“One might begin at dawn nor end till the purple twilight,
Stringing verses at will, nor know it was verse he was stringing.
This is the modern way, the way of steamer and railroad
Where all the work is done, you scarcely know how, by the Engine.
Ah, but the Hill of Fame, can they dig it down? can they grade it?
Difficult always is Good, and he, I guess, who attains it
Starts with two feet and a staff and bread for To-day in his wallet,
Footsore dropping at last, repaid by long hope of the summit.”
His college duties he performed with conscientious fidelity, and he found at times a genuine satisfaction in the free intercourse with his students over great subjects, yet he could not always overlook the immaturity of his pupils, and he was impatient at the sort of work outside of direct teaching which falls to the lot of college professors. The task of lecturing itself was sure to suggest the incompleteness of expression, and so offend all his genius as a writer. “Yesterday,” he writes to Miss Norton, in the fall of 1859, “I began my lectures. I came off better than I expected, for I am always a great coward beforehand. I hate lecturing, for I have discovered (entre nous) that it is almost impossible to learn all about anything, unless, indeed, it be some piece of ill-luck, and then one has the help of one’s friends, you know.... I am trying to reform the Spanish and Italian classes. Charles would be astonished to hear me read the Castilian tongue, now wellnigh as familiar to me as Castilian soap. If he wouldn’t be, I am. I am about as much ‘Spanish,’ tell him, ‘as a Connecticut segar.’”
At the same time he wrote to Mr. Norton: “I am busier than ever, and, I fear, fruitlessly. My Italian class are half of them drones, and this hinders my getting on as I would with the rest. I am studying Spanish, as I did German in Dresden, reading it in all my leisure time, and before long mean to make myself thorough in it. At forty a man learns fast. My Spanish class is a very good one. There are only five, and they all do their best. Vacare musis—what does that mean? I have almost forgotten.”
“I champ the bit sometimes here,” he writes to the same a year later, “but God’s will be done! Ancora imparo, though I be in a go-cart. My Spanish recitations cost me some time and trouble as yet, for I make the students parse and construe with never-failing strictness. For this I have to study the grammar harder than any of them, for my Italian is always in my way with its slightly differing forms. However, I have learned more already than I should have thought possible a year ago, and I think some of the students seem to be interested.”
Now and then he could make his college work and his Atlantic work play into each other, but not often. “I have as yet only dipped into your last four volumes,” he writes 12 June, 1860, to R. G. White, “and those I keep for the same good time (i.e. vacation). I have to prepare some lectures on Shakespeare, and shall kill two birds with one stone by making use of your edition, and so enabling myself to write an intelligent notice of it for the Atlantic.”
The Atlantic itself gave him an agreeable change from his class-room duties, even if it took him along somewhat the same road as when, shortly after he undertook it, he received a contribution from Sainte-Beuve on Béranger, and translated it for the number for February, 1858. Two months later he began that series of criticisms on the successive volumes of Smith’s “Library of Old English Authors,” which he completed in the North American ten years afterward, and combined into the long paper printed in the first volume of his “Literary Essays.” As an instance of minute detective work in criticism, the article is noteworthy, but we suspect that his readers to-day pass lightly over the scoring of Hazlitt’s editorship to read the brilliant characterizations of Elizabethan poets and dramatists, which crop out of the stony soil of textual criticism. In writing these articles Lowell was recurring to subjects which had, as we have seen, unfailing interest for him, and one cannot compare these notes on Chapman, Webster, Marlowe, and others with the observations that occur in “Conversations with the Old Dramatists,” without marking the greater mellowness of nature from which the later criticism proceeds. Lowell writes of them, not as in the first instance when he was just returned from a voyage of discovery, but as one who has lived long and familiarly in this rich country of the poetic mind.[19]
Excepting the “Biglow Papers,” a couple of political articles, two or three poems, and a few brief reviews of books, Lowell did not contribute to the Atlantic during the four years of the war, and naturally he turned his prose work into the North American after he became one of its editors. There, as we have seen, his work was mainly political, though he also did much reviewing of books; but after the pressure of war-time was lifted he made the review the vehicle for more strictly literary articles, and it was plainly a relief to him to spring back to subjects more congenial to his nature. In January, 1865, when Mr. Norton supplied the main political paper, Lowell printed that most characteristic article which in his collected writings bears the title “New England Two Centuries Ago,” and is in outward form a review of the third volume of Palfrey’s “History of New