James Russell Lowell, A Biography; vol 2/2

by Horace Elisha Scudder

Six weeks later he wrote to the same friend: “The hot weather we have been having for some time—95° for nearly a week together—has pretty nearly used me up. It has made me bilious and blue, my moral thermometer sinking as the atmospheric rose. But Sunday afternoon we had one of the finest thunderstorms I ever saw, beginning in the true way with a sudden whirl of wind that filled the air with leaves and dust and twigs (dinanzi va superbo), followed in due time by a burst of rain. One flash struck close by us somewhere, and I heard distinctly the crack of a bough at the moment of its most intense redness. Just at sunset the cloud lifted in the west, and the effect was one that I always wish all my friends could be at Elmwood to see. The tops of the English elms were turned to sudden gold, which seen against a leaden background of thundercloud had a supernatural look. Presently that faded, and after the sun had set came a rainbow more extravagant than any I ever saw. There were seven lines of the glory looking like the breaking of quiet surf on the beach of a bay. First came one perfect bow—the more brilliant that the landscape was dark everywhere by the absence of the sunlight. Gradually another outlined itself at some distance above, and then the first grew double, triple, till at last six arches of red could be counted. The other colors I could only see in the two main bows. I thought it a trick of vision, but Fanny and her sister counted as I did. A triple arch was the most I had ever seen before. Here is a diagram.... d is the spectator for whom this wonderful show was exhibited. I should have made d a capital, thus, D, to indicate his importance in the scene. For have I not read in some old moralist that God would not have created so much beauty without also creating an eye to see and a soul to feel it? As if God could not be a poet! The author of the book of Genesis knew better. However, it is something to have had an eye see what we are seeing; it seems to double the effect by some occult sympathy, and my rainbows are always composed of one part rain, one part sunshine, and one part blessed Henry Vaughan with his ‘Still young and fine,’ and his ‘World’s gray fathers in one knot!’ The older I grow the more I am convinced that (there) are no satisfactions so deep and so permanent as our sympathies with outward nature....

“In some moods I heartily despise and hate myself, there is so much woman in me ( ... I mean no harm. I was designed, sketched rather, for a man). Why, I found myself the other day standing in a muse with something like tears in my eyes, before a little pirus that had rooted itself on the steep edge of the runnel that drains the meadow above Craigie’s pond, and thinking—what do you suppose? Why, how happy and careless the life of such a poor shrub was compared with ours! But I was in a melancholy and desponding mist of mind, and I snatched myself back out of it to manlier thoughts. But the reality and sincerity of the emotion struck me as I mused over it, and I set it down on the debtor side of my account. Still, can one get away from his nature? That always puzzles me. Your close-grained, strong fellows tell you that you can, but they forget that they are only acting out their complexion, not escaping it. I did not expect to chase my rainbow into such a miserable drizzle, but for that very reason I will let it go as I have written it, though I am rather ashamed of having uncovered my nakedness so plumply. In spite of the heat we have had rain enough to keep the country beautiful, and my salt marshes have been in their glory. The salt grass is to other grass like fur compared with hair, and the color of the ‘black grass,’ and even its texture at the right distance remind one of sable. I have been making night studies of late, having enjoyed, as folks say, a season of sleeplessness, and I saw the dawn begin the other night at two o’clock. The first bird to sing was a sparrow. The cocks followed close upon him, and the phœbe upon them. The crows were the latest to shake the night out of them.

“The Corporation have given me a tutor and cut my salary down to $1500. But I think they will give me what they call a ‘gratuity’ if the college funds justify it. If not, I must take to lecturing.... I am called away to the hayfield, so good-by. I work more or less every day out of doors and like it. I am getting back as well as I can to my pristine ways of life.”

He had wished to purchase a little immunity from the routine of college duties, but he needed to increase his income, for the change in his college work, though it gave him more liberty, left him with smaller salary. Except for the months when his editorship of the Atlantic and his college professorship had jointly given him a fairly comfortable livelihood, he had always been in an impecunious condition; his writings had not been especially remunerative, and as he was somewhat dependent on outside pressure for a stimulus to work, it is probable that his need of money had furnished this stimulus.

So this summer he was not unwilling to help himself out with some special tasks on the British Poets. “My job,” he writes, “is correcting Dryden for the next edition. I enjoy it, to be sure, but it is rather wearisome. I have always had a great respect for Dryden’s solid ability, and I am glad to read him in this minute way as a study of his language. I have long thought that he was the last writer of really first-rate English prose. Make every possible deduction, and I still think so, and I believe it is because of two things: first, that the language had not yet been sophisticated by writing for the press; and second, that he wrote as a gentleman rather than as an author. It is easy to see why his verse has been so much admired, it is so vigorous and easy, and there is such mastery of language. Dryden knew a great deal, and uses his knowledge with an ease of manner that is very charming to me.

