James Russell Lowell, A Biography; vol 2/2

by Horace Elisha Scudder

Lowell found in the winter of 1865-1866 a most congenial occasion for society in the meetings in Mr. Longfellow’s study, held for scrutiny of the proofs of that poet’s translation of the “Divina Commedia.” Mr. Longfellow records in his Diary, 25 October, 1865: “Lowell, Norton, and myself had the first meeting of our Dante Club. We read the XXV. Purgatorio; and then had a little supper. We are to meet every Wednesday evening at my house.” In the first Report of the Dante Society, Mr. Norton gives a full and interesting account of these meetings, and of the task they set themselves.

“We paused,” he says, “over every doubtful passage, discussed the various readings, considered the true meaning of obscure words and phrases, sought for the most exact equivalent of Dante’s expression, objected, criticised, praised, with a freedom that was made perfect by Mr. Longfellow’s absolute sweetness, simplicity, and modesty, and by the entire confidence that existed between us. Witte’s text was always before us, and of the early commentators Buti was the one to whom we had most frequent and most serviceable recourse. They were delightful evenings; there could be no pleasanter occupation; the spirits of poetry, of learning, of friendship, were with us. Now and then some other friend or acquaintance would join us for the hours of study. Almost always one or two guests would come in at ten o’clock, when the work ended, and sit down with us to a supper, with which the evening closed.”

With the North American Review still making its quarterly demands upon him, but the political impulse less urgent, Lowell turned naturally to literary criticism. Thus far, he had not made any deliberate appraisal of great writers, save in his short paper on Keats, which, from the occasion that called it out, was rather biographical than critical. He had in a fragmentary fashion in his “Conversations,” and in a discursive manner in his lectures, given appreciations of the great poets and dramatists of England, but in the next decade he was to print a series of essays which should embody his reading, study, reflection, and poetic insight in that field of human endeavor where his own work stands, and which had been since his boyish days the one great subject of his investigation.

History, which he read with avidity, was the background from which were projected the great figures of literature. Philosophy was not for him a system of independent reasoning, but rather the unclassified winged thoughts on high themes embodied in great poetic and dramatic art. Language, always a subject full of interest for him, was attacked, not from the point of view of a man of science, but from that of one curious of its human relations and its instrumentality in art. Nor was his knowledge of the plastic arts more than that which comes incidentally to a traveller and a general reader and observer, or his interest in them especially keen. He was very likely to bring the canons of literary art to bear upon them, sometimes indeed, as might be guessed, with shrewdness and analogical truthfulness; or he was affected by personal considerations, as when he writes of Story: “I saw the photographs of William’s statues, and think them very fine. They are really noble. The Quincy is admirable—the best thing of the kind our modern times has produced. In short, to my thinking, William is the only man of them all who knows how to do the thing. It was a real pleasure to be so thoroughly satisfied with the work of an old friend.” He recognized frankly his own limitations in the matter, as indeed he was disposed to think the defect almost ineradicable in the Saxon, who “has never shown any capacity for art, nay, commonly commits ugly blunders when he is tempted in that direction;” and apparently his only suggestion for bettering the condition was to put before workmen good illustrations of great art in the books they should find in their libraries, and give them an acquaintance with Ruskin’s writings.

But literature stood to him as the great exponent of all that was permanent in the human spirit. “There is much,” he says, “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.”[21] It was with this principle determining his choice that he proceeded with more or less conscious assembling to discourse on Carlyle, Emerson, Lessing, Rousseau, Shakespeare, Dryden, Chaucer, Pope, Milton, Dante, Spenser, and Wordsworth, as well as to write in many detached passages on the genius of Goethe. Later he returned to the same general field, and besides revising his judgment on some of these topics, treated also with more or less fulness of Gray, Cervantes, Fielding, and Coleridge, while any one who consults the elaborate index to his prose writings will readily see how many other authors who belong in the great ranks have been drawn upon for illustration of the one great theme.

To his reading of all this literature he brought the touchstone of his own life and experience. In this word “experience,” moreover, must be included his own highest experiments. His poetry, for the most part, as we have already seen, does not have its roots in other literature; it springs from that life which he held in common with those whom he reverenced for their own acts of literary creation. He quotes the recommendation of a friend that he should read poetry, feed himself on bee bread so that he might get into the mood of writing poetry; but, though all his life long Lowell fed, as by the most natural appetite, on poetry and other forms of imaginative literature, his own poetry is not bookish, nor does it borrow in form or phrase. Even when most impressionable in his youth, the influence upon him of Keats and Tennyson was more obvious than that of Shakespeare or Marlowe, only because, eschewing the imitative, his verse took the color of his generation. The likenesses were always general, and when he essayed forms of verse most rigid in their historical development, as the sonnet and the ode, he simply obeyed the law as his great progenitors had done, finding his freedom within the law, and not in outbreaks and protests. The conscious intention to be original, he himself says, seldom leads to anything better than extravagance; and there is a passage in his paper on Chaucer which sums up a large part of his literary philosophy.[22]

“Poets have forgotten that the first lesson of literature, no less than of life, is the learning how to burn your own smoke; that the way to be original is to be healthy; that the fresh color, so delightful in all good writing, is won by escaping from the fixed air of self into the brisk atmosphere of universal sentiments; and that to make the common marvellous, as if it were a revelation, is the test of genius.”

