's hand, but it is from the unyielding marble that these slender children of his mirthful hours are carved. It was not in her infancy that Rome produced her Juvenal. Martial and Plautus caricatured the passions of humanity after Carthage had been destroyed and Julius Cæsar had made of his tomb a city of palaces. Aristophanes wrote when Greece had her Parthenon and had boasted her Pericles. [pg 179] France had given birth to Richelieu when Molière assumed the sack, and England had sustained the Reformation and conquered the land of the Cid when Butler, with his satires, shaking church and state, appeared before her king. So with America. It was not until wrongs were to be redressed, and unworthy ambitions to be checked, that the voice of LOWELL'S scornful laughter was heard in the land, piercing, with its keen cadences and mirth-provoking rhyme, the policy of government and the ghostly armor of many a spectral faith and ism.
True, we had the famous 'Hasty Pudding' of Joel Barlow, the 'Terrible Tractoration' of Fessenden, and Halleck's 'Fanny,' but these were mere jeux, gallant little histories, over which we laughed and voila le tout! And our Astolfo, Holmes, flying by on his winged horse, sends down now and then
'His arrowes an elle long
With pecocke well ydight,'
which we gather, and our fair dames weave into brilliant fans that flutter and snap in many a gay assembly, and whose myriad eyes of blue and purple smile with irresistible mirthfulness into the most hostile countenances. Still Holmes apparently likes best the unrestrained freedom of prose. His genius delights in periods finished after its own heart,—pyramidal, trapezoidian, isoscelesian, rhomboidical. But Lowell's genius is infinitely pliable, accommodating itself without hesitation to the arbitrary requirements of the Sieur Spondee, and laughing in the face of the halting Dactyl. His Birdofredom could, we doubt not, sail majestically in the clouds of a stately hexameter, make the aristocratic Alexandrine cry for quarter, and excel the old Trouveurs in the Rime équivoquée. From the quiet esteem which his early poems and essays had won for him, he leaped at once into the high tide of popularity, and down its stream
'Went sailing with vast celerity,'
with the 'Biglow Papers' for his sail. This work electrified the public. It pierced the crust of refinement and intelligence, and roused the latent laughter of its heart. Even newsboys chuckled with delight over its caustic hits at the powers that were, against which, with the characteristic precocity of Young America, each had his private individual spite; while they found in its peculiar phraseology a mine of fun. Patriots rejoiced that one vigilant thinker dared stand guard over our national honor, with the two-edged sword of satire in his hand. Men in authority, at whom the shafts of its scathing rebukes were leveled, writhed on their cushions of state, while, in sheer deference to his originality and humor, they laughed with the crowd at—themselves. And in sooth it was a goodly sight, the young scholar, who had hitherto only dabbled delicately with the treasures of poetry, whose name was a very synonym for elegance and the repose of a genial dignity, whom we suspected of no keen outlooks into the practical world of to-day,—to see this man suddenly flashing into the dusty arena, with indignation rustling through his veins and breathing more flame
'Than ten fire-kings could swallow,'
scorching with his burning words, which an inimitable carelessness made doubly effective, the willful absurdities of government and the palpable wrongs of society, to question which had seemed before almost a heresy. But Lowell's humor was the chrism, snatching together parallels whose apparent inequalities, yet real justice, were powerfully convincing. He never sought the inconsistencies of his subject, they flocked to meet him uninvited. And his infinite cheerfulness, his freedom, even in his most daring onslaughts, from ill-nature, these were the influences meet,
'That bowed our hearts like barley bending.'
Scarcely did we know our knight in his new armor. Off with the hauberk and visor, down with the glittering shield of his mediæval crusade, and, lo! with his hand on the plow and his eyes on the fair fields of his own New England, our country boy sings his Ave Aquila! while other men are rubbing the sunbeams of [pg 180] of the new-born day into their sleepy eyes.
