James Russell Lowell and His Friends

by Edward Everett Hale

JOHN HOLMES, ESTES HOWE, ROBERT CARTER, JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
From a photograph owned by General James Lowell Carter

The subjects of the twelve lectures are these: 1. Definitions. 2. Piers Ploughman’s Vision. 3. The Metrical Romances. 4. The Ballads. 5. Chaucer. 6. Spenser. 7. Milton. 8. Butler. 9. Pope. 10. Poetic Diction. 11. Wordsworth. 12. The Function of the Poet.

It is no wonder that the lectures were so popular. They are of the best reading to this day, full of fun, full of the most serious thought as well. And you find in them at every page, I may say, seeds which he has planted elsewhere for other blossoms and fruit. For instance, here is his description of a New England spring:—

“In our New England especially, where May-day is a mere superstition and the May-pole a poor, half-hardy exotic which shivers in an east wind almost as sharp as Endicott’s axe—where frozen children, in unseasonable muslin, celebrate the floral games with nosegays from the milliners, and winter reels back, like shattered Lear, bringing the dead spring in his arms, her budding breast and wan, dilustered cheeks all overblown with the drifts and frosty streaks of his white beard—where even Chanticleer, whose sap mounts earliest in that dawn of the year, stands dumb beneath the dripping eaves of his harem, with his melancholy tail at half-mast—one has only to take down a volume of Chaucer, and forthwith he can scarce step without crushing a daisy, and the sunshine flickers on small new leaves that throb thick with song of merle and mavis.”

We find much of this again in the “Biglow Papers;” perhaps the prose is better than the verse. Indeed, you have only to turn over the pages to find epigrams of which you might make proverbs. “Fortunately for the ballad-makers, they were not encumbered with any useless information.” “The ballads are pathetic because the poet did not try to make them so; and they are models of nervous and simple diction, because the business of the poet was to tell his story and not to adorn it.” “The only art of expression is to have something to express. We feel as wide a difference between what is manufactured and what is spontaneous as between the sparkles of an electrical machine and the wildfire of God which writes ‘Mene, Mene,’ on the crumbling palace walls of midnight cloud.” “Even Shakespeare, who comes after everybody has done his best, and seems to say, ‘Here, let me take hold a minute and show you how to do it,’ could not mend that.”

Let no one suppose, because these lectures are thus delivered to what is called a popular audience, that there is anything slight in the work or superficial in the handling. Lowell was not the man to slight his work because he had an audience of the people, or to treat the rank and file with more superficial consideration than the men with epaulets or sashes. Even if he had been, when he delivered one of these courses of lectures he had before him his full share of the leaders of that community, men and women to whom even a Philistine would not dare bring the work of a slop-shop.

A good deal of the thought of these lectures appears, as I have said, in other forms in some of his later publications. But, for whatever reason, he never made a separate book of them. I think he says somewhere in a private letter that he wanted to do it, and indeed had meant to do it, but that he could not make the time; and that this was a fair excuse any one will say who knows how steadily he worked and how much work he had to do in study, in teaching, in writing and proof-reading, and, in after life, in his diplomatic duties.

In 1874 Mr. Lowell was chosen the President of the Harvard Society of Alumni, and from 1863 to 1871 he was President of the Phi Beta Kappa of Cambridge. It is worth observing that no other President of the Phi Beta has ever held that position so long. His immediate predecessor was Judge Hoar, and his successor Richard Henry Dana. These two societies exist chiefly to provide for the annual dinners of Cambridge graduates at the College on Commencement Day and the day following. The fine charm of the Phi Beta dinner is that it is not expected or permitted that anything that is said shall be reported. You may look for the most bubbling fun of some of the most serious men in the world, without any terror of seeing it bewitched and reflected the next morning from the cracked mirror of some ignorant boy who, when he reads his notes, can see no difference between Voltaire and Valkyrie. But the Commencement dinners, the day before the Phi Beta dinners, are open to the reports of all men, angels, and devils, so that some of the sparks of Lowell’s infinite fun may, with proper grinding, be thrown upon the kodak still.

He officiated as President of the Alumni in 1875 and 1876. Those years, as the centennial years of the early Revolutionary events, kept every one on the alert as to New England history. Here is a short extract from each of these addresses:—