With his large literary essays as works of art I do not purpose concerning myself; such study lies somewhat outside the range of a biography, but as these papers formed a considerable and very important expression of his mind at one period of his life, it is worth while to look at them with a view to discover how far they serve to disclose him, to read them by the light of his experience, and to see if he put his personality into this form of writing. The publication of Carlyle’s “Frederick the Great” was the occasion of the first of these articles. In writing of it to Leslie Stephen, when it was reprinted in “My Study Windows,” he admits that he was harder on Carlyle than he meant to be, because he was fighting against a secret partiality. The phrase lets one a little into Lowell’s mind. As far back as in his college days he was reading Carlyle with gusto, and the breezy description[23] which he gave of Boston at the period when Carlyle’s “message” acted as a sort of leaven in the new dough of New England, was a lively reminiscence of his own tumultuous youth. Thus, upon writing of Carlyle when he himself was nearing the line of fifty, there was an undercurrent of reminiscence of his own callowness. He remembered his devotion to the Carlyle of the “Miscellanies,” and was more or less conscious that he had outlived his first enthusiasm. With all his admiration for the great critic who stirred him when he was himself pricking on the plain of Reform, his point of view was now changed, for he had left Carlyle’s side and come into more complete possession of his own judgment. The secret influences which forbade him to be preponderatingly ethical, which kept him from abandoning himself to the anti-slavery cause, even when he was fighting in the ranks, and made it impossible for him to be a great teacher, though quite aware of what constitutes a great teacher, had lessened, perhaps, his effectiveness in some single direction, but had given him greater poise and enabled him on rare occasions to bring all his powers into play, and then to do easily, without conscious effort, the thing he wanted to do. The “Commemoration Ode” is an instance, and in this judgment of Carlyle he seems to me unwittingly to be judging the Lowell who seemed somewhat possible in the days when he first read Carlyle. There is a sentence in the essay which puts the thing in a nutshell. “The delicate skeleton of admirably articulated and related parts which underlies and sustains every true work of art, and keeps it from sinking on itself a shapeless heap, he [Carlyle] would crush remorselessly to come at the marrow of meaning. With him the ideal sense is secondary to the ethical and metaphysical, and he has but a faint conception of their possible unity.”

It was in the growing conception of this unity that Lowell had moved away from Carlyle. The constant adjustment of the ideal and the ethical had been the ripening process in his mind, a process greatly stimulated by the urgent need he felt during the past few years for finding some common ground on which his visions of truth and freedom and his practical sense could meet. It was largely through a great political realization that Lowell came to be what thenceforth he was, a sane critic of literature and a poet whose imagination instinctively sought large moulds. This is not to say that he was indifferent to any other expression; his nature was too free and spontaneous for that; but if one is to be measured by the main incidents of his life, it is fair to say that the Lowell who after this left his impress on his countrymen was a man of such balance of mind that his judgments and his poems alike had the weight that comes from this equipoise, and the man thus characterized could scarcely fail in new relations to show the ease of one self-centred, and not the restlessness and anxiety of an experimenter with life.

It is this consciousness of art governed by great laws, whether applied to life or to literature, that dominates Lowell’s expression, and in the essay on Carlyle, his keenest criticism is called out by his perception of Carlyle’s failure in this respect. “Had Mr. Carlyle been fitted out completely by nature as an artist, he would have had an ideal in his work which would have lifted his mind away from the muddier part of him, and trained him to the habit of seeking and seeing the harmony rather than the discord and contradiction of things.” Again we read in this passage the unconscious reflection of its writer’s own mind, which once had been far enough away from this habit. Nothing in Carlyle appears to interest him more than the lawlessness into which his exuberant humor had led him, and the narrow escape he had had of being a great poet, and he sums up his judgment of “Frederick the Great” by saying that “it has the one prime merit of being the work of a man who has every quality of a great poet except that supreme one of rhythm, which shapes both matter and manner to harmonious proportion, and that where it is good, it is good as only genius knows how to be.”