And it was not alone in our own country that this newly developed phase of our poet's genius was acknowledged and applauded. Says a British Review, with an admiration whose reservations are unfortunately too just to be disputed: 'All at once we have a batch of small satirists,—Mr. Bailey at their head,—in England, and one really powerful satirist in America, namely, Mr. J.R. Lowell, whose "Biglow Papers" we most gladly welcome as being not only the best volume of satires since the Anti-Jacobin, but also the first work of real and efficient poetical genius which has reached us from the United States. We have been under the necessity of telling some unpleasant truths about American literature from time to time, and it is with hearty pleasure that we are now able to own that the Britishers have been for the present utterly and apparently hopelessly beaten by a Yankee in one important department of poetry. In the United States, social and political evils have a breadth and tangibility which are not at present to be found in the condition of any other civilized country. The "peculiar domestic institution," the fillibustering tendencies of the nation, the charlatanism which is the price of political power, are butts for the shafts of the satirist, which European poets may well envy Mr. Lowell. We do not pretend to affirm that the evils of European society may not be as great in their own way as those which affect the credit of the United States, with the exception, of course, of slavery, which makes American freedom deservedly the laughing-stock of the world; but what we do say is, that the evils in point have a boldness and simplicity which our more sophisticated follies have not, and that a hundred years hence Mr. Lowell's Yankee satires will be perfectly intelligible to every one.'
The predictions of the English reviewer are fulfilled already. The prescribed century has not elapsed, and in a decade the 'Yankee satires' are comprehended as perhaps even their author failed to comprehend as he created them. There is something positively startling and uncanny in his prophetic insight into the passions that have attained their majority in this present year of grace,—passions that,
'Like aconite, where'er they spread, they kill.'
He does not approach with the old show of superstitious reverence the altar of our vaunted destiny, where men have sung their in-secula-seculorums, while pagans at the chancel rail have been distributing to infidel hordes the relics of their holiest saints, and threatening the very fane itself with fire. Mere words will never strike him dumb. He does not bow to the shadow of Justice or kneel with the ignorant and unsuspicious at the shrine of every plausible Madonna by the roadside. Hear him on the constitutional pillars that heaven and earth are now moved to keep in place, and let us commiserate what must now be the distracting dread of Increse D. O'Phace, Esquire, lest some Samson in blind revenge entomb himself in the ruins of the Constitution.
'Wy, all o' them grand constitootional pillers,
Our four fathers fetched with 'em over the billers,
Them pillers the people so soundly hev slept on,
Wile to slav'ry, invasion an' debt they were swept on,
Wile our destiny higher an' higher kep mountin'
(Though I guess folks'll stare wen she hands her account in).
Ef members in this way go kickin' agin 'em,
They won't hev so much ez a feather left in em.'
Not less wonderful than his penetration into political affairs is Lowell's command of the pure Yankee dialect. His knowledge of it is perfect; he elevates it to the dignity of a distinct tongue, having its own peculiar etymology, and only adopting the current rules of prosody in tender consideration for its thousands of English readers. There is, however, we are tolerably assured, a certain class of critics who venture to lament that this laughter-inspiring muse should have descended from the sunny Parnassus of its own vernacular to the meads below, where disport the unlearned and uninspired, [pg 181] the mere kids and lambs of its celestial audience: a generous absurdity, at which the very Devil of Delphos might have demurred. These are the dapper gentlemen, who, tripping gayly along to the blasts and tinklings of Lanner's Waltzes, would judge every man's intellect by the measure of their own. Know, oh dwarfed descendants of Procustes, that the quality of humor is not strained, but droppeth as the gentle dew from heaven; and if, after patient blending with grains of intolerance and egotism, in the mortar of your minds, it seems to you but that poisonous foam that of old sorcerers drew, by their incantations, from the moon, we can only smile with Voltaire at your 'foolish ingenuities,' and recommend to you a new career. 'Go pype in an ivy lefe,' Monsieur Mustard-seed, or 'blow the bukkes' horne.'