England” and of four volumes of the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. In its larger part a skilful florilegium of early writings, the paper is also and emphatically the reflection of Lowell’s mind during the stress of the war, when he was doubly concerned over the relation between the two great English-speaking nations and the practical solutions of the problems presented to democracy in the reëstablishment of order and union in the United States. He had rising in him, as his Ode shows, a great passion for the whole country; but as has been well said by Colonel Higginson, that no one can be a true cosmopolitan who is not at home in his own country, so it is equally true that national consciousness has its basis in local pride and affection. The genius of our political organism, by which one is called on for a double loyalty to state and nation, a loyalty jeoparded by the heresy of an extreme state-rights dogma, was finely disclosed in Lowell’s attitude. Fortunately for us the locality, the community in which our fortune is cast, has in itself a political essence, so that it is not mere attachment to the place of birth and breeding which makes its natural demand on us, but membership in an organism lacking only the crown of absolute independence to make it a unit of politics. It is a subtle but very real distinction between state and nation that permits not a divided but a complex loyalty, and the profound meaning which lies in the interplay of state and federal power is reflected in the consciousness of Americans as they bear themselves toward one or the other authority.
Now New England, though not an entity in politics, has so distinct a character that each of the states included in that name is representative of an order which is far more than a geographical division. Largely by reason of its historic genesis and development, New England is more an individual than any other group of commonwealths unless it be the Cotton States, and a man of Massachusetts, clearly the heart of the whole system, is very sure to think of himself as a New Englander without prejudice to his loyalty to his own state. Lowell certainly did. It was through New England, its history, its spirit, its genius, that he apprehended the very nature of freedom and the principles of democracy. Mr. Henry James has well said: “New England was heroic to him, for he felt in his pulses the whole history of her origines; it was impossible to know him without a sense that he had a rare divination of the hard realities of her past.”[20] And this article on “New England Two Centuries Ago,” designed to offer something of a conspectus of a people and land from which he was sprung, whose life was coursing in his veins, was also an interpretation of the political faith he held, a faith which he postulated for the final manifestation of the whole nation that in his imagination he saw rising out of the confusion of struggle. “I have little sympathy,” he says at the close, “with declaimers about the Pilgrim Fathers, who look upon them all as men of grand conceptions and superhuman foresight. An entire ship’s company of Columbuses is what the world never saw. It is not wise to form any theory and fit our facts to it, as a man in a hurry is apt to cram his travelling-bag, with a total disregard of shape or texture. But perhaps it may be found that the facts will only fit comfortably together on a single plan, namely, that the fathers did have a conception (which those will call grand who regard simplicity as a necessary element of grandeur) of founding here a commonwealth on those two eternal bases of Faith and Work; that they had indeed no revolutionary ideas of universal liberty, but yet, what answered the purpose quite as well, an abiding faith in the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God; and that they did not so much propose to make all things new, as to develop the latent possibilities of English law and English character, by clearing away the fences by which the abuse of the one was gradually discommoning the other from the broad fields of universal right. They were not in advance of their age, as it is called, for no one who is so can ever work profitably in it; but they were alive to the highest and most earnest thinking of their time.”
In this article, also, one may see something of Lowell’s feeling about England, which again was almost a traditionary sentiment. He saw the mother country through the glass of New England, and especially valued that Puritan strain in English history which had found such free play in New England. “Puritanism,” he says, “believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy;” and he found in the governmental attitude of England toward America in his own day a reminder of the policy exercised after the Restoration toward New England.
Lowell’s letters make it clear that at this time he was not given to the enjoyment of much hospitality. Mrs. Lowell was frequently an invalid, and though he had familiar friends to stay with him, as Rowse the painter, and gave cordial invitations to such as might be passing through Cambridge, he neither entertained much himself nor accepted entertainment at other houses. Now and then some man of letters came over from England or France and Lowell was asked to meet him. He records such an experience in a letter dated 20 September, 1861:—