“The work takes about three days to a volume, and I have the first two to go over again, because I corrected more than they are willing to pay for (I mean to the printer). I find some strange nonsense, chiefly caused by punctuation. The Donne, on which I spent three or four weeks of unremitting work, I have literally lost. Little & Brown don’t want the expense of printing, and I have lost the book; can’t find it anywhere. I find another copy—but perfectly clean!”[26]

A proposal was made at this time that he should write the life of Hawthorne. Longfellow suggested this to Mrs. Hawthorne, who talked with Lowell about it. He was attracted by the subject, and saw that he would have abundant material, for Mrs. Hawthorne told him that there were seventeen volumes of notes, beside the letters which could be collected. After consideration, however, Mrs. Hawthorne feared to take the risks involved in having the precious manuscripts go out of her hands, and the plan was abandoned, Mrs. Hawthorne contenting herself with printing a portion of the notes in the Atlantic, and afterward issuing the several volumes of Passages from the American, English, French, and Italian Note-Books.

Lowell was busy also this summer getting ready for publication the second series of the “Biglow Papers,” his chief labor being in the long Introduction, which is a justification of his use of the rustic New England form by a careful tracing of many of the words and phrases and local pronunciation to the English usage of the seventeenth century, brought over by the early settlers and domesticated under conditions which served to preserve them in common speech. And here may be printed an unfinished letter, written a few months later, in which he sets forth more familiarly some of his linguistic views: “I am not obstinate, but Shakespeare does not tack his ‘lesses’ to nouns but to verbs. He says ‘viewless winds’ in ‘Measure for Measure,’ and means as Milton does in ‘Comus’ (‘I must be viewless now’) ‘invisible.’ So in ‘Hamlet,’ when he says ‘woundless air’ he means ‘invulnerable,’ as you will see by turning to Act I., scene i. I admit that less ought to be joined to a noun (as in German los always is), but I think one may sin with Shakespeare or Milton, for my instance from which latter I have to thank Malone. I grant that Whittier is no authority—though I suspect he is right in rhyming for the ear and not for the eye, as used to be the fashion. So long as we don’t pronounce arrums Hibernice, why shouldn’t he rhyme it with psalms? Not that I would. I would be conservative about pronunciation,—the test of good-breeding,—and would leave idioms to the grace of God, where they properly belong. Boys and blackguards have always been my masters in language. I have always felt that if I could attain to their unconscious freedom, I were safe. I would not insist (for example) with our excellent Daily Advertiser on ‘house to be let,’ because it is unidiomatic and because it is glossologically wrong. We took it directly from the French maison à louer. Nor would I say ‘by auction,’ because ‘at’ is quite as good. Nor would I say ‘the house is in process of erection’ for ‘the house is building.’”

Lowell dedicated his second series of “Biglow Papers” to Judge Hoar. “A very fit thing,” he writes, “it seems to me, for of all my friends he is the most genuine Yankee.” In the same letter he writes with eagerness of a new poetic enterprise he had undertaken, or rather of an old one revived.[27] “I have been working hard, and if my liver will let me alone, as it does now, am likely to go on all winter. And on what do you suppose? I have taken up one of the unfinished tales of the ‘Nooning,’ and it grew to a poem of near seven hundred lines! It is mainly descriptive. First, a sketch of the narrator, then his ‘prelude,’ then his ‘tale.’ I describe an old inn and its landlord, barroom, etc. It is very homely, but right from nature. I have lent it to Child and hope he will like it, for if he doesn’t I shall feel discouraged. It was very interesting to take up a thread dropt so long ago, and curious as a phenomenon of memory to find how continuous it had remained in my mind, and how I could go on as if I had let it fall only yesterday.” This was “Fitz Adam’s Story,” which Mr. Child found no difficulty in liking, so that Lowell sent it at once to Mr. Fields for the Atlantic, where it appeared in January, 1867. “I mean to work ahead as fast as I can with the rest,” he wrote to Mr. Fields, and in the spirit which then possessed him he had high hopes of completing “The Nooning,” having already, as we have seen, various parts of it ready for final articulation. He wrote Mr. Fields again, 8 November, 1867, when urged to send more of the poem: “I cannot get into the mood of my Nooning story just now,” but evidently he hoped still to go on with it, for he did not include “Fitz Adam’s Story” in his next collection of poems published in 1869; yet when twenty years more had gone by, and “The Nooning” was still in fragments, he saw that there was no likelihood of his ever producing the rounded whole, and so included “Fitz Adam’s Story” in his latest collection with an apologetic note.

“I am already beginning to feel the relief from those confounded recitations,” he wrote a month or so after the fall term at college began, “both in better health and better spirits.” He sent Mr. Fields not only this poem for the Atlantic, but a fairy tale and a poem for Our Young Folks. “You asked me once,” he writes, “for a fairy story, and I suppose never expected to hear of it again. But it is not safe to cast bread on my waters. I invented a kind of one at once, and yesterday and the day before contrived to write it, partly to spite an infernal pain I was suffering, and which got me under at last. I think I have told it simply enough, and was surprised to find how easy it was to write in words mostly of one syllable. I think there are some pleasant humors in it, but it may have suffered from my being in such a wretched condition while I wrote it. Please read it yourself, and show it to no one. To tell the honest truth, I have never read Our Young Folks, and so do not know whether it is suitable or not. Perhaps I could write it over again, but that might spoil it, for I might not be able to fancy myself so vividly telling it again as I did before.