It is no trifling merit in a work of so extraordinary a character that the original programme should have been so perfectly carried out. The poet never relaxes, even into a Corinthian elegance of allusion; his metaphors are always fresh and ungarnished; they no more shine with the polish of the court than do those of Panurge. In fact, there is a flavor of the camp about them, a pleasant suspicion, and more than a suspicion, of life in the open air, the fresh smell of the up-turned earth, the odor of clover blossoms. The poet is walking in the fresco, and the sharp winds cut a pathway across every page. Equally remarkable and pervaded by a most delightful personality are the editorial lucubrations of the Rev. Homer Wilbur. The very lustre of the midnight oil shines upon their glittering fragments of philosophy, admirably twisted to suit the requirements of an eminently unphilosophical age; moral axioms from heathen writers applied judiciously to the immoral actions of Christian doers; distorted shadows of a monstrous political economy, and dispassionate and highly commendable views 'de propagandâ fide.' Like Johnson,
'He forced Latinisms into his line,
Like raw undrilled recruits,'
that have yet done immense service in his conflicts with the enemy. This pedantry, so inimitable, is unequaled even by the most weighty pages of the 'Pseudodoxia Epidemica' of Sir Thomas Browne. That it should prove obnoxious to some critics only testifies to its perfection and their own incapacity for enjoyment. If a man does not relish the caviare and truffles at a dinner, he does not question the wisdom of his Lucullus in providing them; the fault is in his own palate, not in the judgment of his host. The aggrieved individuals, who are either too weak or too indolent to scale the numberless peaks of Lowell's genius, may comfort themselves with the reflection that the treasures of their minds will never be tesselated into the mosaic of any satirist's fancy, for in them can abound only emptiness and cobwebs—as saith the Staphyla of Plautus:—
'Nam hic apud nos nihil est aliud qua sti furibus,
Ita inaniis sunt oppletæ atque araneis.'
Caricatures have never been disdained by the greatest minds. They were rather the healthful diversion of their leisure hours. Even the stern and rugged-natured artist, Annibale Caracci, was famous for his humorous inventions, and the good Leonardo da Vinci esteemed them as most useful exercises. We all remember the group of the Laocoon that Titian sketched with apes, and those whole humorous poems in lines found in Herculaneum, where Anchises and Æneas are represented with the heads of apes and pigs. Lessing even tells us in his Laocoon that in Thebes the rage for these caricatura was so great that a law was passed forbidding the production of any work conflicting with the severe and absolute laws of beauty.
In quite another vein, yet transfused with the same irrepressible mirth, we have Lowell's 'Fable for Critics,' which, with its 'preliminary notes and few candid remarks to the reader,' is a literary curiosity whose parallel we have not in any work by an American author. It is all one merry outburst of youth and health, and music and poetry, with the spice of [pg 182] a criticism so rare and genial, that one could almost court dissection at his hands, for the mere exquisitely epicurean bliss of an artistic euthanasia. It is genius on a frolic, coquetting with all the Graces, and unearthing men long since become gnomes,
'In that country
Where are neither stars nor meadows,'
to join in his merry carousing. They float on floods of Chian and moor their barks under 'hills of spice.' What golden wine of inspiration has our poet drunk, whose flush is on his brow and its fire in his veins? For every sentence of this poem is aglow with vigor and life and power;
'Its feeldes have een and its woodes have eeres.'
And if he sometimes stumbles over a metre or lets his private friendships and preferences run away with his cool discretion and judgment, why, bonus dormitat Homerus, let us, like the miser Euclio, be thankful for the good the gods vouchsafe us. Taken in themselves and without regard to their poetical surroundings, no more comprehensive, faithful, concise portraitures of our authors have ever been produced. They unite in the highest degree candor and justice, and there is withal a tone so kindly and a wit so pure, that we almost believe him to be describing a community of brothers affiliated by the close ties of deep mutual appreciation. He flings his diamonds of learning upon the page, and we recognize the scholar whom no extravagance in knowledge can make bankrupt. We seem to have come by rare chance upon one of those wardrobes of the early kings, wherein are all savory treasures,—the rose and violet colored sugars of Alexandria, sweet almonds, and sharp-toothed ginger. We pardon his puns, indeed we believe them to be inevitable, the flash of the percussion cap, the sparks of electricity, St. Elmo's stars, phosphorescent gleams, playing over the restless ocean of his fruitful imagination. And we are persuaded that if the venerable Democritus (who was uncanonized only because the Holy See was still wavering, an anomalous body, in Weissnichtwo, and who existed forty days on the mere sight of bread and honey) had been regaled with the piquant delicacies of Lowell's picture of a Critic, he might have continued unto this present. It is a satire so pleasantly constructed, so full of palpable hits at the 'musty dogmas' of the day, so rich in mirthful allusion, and with such a generously insinuated tribute to the true and earnest-hearted critic, that we know not which most to admire, the sketch, or the soul whence it emanated. The following description of a 'regular heavy reviewer' is complete:
'And here I must say he wrote excellent articles
On the Hebraic points, or the force of Greek particles,
They filled up the space nothing else was prepared for;
And nobody read that which nobody cared for;
If any old book reached a fiftieth edition,
He could fill forty pages with safe erudition;
He could gauge the old books by the new set of rules,
And his very old nothings pleased very old fools.
