James Russell Lowell, A Biography; vol. 1/2

by Horace Elisha Scudder

In an address which he gave in 1889 before the Modern Language Association of America, he recorded his judgment on the vexed question of the distribution of emphasis upon the philological and the æsthetic pursuit of the study of literature. It was twelve years since he had discontinued the practice of teaching, and it is reasonable to infer that he was distilling in a few sentences the experience which his method of study and his method of teaching recalled to him.

“In reading such books,” he says, “as chiefly deserve to be read in any foreign language, it is wise to translate consciously and in words as we read. There is no such help to a fuller mastery of our vernacular. It compels us to such a choosing and testing, to so nice a discrimination of sound, propriety, position, and shade of meaning, that we now first learn the secret of the words we have been using or misusing all our lives, and are gradually made aware that to set forth even the plainest matter as it should be set forth is not only a very difficult thing, calling for thought and practice, but an affair of conscience as well. Translating teaches us as nothing else can, not only that there is a best way, but that it is the only way.”

Again, in the same address, thinking no doubt of the expansion of the curriculum at Harvard, even since he laid aside the teacher’s gown: “We have every reason to congratulate ourselves on the progress the modern languages have made as well in academic as in popular consideration. They are now taught (as they could not formerly be taught) in a way that demands toil and thought of the student, as Greek and Latin, and they only, used to be taught, and they also open the way to higher intellectual joys, to pastures new, and not the worse for being so, as Greek and Latin, and they only, used to do.... If I did not rejoice in the wonderful advance made in the comparative philology of the modern languages, I should not have the face to be standing here. But neither should I if I shrank from saying what I believed to be the truth, whether here or elsewhere. I think that the purely linguistic side in the teaching of them seems in the way to get more than its fitting share. I insist only that in our college courses this should be a separate study, and that, good as it is in itself, it should, in the scheme of general instruction, be restrained to its own function as the guide to something better, and that something better is Literature. The blossoms of language have certainly as much value as its roots, for if the roots secrete food and thereby transmit life to the plant, yet the joyous consummation of that life is in the blossoms, which alone bear the seeds that distribute and renew it in other growths. Exercise is good for the muscles of mind and to keep it well in hand for work, but the true end of Culture is to give it play, a thing quite as needful. What I would urge, therefore, is that no invidious distinction should be made between the Old Learning and the New, but that students, due regard being had to their temperaments and faculties, should be encouraged to take the course in modern languages as being quite as good in point of mental discipline as any other, if pursued with the same thoroughness and to the same end. And that end is Literature, for there language first attains to a full consciousness of its powers and to the delighted exercise of them. Literature has escaped that doom of Shinar which made our Association possible, and still everywhere speaks in the universal tongue of civilized man.”

Lowell’s office did not require of him elementary instruction in modern languages, nor indeed was it expected that he should do drill work in linguistics. There were competent instructors then in the several languages, some of whom afterward came to be eminent professors, as the department was divided. He was not indifferent in the choice of assistants, but once they were at work he left them to their own devices, and exercised the slightest sort of supervision of them. There was no very nice division of labor, except that, as I have said, these assistants took the more exact grammatical details, yet they all included more or less of literature in their work with students. It can hardly be said that Lowell did more than flavor his instruction of literature with a pinch of grammar. Words in their origin and changing meanings he did comment on, but inflections, paradigms, and all the apparatus of grammar formed no part of his interest in his work.

In his essay on “Shakespeare Once More” he has said: “There would be no dispute about the advantages of that Greek culture which Schiller advocated with such generous eloquence, if the great authors of antiquity had not been degraded from teachers of thinking to drillers in grammar, and made the ruthless pedagogues of root and inflection, instead of companions for whose society the mind must put on her highest mood.... There is much that is deciduous in books, but all that gives them a title to rank as literature, in the highest sense, is perennial. Their vitality is the vitality not of one or another blood or tongue, but of human nature; their truth is not topical and transitory, but of universal acceptation; and thus all great authors seem the coevals not only of each other, but of whoever reads them, growing wiser with him as he grows wise, and unlocking to him one secret after another as his own life and experience give him the key, but on no other condition.”

Now Lowell’s own interest in literature had been direct. It would be idle to say that literature was interesting or valuable to him only so far as it was a criticism of life. It would be equally idle to say that his pleasure in it was derived only from his perception of it as great art. He carried to it the same kind of interest which he carried into his own production of literature. He was at once full of that human sense which made him delight in a fine expression of humanity, and he had the craftsman’s pleasure in excellent work, so that on the one hand, though in his youth he raged against Pope, in his more mature judgment he rejoiced in the patience in careful finish which characterized him: and, on the other hand, he gave himself with the fullest abandonment to an admiration of Dante as “the highest spiritual nature that has expressed itself in rhythmical form.” He thought him “the first great poet who ever made a poem wholly out of himself.” In one of his unpublished lectures Lowell uses Dante as a text for a discourse on the pursuit of literature, and mingles with it a slight element of autobiography, which makes it specially fitting to repeat the passage here:—

