Among my Books.

Mr Lowell’s best known book of literary criticism is, no doubt, Among my Books; but though it shows his method characteristically enough, it is by no means mainly bookish: in fact, I think there is rather less in it about the literary part of the matter than in others. The famous essay on “Dryden” is of course a standard, and perhaps its author’s diploma-piece as a critic; and the “Shakespeare once More” (a title suggested by Goethe) is a very interesting literary pot-pourri. But the “Lessing” and the “Rousseau” are chiefly biographical; and such papers as “Witchcraft” and “New England,” attractive as they are, are from the literary point of view quite “off,” as literary slang has it. There is nothing to object to in this, for the general title covers subjects suggested by books, or the subjects of books, quite as amply as books-by-themselves-books; and there can be no doubt that the reader usually likes the others best. But the whole volume shows its author well as a scholar but not a pedant, a man of letters who is also a man of the world, and a judge who, though by no means ideally impartial, and even with a tolerably well-stuffed portfolio of prejudices, can give judgments not to be pooh-poohed at the worst, and at the best things worthy to take their place with the best of judge-made law in our subject.

My Study Windows.

The equally well-known My Study Windows does not contain, as the title may seem to intimate, matter of more mixed quality as regards pure literature, but the quality is still mixed. Mr Lowell was not happy in his reception of the avatar of Mr Swinburne: it is indeed so rare for a man of more than middle age to be quite at focus with a new poet, that some of the wiser or more pusillanimous of our kind decline in such cases to register a formal judgment. The “Carlyle” is much tainted by political prejudice, though it does credit to Mr Lowell’s perspicacity to have so early found out in Carlyle that real “Toryism” which was so long mistaken. But the “Chaucer” and the “Pope”—differ here and there with them as we may or must—are solid and substantive contributions to the main shelf of criticism; while in the lower ranges “The Life and Letters of James Gates Perceval” only needed more quotation and more ruthlessness to make it a pendant to Macaulay’s “Montgomery.”

Essays on the English Poets.

The Essays which have been reprinted in England, with the permission of Mr Lowell and with a Preface by his own hands, as Essays on the English Poets[[1156]] (including those on Lessing and Rousseau as a very welcome though not exceedingly relevant bonus or make-weight), are partly drawn from the two books just noticed. Some of them seem to have been written rather early; most were originally lectures to a university, and may have a little sacrificed literature to instruction. The best by a good deal is, I think, the “Wordsworth,”[[1157]] which, though there are many good essays on Wordsworth to make up for the many bad ones, deserves to rank almost with the best. It is seldom that in a single essay one finds such a capital specimen of delicate appreciation as the comparison of the fall of Goethe’s Ueber allen Gipfeln to “blossoms shaken down by a noonday breeze on turf”; so good an example of the criticism of epigram as “Wordsworth is the historian of Wordsworthshire”;[[1158]] and so fine and just a critical simile as the comparison of Milton’s verse to a mixed fleet of men-of-war and merchantmen, which comes shortly after. The “Milton” itself has more to do with Milton’s editor and biographer than with Milton, and is marred by that curious impatience of a reasoned prosody which appears in Mr Lowell so often. So is the Spenser—quite admirable in great part of it—by the author’s well-known and excessive depreciation of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century poetry.[[1159]] The “Keats” leaves off just when we are expecting the critic to begin. As if to carry out unity of cross-purpose, if of nothing more, the “Lessing” hardly says anything about Lessing’s criticism, and the “Rousseau” is chiefly about Rousseau as a man. But though, putting the “Wordsworth” aside, the contents of the volume would hardly have given us a fair idea of Mr Lowell’s critical powers by themselves, it could have been written by no bad critic as a whole, and in part could only have been written by a very good one.