But give him a new book fresh out of the heart,
And you put him at sea without compass or chart,—
His blunders aspired to the rank of an art;
For his lore was engraft, something foreign that grew in him,
Exhausting the sap of the native, and true in him,
So that when a man came with a soul that was new in him,
Carving new forms of truth out of Nature's old granite,
New and old at their birth, like Le Verrier's planet,
Which, to get a true judgment, themselves must create
In the soul of their critic the measure and weight,
Being rather themselves a fresh standard of grace,
To compute their own judge and assign him his place,
Our reviewer would crawl all about it and round it,
And reporting each circumstance just as he found it,
Without the least malice—his record would be
Profoundly æsthetic as that of a flea,
Which, supping on Wordsworth, should print, for our sakes,
Recollections of nights with the Bard of the Lakes,
Or, borne by an Arab guide, venture to render a
General view of the ruins of Denderah.'
[pg 183]
He draws with a few strokes of his magical charcoal a sharp silhouette of Brownson upon the wall of our waiting curiosity, fills in his sketch of Parker with a whole wilderness of classical shades, disposes of Willis with a kiss and a blow, gives pages of sharp pleasantries to Emerson, pays a graceful tribute to Whittier, and Hawthorne,—
'His strength is so tender, his wildness so meek,
That a suitable parallel sets one to seek,—
He's a John Bunyan Fouqué, a Puritan Tieck;
When Nature was shaping him, clay was not granted
For making so full-sized a man as she wanted,
So to fill out her model, a little she spared
From some finer-grained stuff for a woman prepared,
And she could not have hit a more excellent plan
For making him fully and perfectly man.'
Turning backward from these evidences of Lowell's ripening powers to his early poems, astonishment at his versatility is the first emotion produced. It is hard to believe that the 'Biglow Papers' slid from under the hand that wrote the 'Prometheus' and the 'Legend of Brittany.' His genius flashes upon us like a certain flamboyant style of poetic architecture—the flowing, flame-like curves of his humor blending happily with the Gothic cusps of veneration for the old, with quaint ivy-leaves, green and still rustling under the wind and rain, springing easily out of its severer lines. What resistless magic is there in the fingers whose touch upon the same rich banks of keys, summons solemn, vibrant peals as of Beethoven's grandest fugues, endless harmonies as of the deep seas, and the light and graceful fantasies of Rossini, which are as the glad sunshine upon their waves. Truly the poet's gift is a divine and an awful one. His heart must needs be proud and humble too, who is claimed as nearer of kin than a brother by myriads of stranger souls, each, perhaps, owning its separate creed, and in whose unspoken prayers his name is ever present. In his 'Conversations on some of the old Poets,' we discover the alembic through which his crude opinions, his glowing impulses, his exquisitely minute discrimination were distilled;—the old poets, to whom the heart turns ever lovingly as to the wide west at eve. They were the nursing mothers of his intellectual infancy, and it is probably to his reverent but not blind esteem for them, his earnest study of them, not merely as poets, but as men, citizens, and friends, that much of the buoyancy and vigor of his poetry is to be attributed. The 'Conversations' themselves are alive with that enthusiasm and sympathetic inquiry that disproves the false saying of the Parisian Aspasia of Landor—'Poets are soon too old for mutual love.' They are the warm photographs of feeling as it bubbles from a burning heart; sometimes burned over-deep, with a leaning to fanaticism, but with so much of the generosity and justice of maturity in their decisions that these necessary errors of an ardent youth are overlooked, and the more as they have disappeared almost entirely from the productions of later years. He betrays in his quick conception of an author's mood and meaning a delicacy so extreme, an organization so nervously alive to beauties and discords, and a religious sentiment so cultured to the last degree of feeling, that we dread lest we shall encounter the weakness, morbidness or bigotry that naturally results from the contact of such a soul with the passions of everyday life, recalling the oft-quoted 'Medio in fonte leporum'—
'In the bowl where pleasures swim,
The bitter rises to the brim,
And roses from the veriest brake
May press the temples till they ache.'