“One is sometimes asked by young men to recommend to them a course of reading. My advice would always be to confine yourself to the supreme books in whatever literature; still better, to choose some one great author and grow thoroughly familiar with him. For as all roads lead to Rome, so they all likewise lead thence; and you will find that in order to understand perfectly and weigh exactly any really vital piece of literature, you will be gradually and pleasantly persuaded to studies and explorations of which you little dreamed when you began, and will find yourselves scholars before you are aware. If I may be allowed a personal illustration, it was my own profound admiration for the ‘Divina Commedia’ of Dante that lured me into what little learning I possess. For remember that there is nothing less fruitful than scholarship for the sake of mere scholarship, nor anything more wearisome in the attainment. But the moment you have an object and a centre, attention is quickened, the mother of memory; and whatever you acquire groups and arranges itself in an order which is lucid because it is everywhere in intelligent relation to an object of constant and growing interest. Thus, as respects Dante, I asked myself, What are his points of likeness or unlikeness with the authors of classical antiquity? in how far is either of these an advantage or defect? What and how much modern literature had preceded him? How much was he indebted to it? How far had the Italian language been subdued and suppled to the uses of poetry or prose before his time? How much did he color the style or thought of the authors who followed him? Is it a fault or a merit that he is so thoroughly impregnated with the opinions, passions, and even prejudices not only of his age but his country? Was he right or wrong in being a Ghibelline? To what extent is a certain freedom of opinion which he shows sometimes on points of religious doctrine to be attributed to the humanizing influences of the Crusades in enlarging the horizon of the Western mind by bringing it in contact with other races, religions, and social arrangements? These and a hundred other such questions were constant stimulants to thought and inquiry, stimulants such as no merely objectless and, so to speak, impersonal study could have supplied.”

When, therefore, Lowell was brought face to face with a company of young men, in the relation of teacher, he appears not to have cast about to see how he could adjust his powers to some prevailing method of teaching, but to have used the material of literature as an instrument of association, and naturally, untrammelled by pedagogic theory, to have tried to communicate to the minds about him the kind of interest which the literature he was handling inspired in him. So far was he from a professional teacher that it is doubtful if he individualized his students much, or made any attempt to find entrance into this or that mind by first trying to detect what opening the mind offered. Undoubtedly, one or another with special aptitude or appreciation may have stimulated him and quickened his faculty of instruction, but for the most part these young men gave him the occasion for utterance, and the text before him gave the theme of discourse. Mr. Barrett Wendell, in his illuminating paper on Lowell as a teacher, confesses with a generous chagrin, that though he had been an enthusiastic pupil and had used Lowell’s hospitality fully, the acquaintance was very one-sided. He came to know Lowell well, but Lowell when he met him again after no great interval of time, had quite forgotten his face, and almost forgotten his name.[105]

Though he could scarcely be said to have resorted to any set or customary methods of a professional sort, he was not without recourse to simple aids in his teaching. “Thirty odd years ago,” he wrote in 1889,[106] “I brought home with me from Nuremberg photographs of Peter Fischer’s statuettes of the twelve apostles. These I used to show to my pupils and ask for a guess at their size. The invariable answer was ‘larger than life.’ They were really about eighteen inches high, and this grandiose effect was wrought by simplicity of treatment, dignity of pose, a large unfretted sweep of drapery. This object lesson I found more telling than much argument and exhortation.” He made also some attempt, when the method was much more of a novelty than it is to-day, to bring in the aid of illustration from art. He interested himself to rid his class-room in University Hall of some dismal charts that hung on the walls, and brought down from Elmwood a number of engravings and photographs which he had collected in his travels abroad, especially illustrations of Florence and Rome; one year he presented each of his class who had persevered with a copy of the recently discovered portrait of Dante by Giotto; and again he gave to each of his small class in Dante a copy of Mr. Norton’s privately printed volume on the “New Life.”

The actual exercise in the class-room was simple enough and unconventional. The classes were not large, and the relation of the teacher to his students was that of an older friend who knew in a large way the author they were studying, and drew upon his own knowledge and familiarity with the text for comment and suggestion, rather than troubled himself much to find out how much his pupils knew. A student would trudge blunderingly along some passage, and Lowell would break in, taking up the translation himself very likely, and quickly find some suggestion for criticism, for elaboration or incidental and remote comment. Toward the close of the hour, question and answer, or free discussion yielded to the stream of personal reminiscence or abundant reflection upon which Lowell would by this time be launched. Especially would he recall scenes in Florence, sketch in words the effects of the Arno, Giotto’s Tower, the church in which Dante was baptized, where he himself had seen children held at the same font; and so Lowell gave out of his treasures, using that form of literature which was perhaps the most perfectly fitted to his mind, free, unconstrained talk. Suddenly, glancing at his watch before him,—a time-piece which was as idly whimsical as its owner,—he would stop, bow and walk quickly out of the room, the men rising respectfully as he left.