Very truly your Eumenides-driven contributor,

J. R. L.[84]

The most substantial magazine in his own neighborhood was the North American Review, and to that, in his early period, Lowell contributed but half a dozen articles. It is partly characteristic of the manner of the heavy reviewing of the day, and wholly characteristic of Lowell, that in each of these cases quite two thirds of the article is taken up with prolegomena. Before he could settle down to an examination of “The New Timon,” he must needs analyze at great length the quality of Pope, who had served as a sort of pattern: it is interesting, by the way, to note that in the last paragraph of his review, he guesses the book to have been written by Bulwer. So in reviewing Disraeli’s “Tancred,” he despatches the book itself somewhat summarily after a dozen pages of witty reflections on novel-writing. A review of Browning is more definitely an examination of this poet, with large extracts from “Luria,” though it has the inevitable long introduction on poetry in general; but its appreciation and discriminating judgment of Browning at a time when “Sordello,” “Paracelsus,” and “Bells and Pomegranates” were the only poems and collection by which to measure him, indicate surely how direct and at first hand were Lowell’s critical appraisals. “Above all,” he says, after a glowing rehearsal of the contents of “Bells and Pomegranates,” “his personages are not mere mouthpieces for the author’s idiosyncrasies. We take leave of Mr. Browning at the end of ‘Sordello,’ and except in some shorter lyrics see no more of him. His men and women are men and women, and not Mr. Browning masquerading in different colored dominoes:” and in the same article occurs a passage which might lead one to think Lowell was musing over his own qualities: “Wit makes other men laugh, and that only once. It may be repeated indefinitely to new audiences and produce the same result. Humor makes the humorist himself laugh. He is a part of his humor, and it can never be repeated without loss.”

In the more substantial literary criticism of his maturity Lowell occupied himself mainly with the great names of world literature, but at this time he was especially intent on his contemporaries in America and England, and he was keenly alive to manifestations of spirit which gave evidence of transcending the bounds of local reputation. In a review of Longfellow’s “Kavanagh” he made the book really only a peg from which to hang a long disquisition upon nationality in literature, a subject which, it will be remembered, receives considerable attention in the book. Lowell’s own conclusion is that “Nationality is only a less narrow form of provincialism, a sublimer sort of clownishness and ill manners.”

It was with the heartiest good-will that he welcomed Thoreau’s “Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” just after the publication of that book. As in his other reviews of this period, he must needs preface his consideration of the book itself with some general remarks on travellers, which he liked well enough to preserve in his “Leaves from my Journal in Italy and Elsewhere,” published in “Fireside Travels;” but the main part of his article is a generous appreciation of Thoreau’s faculty of insight into the things of nature. “A graduate of Cambridge,—the fields and woods, the axe, the hoe, and the rake have since admitted him ad eundem. Mark how his imaginative sympathy goes beneath the crust, deeper down than that of Burns, and needs no plough to turn up the object of its muse.” He makes, however, a clear distinction between Thoreau the observer and man of reflection and Thoreau the bookman. “As long as he continues an honest Boswell, his book is delightful; but sometimes he serves his two rivers as Hazlitt did Northcote, and makes them run Thoreau or Emerson, or, indeed, anything but their own transparent element. What, for instance, have Concord and Merrimack to do with Boodh, themselves professors of an elder and to them wholly sufficient religion, namely, the willing subjects of watery laws, to seek their ocean? We have digressions on Boodh, on Anacreon (with translations hardly so good as Cowley), on Perseus, on Friendship, and we know not what. We come upon them like snags, jolting us headforemost out of our places as we are rowing placidly up stream, or drifting down. Mr. Thoreau becomes so absorbed in these discussions that he seems, as it were, to catch a crab, and disappears uncomfortably from his seat at the bow-oar. We could forgive them all, especially that on Books, and that on Friendship (which is worthy of one who has so long commerced with Nature and with Emerson), we could welcome them all, were they put by themselves at the end of the book. But as it is, they are out of proportion and out of place, and mar our Merrimacking dreadfully. We were bid to a river-party, not to be preached at. They thrust themselves obtrusively out of the narrative, like those quarries of red glass which the Bowery dandies (emulous of Sisyphus) push laboriously before them as breast-pins.” He finds fault with Thoreau for some of his verse, but regards with admiration his prose. “The style is compact, and the language has an antique purity like wine grown colorless with age.” Lowell expressed the same admiration for Thoreau’s style when he wrote again about him a dozen years later, after re-reading his books, but his point of view had by that time changed, and he was more concerned to look into Thoreau’s philosophy of life.