But among the roses of his criticisms we look in vain for thorns. In style, it is true, these essays are halting and unequal. His adoption of the colloquial form for the expression of opinion to the public has never seemed to us remarkably felicitous, in spite of its venerable precedents. Where his imagery becomes lofty and his flow of thought should be continuous, we are indignant at its sudden arrest, and involuntarily devote the intruder to a temporary bungalow in Timbuctoo.
[pg 184]
It is refreshing to lose the moony Tennysonian sensuousness which induced, with Lowell's vigorous imagination, the blank artificiality of style which was visible in several of his early poems. There was a tendency, too, to the Byzantine liberty of gilding the bronze of our common words, a palpable longing after the ississimus of Latin adjectives, of whose softness our muscular and variegated language will not admit. Mr. Lowell's Sonnets, too, we could wish unwritten, not from any defect in their construction, but from a fancied want of congeniality between their character and his own. In spite of its Italian origin, the sonnet always seems to demand the severest classical outlines, both in spirit and expression, calm and steadfastly flowing without ripples or waves, a poem cut in the marble of stately cadences that imprison some vast and divine thought. Lowell is too elastic, impulsive, for a sonneteer. But considered apart from our peculiar ideas of the sonnet, the following is full of a very tender beauty:—
'I ask not for those thoughts that sudden leap
From being's sea, like the isle-seeming Kraken,
With whose great rise the ocean all is shaken,
And a heart-tremble quivers through the deep;
Give me that growth which some perchance deem sleep,
Wherewith the steadfast coral-stems uprise,
Which by the toil of gathering energies
Their upward way into clear sunshine keep,
Until, by Heaven's sweetest influences,
Slowly and slowly spreads a speck of green
Into a pleasant island in the seas,
Where, 'mid tall palms, the cave-roofed home is seen
And wearied men shall sit at sunset's hour,
Hearing the leaves and loving God's dear power.'
And what could be more drippingly quaint than his song to 'Violets,' which breathes so gentle and real a sympathy with its subject, that we almost imagine it was written in those early times when men communed with Nature in her own audible language. It is even more beautiful than Herrick's
'Why do ye weep, sweet babe? Can tears
Speak grief in you, who were but born
Just as the modest morn
Teemed her refreshing dew?'
We give but a fragment of the Violet.
'Violet! sweet violet!
Thine eyes are full of tears;
Are they wet
Even yet
With the thought of other years?
Or with gladness are they full,
For the night is beautiful,
And longing for those far-off spheres?
Thy little heart, that hath with love
Grown colored, like the sky above
On which thou lookest ever—
Can it know
All the woe
Of hope for what returneth never,
All the sorrow and the longing
To these hearts of ours belonging?'
And there are touches of what we are wont to call dear, womanly feeling, as when the 'Forlorn,' out in the bitter cold,
'Hears a woman's voice within
Singing sweet words her childhood knew,
And years of misery and sin
Furl off and leave her heaven blue.'
The 'Changeling' alone would sustain a reputation. It seems always like the plaintive but sweet warble of some unknown bird rising from the midst of tall water-rushes in the day's dim dawning. A wonderful melody as of Mrs. Browning's best efforts pervades every verse, priceless and rare as some old intaglio. But when we come to his 'Odes to the Past and the Future,' the full power of poesy unfolds before us. Their images are not the impalpable spectres of a poet's dream, but symbols hardened into marble by his skill, and informed with the fire of life by his genius.
'Wondrous and awful are thy silent halls,
O kingdom of the past!
There lie the bygone ages in their palls,
Guarded by shadows vast;
There all is hushed and breathless,
Save when some image of old error falls,
Earth worshiped once as deathless.'
Was ever picture of silence more effective and complete? We can see the desolate quiet of the vast arched halls, left undisturbed by centuries, and as the moldering statue totters forward from its niche, we feel a faith has fallen which was once the heaven of nations, and the awful tumult is audible as a voice from the drear kingdom of death. And the hymn to the Future, with all the [pg 185] joyful Titian hues of its opening strophes, the glowing fervor of its deep yearning, swelling through 'golden-winged dreams' of the 'Land of Promise':—
'To thee the Earth lifts up her fettered hands
And cries for vengeance; with a pitying smile
Thou blessest her, and she forgets her bands,
And her old woe-worn face a little while
Grows young and noble: unto thee the Oppressor
Looks and is dumb with awe;
The eternal law
Which makes the crime its own blindfold redresser,
Shadows his heart with perilous foreboding,
And he can see the grim-eyed Doom
From out the trembling gloom
Its silent-footed steeds toward his palace goading.'
