James Russell Lowell, A Biography; vol 2/2

by Horace Elisha Scudder

The sixth stanza was not recited, but was written immediately afterward. It is so completely imbedded in the structure of the ode that it is difficult to think of it as an afterthought. It is easy to perceive that while the glow of composition and of recitation was still upon him Lowell suddenly conceived this splendid illustration and indeed climax of the utterance of the Ideal which is so impressive in the fifth stanza. So free, so spontaneous is this characterization of Lincoln, and so concrete in thought, that it has been most frequently read, we suspect, of any single portion of the ode, and it is so eloquent that one likes to fancy the whole force of the ode behind it, as if Lowell needed the fire he had fanned to white heat, for the very purpose of forging this last, firm tempered bit of steel.

Into these threescore lines Lowell has poured a conception of Lincoln which may justly be said to be to-day the accepted idea which Americans hold of their great President. It was the final expression of the judgment which had slowly been forming in Lowell’s own mind, and when he summed him up in his last line,—

“New birth of our new soul, the first American,”

he was honestly throwing away all the doubts which had from time to time beset him, and letting his ardent pursuit of the ideal, his profound faith in democracy as incarnate in his country, centre in this one man.

In April, 1887, the Century Magazine had a brief article headed “Lincoln and Lowell,” in which the editor, quoting the pregnant sentence on Lincoln from Lowell’s recently published address on “Democracy,” is reminded that Lowell “was the first of the leading American writers to see clearly and fully, and clearly and fully and enthusiastically proclaim the greatness of Abraham Lincoln.” And after quoting this sixth stanza of the ode, he goes back and recalls the political papers in the Atlantic and North American Review, with their references to Lincoln which we have already noted. The next number of the Century contained an article in the nature of a postscript, citing the early judgment of Emerson also on the President. In publishing Nicolay and Hay’s “Life of Lincoln” in the magazine, the editor naturally was interested to recover the impression made by Lincoln when he was comparatively an untried man, on the poets and seers, who have a clearer divination than politicians. He was in correspondence with Lowell and wished if he could to learn what Longfellow and Whittier had then said.

Lowell replied under date of 7 February, 1887: “I can recollect nothing about Lincoln by either L. or W., though this would prove nothing. I do remember a debate with Dr. Holmes just after Lincoln’s nomination. It was under the elms in front of the old Holmes house (where he took a photograph of me by O. W. H. and Sun), and he was much exercised in mind because Seward had not been the man. I, who had read Lincoln’s speeches, was entirely content.” The extracts which I have given from Lowell’s letters and essays make it, however, quite clear that the full recognition of Lincoln’s greatness was a growth and not an immediate insight. Nor is this strange. Lowell never saw Lincoln. Had he met him early in his career, and enjoyed the advantage which comes from personal sight, as Hawthorne for example did, there is little doubt that he would have borne away from the interview the impression which was stamped on so many ingenuous minds, and he would have read the President’s utterances by the light of that illuminating countenance. That Lowell did not at once throw away all doubts and accept Lincoln at the valuation he later placed upon him was due to the facts that Lincoln revealed himself only by degrees in his speech and act, and that while he was then making himself known Lowell was cherishing an ideal of his country and its destiny which called for the loftiest expression of patriotism. He was above all eager for a demonstration of high courage and fearless insistence upon national supremacy, when the country seemed rocking with inconstancy. That he should confess in Lincoln the “new American” was an evidence that the pure idealism which had marked Lowell’s political thinking and writing, an idealism moreover conjoined with shrewd practical sense, had at last found, to his profound satisfaction, a great exemplar, and the life and death of this wonderful product of the American soil presaged for him the development of a race of freemen.

CHAPTER XI
POETRY AND PROSE
1858-1872

Lowell’s writing during the war, and very largely also during the four previous years in which he had been engaged on the Atlantic, was mainly of a political character, and it has seemed best not to interrupt the record with much reference to his other writings and his pursuits generally during these eight years. But though he felt keenly the great movement which was breaking up the old union and making way for the new and greater union, he was too established in his own order of life to permit that to undergo any violent change. Even in his political writing, as we have seen, he was first of all a man of letters, with an imaginative foresight; his occupation both as a teacher and an editor gave a certain steadying force to his powers, so that though he rebelled against the irksomeness of routine he was delivered from what might have been the waywardness of a too self-centred life.

His safety-valve during all this period was in his letters to his familiar friends, as it was also in the free talk which he held with them; and this, even though he chafed under restraint and pressure which seemed to him to lessen his spontaneity. “How malicious you are,” he writes to Miss Norton, 23 October, 1858, “about what I said of women’s being good letter writers! What I meant was that they wrote more unconsciously than we do. I don’t know how it is with other folks, but I cannot sit down now and write a letter as if I were talking. Good writing, I take it, can only result from necessity of expression, and an author satisfies that in so many ways that his letters are apt to be dull.

“I like ‘Miles Standish’ better than you do. I think it in some respects the best long poem L. has written. It is so simple and picturesque, and the story is not encumbered with unavailing description, which is a fault in ‘Evangeline.’ But I quite agree with you about the metre. It is too deceitfully easy.