The article on Landor, written at this time, was quite exclusively an examination of the genius of a writer for whom he had long had a great admiration; and inasmuch as he had himself tried the form of conversation, it is worth while to note the excellent judgment he passes on Landor’s art. “Of his ‘Imaginary Conversations’ we may generally say that they would be better defined as dialogues between the imaginations of the persons introduced than between the persons themselves. There is a something in all men and women who deserve the much-abused title of individuals, which we call their character, something finer than the man or woman, and yet which is the man or woman nevertheless. We feel it in whatever they say or do, but it is better than their speech or deed, and can be conceived of apart from these. It is his own conceptions of the characters of different personages that Landor brings in as interlocutors. Between Shakespeare’s historical and ideal personages we perceive no difference in point of reality. They are alike historical to us. We allow him to substitute his Richard for the Richard of history, and we suspect that those are few who doubt whether Caliban ever existed. Whatever Hamlet and Cæsar say we feel to be theirs, though we know it to be Shakespeare’s. Whatever Landor puts into the mouth of Pericles and Michael Angelo and Tell, we know to be his, though we can conceive that it might have been theirs. Don Quixote would never have attacked any puppets of his. The hand which jerked the wires, and the mouth which uttered the speeches would have been too clearly visible.” Here again it is interesting to take up the reminiscences of Landor and of his own early acquaintance with his writings, which he printed in 1888, when introducing a group of Landor’s letters; for the comparison shows that though his enthusiasm for this writer had somewhat abated with years, the general tone of his judgment was the same.

The article on Landor was a deferred one. It was to have been written for the June number of the Massachusetts Quarterly Review, but did not appear till December. His child’s sickness and work on the “Biglow Papers” drove other things out of his head. Indeed, as he wrote rapidly when he was moved to write at all, so he was afflicted with obstinate inertia when ideas did not come spontaneously. “I am again a delinquent,” he wrote to Gay, 25 November, 1848,—“and this time I am ashamed to say, out of pure laziness and having nothing to write about. But my next article I intend to write on Tuesday, so that you will be sure of it in time. Do forgive me this once more, and forgive also (if you can) the stupidity of my contribution. I feel like a squeezed turnip on which the experiment of extracting blood has been tried. I am haunted, like Barnaby Rudge’s father, with the sound of a Bell, not having sent anything yet to that horrible annual.[85] Upon my word I am almost crazy with it. I have not an idea in my head, and believe firmly that I never shall have one again. And I obtained a reprieve ending a week ago last Friday!”

But if he groaned thus over writing for publication, he was lavish of criticism and what might be called material for literature, when writing to his friends. The letters which Mr. Norton prints, dated in this period, abound in felicitous comment on men and incidents, and even a postscript will sometimes ramble on into the dimensions almost of a separate letter. After indulging in a long epistle to Mr. Briggs, dated 12 May, 1848, he suddenly remembers that he means to send some poems of his wife’s for a collection which Griswold was making of the writings of the female poets of America; and after some lively comments on her contemporaries, he takes note of articles recently written by Briggs, and falls into a strain which he has disclosed elsewhere in somewhat similar terms: “You are wrong and N. P. W. is right (as I think) in the main, in what he says about American Society. There is as striking a want of external as of internal culture among our men. We ought to have produced the finest race of gentlemen in the world. But Europeans have laughed us into a nation of snobs. We are ashamed of our institutions. Our literature aims to convince Europe that America is as conservative and respectable as herself. I have often remarked that educated Americans have the least dignified bearing of any cultivated people. They all stoop in the shoulders, intellectually as well as physically. A nation of freemen, we alone of all others have the gait of slaves. The great power of the English aristocracy lies in their polish. That impresses the great middle class, who have a sort of dim conception of its value. A man gains in power as he gains in ease. It is a great advantage to him to be cultivated in all parts of his nature. Among scholars, R. W. E. has as fine a manner, as much poise, as I ever saw. Yet I have seen him quite dethroned by a pure man of the world. His face degenerated into a puzzled state. I go so far as to believe that all great men have felt the importance of the outward and visible impression they should produce. Socrates was as wise as Plato, indeed he was Plato’s master, but Plato dressed better, and has the greater name. Pericles was the first gentleman of Greece,—not the George IV. though, exactly. Remember Cæsar’s laurel-wig.

“I might multiply instances, but I wish to have room to say how much I have been pleased with Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair.’ He has not Dickens’s talents as a caricaturist, but he draws with more truth. Dickens can take a character to pieces and make us laugh immoderately at the comic parts of it—or he takes only the comic part, as boys take the honey-bag of the bee, destroying the whole insect to get at it. But Thackeray can put a character together. He has more constructive power. D. is a satirizer, T. a satirist. I don’t think D. ever made anything equal to Becky Sharp. Rawdon Crawley, too, is admirable; so in truth are all the characters in their way, except Amelia, who is nothing in particular.

“I liked ‘Wuthering Heights,’ too, as you did, though not so much. There is great power in it, but it is like looking at nature through a crooked pane of glass. Some English journalist has nicknamed the author Salvator Rosa, and our journalists of course all repeat it. But it is nonsense. For it is not wildness and rudeness that the author is remarkable for, but delicacy. A character may be distorted without being wild or rude. Unnatural causes may crook a violet as well as an oak. Rochester is a truly refined character, and his roughness and coarseness are only the shields (scabs, as it were) over his finer nature. My sheet ends our conversation.”