We pass by the 'Legend of Brittany,' which, as a mere artistic study of light and shade in words, is worthy an extended notice. Its fine polish and refinement of feeling remind us of Spencer's silver verses, frosted here and there with the old fret-work of his lovable affectations. But we pause at the 'Prometheus,' honestly believing that no poem made up of so many excellences was ever written in America. Its defects are not of conception, but in an occasional carelessness of execution—a gasp in the rhythm; and when we consider its richness and majesty, when we feel its resistless grasp upon the heart, we could pardon it if its great pearls were strung on straws or its diamonds hidden in a sand-hill of sentimentality. But never was poem freer from morbidness: it repels the sickly pallor of our modern stereotyped sorrow, and is made up only of a grief that is regal—more—divine. If any place by its side the Prometheus of Æschylus and appeal to the unapproachable dignity of their model, we can only say that we hold these two poems distinct as the East is from the West, only between them springs boldly the blue arch of a universal humanity that suffered and enjoyed as now when the earth was young. But it must not be forgotten that the Greek lived when with men was born a boundless sympathy for, and pride in, their gods; that what are now to us but the wonderful dreams of a primeval poesy, shadowing mighty truths, were to the ancients living influences that molded their lives. And if it be urged that already faith must have grown dim in so great a mind as that of Æschylus, then indeed we wonder not at the marvels of magnificent despair, the death-in-life of a godlike suffering which reach in his 'Prometheus Chained' a height of sublimity we may scarcely hope to see approached in modern times, for the mind that created it stood in a light shallop, drifting away from the old landmarks of a worn-out creed into the dark, unknown night of doubt and speculation. But the Prometheus of Lowell is not the god-man writhing in an awful conflict with his slavery but begun. His heart
'For ages hath been empty of all joy,
Except to brood upon its silent hope,
As o'er its hope of day the sky doth now.'
The defiant pride and scornful dignity that raised him above our sympathy in Æschylus, are tempered by Lowell with a human longing for comfort that, in its mighty woe, might melt adamant, or draw from the watchful heavens
'Mild-eyed Astarte, his best comforter,
With her pale smile of sad benignity.'
Chained to the rock in utter loneliness he lies. Long since the 'crisped smiles' of the waves and the 'swift-winged winds' had ceased to listen to his call.
'Year after year will pass away and seem
To me, in mine eternal agony,
But as the shadows of dark summer clouds,
Which I have watched so often darkening o'er
The vast Sarmatian plain, league-wide at first,
But, with still swiftness lessening on and on,
Till cloud and shadow meet and mingle where
The gray horizon fades into the sky,
Far, far to northward. Yes, for ages yet
Must I lie here upon my altar huge,
A sacrifice for man.'
'A sacrifice for man.' The theme has won a high significance with time. One more passage, and we are done—a passage which rivals Shakspeare in its startling vividness, as it whispers with awful power close to our ears. All night had the prisoned god heard voices,—
'Deeper yet
The deep, low breathings of the silence grew
And then toward me came
A shape as of a woman; very pale
It was, and calm; its cold eyes did not move,
And mine moved not, but only stared on them.
Their fixed awe went through my brain like ice;
A skeleton hand seemed clutching at my heart,
And a sharp chill, as if a dank night-fog
Suddenly closed me in, was all I felt.
And then, methought, I heard a freezing sigh,
A long, deep, shivering sigh, as from blue lips
Stiffening in death, close to mine ear. I thought
Some doom was close upon me, and I looked
And saw the red morn, through the heavy mist,
Just setting, and it seemed as it were falling,
Or reeling to its fall, so dim and dead
And palsy-struck it looked. Then all sounds merged
Into the rising surges of the pines,
Which, leagues below me, clothing the gaunt loins
Of ancient Caucasus with hairy strength,
Sent up a murmur in the morning wind,
Sad as the wail that from the populous earth
All day and night to high Olympus soars,
Fit incense to thy wicked throne, O Jove!'
Mr. Lowell is no fine dreamer, no enthusiast in the filmy questions of some cloud-land of poetry: the sword of power is in his hand, and the stern teachings of Right and Justice ring through his heart. To such men, Destiny looks for her unfolding. Woe to them, if upon their silence, inaction or irresolution in these great days, the steadfast gaze of her high expectation falls unheeded.