One wishes that this unconsciousness of method could work itself into the minds of literary men more often and more thoroughly. Let a man eat his dinner and let him enjoy it, but do not let the guests discuss the difference between the taste of red pepper and of black pepper. It is as true in literature as everywhere else that the life is more than meat, and the body than raiment. There will probably be sophists and critics and fencing-masters and dancing-masters in all phases of society. They will certainly give much pleasure to each other, and perhaps they will give pleasure to the world; but it may be doubted whether they will be of much use to anybody. I suppose Grant enjoyed a dress parade when he saw it well done, but when they asked Grant how long it took to make a light infantryman, he said, “About half an hour.” Let us remember this as we listen, a little bored, to what people have to tell us about style.
There are some curious discussions as to the places and the duties of prose and of poetry; what you had better say in prose, what you had better say in verse. But I am disposed to think that such discussions with him were merely matters of amusement or possible speculation. Everybody who is really familiar with Lowell’s writing will remember many passages where the prose may be said to be the translation of his own poetry, or the poetry to be the translation of his own prose. And with such training as his, with such absolute command of language, with his accurate ear and perfect sense of rhythm, it would be of course that he should “lisp in numbers, for the numbers came.”
MR. LOWELL TO DR. HALE
To the very end of his life, his conversation, and his daily walk indeed, were swayed by the extreme tenderness for the feelings of others which his sister noticed when he was a little boy. He would not give pain if he could help it. He would go so much more than halfway in trying to help the person who was next him that he would permit himself to be bored, really without knowing that he was bored. He would overestimate, as good men and great men will, the abilities of those with whom he had to do. So his geese were sometimes swans, as Mr. Emerson’s were, and those of other lovers of mankind.
His letters are never more interesting than in these closing years; and, as I have suggested, the fun of his conversation sparkled as brightly and happily as it ever did. Mr. Smalley, in an amusing passage, has described his ultra-Americanism in England. A pretty Englishwoman said, “Mr. Hawthorne has insulted us all by saying that all English women are fat; but while Mr. Lowell is in the room I do not dare say that all American women are lean.” When Lowell came home he would take pleasure in snubbing the Anglomaniacs who are sometimes found in New England, who want to show by their pronunciation or the choice of their words that they have crossed the ocean. I think that every one who is still living, of the little dinner-party where he tortured one of these younger men, will remember the fun of his attacks. This was one of the men whom you run against every now and then, who thought he must say “Brummagem” because Englishmen said so a hundred years ago; and on this occasion he was taking pains to pronounce the word “clerk” as if it rhymed with “lark,”—“as she is spoken in England, you know!” Lowell just pounced upon him as an eagle might pounce on a lark, to ask why he did so, why, if it were our fashion to pronounce the word “as she is spelled,” we might not do so, whether on the whole this were not the old pronunciation, and so on, and so on.
Never was anything more absurd than the idea which the Irish sympathizers took up, that a residence in London had spoiled his fondness for the old idioms and the other old home ways. Indeed, I think his stay in Southborough was specially pleasant to him because he learned in another part of Middlesex County how to renew some of those studies of “Early America” which he had begun before he knew in Cambridge.
As one turns over the volume of his letters, he finds traces of the fancies which shot themselves in a wayward fashion into his conversation. One of the fads of his later life was the taking up of the notion which we generally refer to Lord Beaconsfield, that almost everything remarkable in modern life may be traced back, later or earlier, to a Hebrew origin. He would discourse at length on the Hebrew traits in Browning, and he affected to have discovered the line of genealogy where, a century or two ago, a streak of the blood of Abraham came into the lines of the Brownings. He was quite sure—I am sorry to say I have forgotten how—that he had a line of Jewish blood himself, a line which he could trace out somewhere this side of the times of Ivanhoe. Then there was the hereditary descent of his mother’s family from the Hebrides, which has been referred to. The Spences were of Traill origin,—his brother Robert carried the Traill name. And Lowell liked to think that he had in his make-up something of the element which in a Lochiel you would call second-sight. Sometimes he alludes to that in his letters; he has only to shut his eyes, he says, and he can see all the people whom he has known, whom he wants to see, and carry on his conversation with them. I have already said that when I painfully worked through the poems of James Russell, our James Russell’s great-grandfather, rendering that homage to the shade of that poet which no one else has rendered for a hundred years, I had to remind myself that he, alas! had no second-sight, and that he differed from his great-grandson precisely in this, that he was not of Norna’s blood and could not work Norna’s miracles.
One of the men of letters whose impressions of such a life every one is glad to read writes to me of Lowell’s work: “Mr. Lowell excelled at once in original and critical work, thus giving the lie to the sneer that a critic is a person who has failed as a creator. Both as a poet and an essayist he revealed himself as a genuine cosmopolitan. He had the wisdom of the scholar and the horse sense of the man of the world. He was equally at home in the splendid realm of the imagination and in the prosaic domain of hard facts; and it may be said of him, as Macaulay said of Bunyan, that he gave to the abstract the interest of the concrete. As a satirist and humorist he produced in the ‘Biglow Papers’ a work which is unique in our literature. He was not given to moralizing; his was as far as possible from being a dull didactic brain; but all to which he put his pen was wholesome and in the best sense stimulating, free from morbidness and that pessimism of
‘John P.