James Russell Lowell, A Biography; vol 2/2

by Horace Elisha Scudder

Venice, Thanksgiving Day, 1873.

...I can’t “do” anything over here except study a little now and then, and I long to get back to my reeky old den at Elmwood. Then I hope to find I have learned something in my two years abroad.... I am looking forward to home now, and shouldn’t wonder if I took up my work at Harvard again, as they wish me to do. We leave Venice probably to-morrow for Verona. Thence to Florence, Rome, and Naples....

As the year 1874 opened, the question of Lowell’s return to college work was mooted. He had felt a little piqued at being suffered to leave, after sixteen years’ continuous service, without any concession from the college. He thought at least he might have been granted leave of absence on half pay, and when no proposal of this sort was made, he sent in a definite resignation. Now the authorities intimated that they hoped he would resume his old place. He was in doubt what he should do. He had tasted the pleasures of freedom; he remembered well the uncongeniality of much of his work; he was painfully conscious of lacking qualities requisite for success in the profession of teaching; he had, moreover, been disturbed by physical disabilities, especially in a blurring of memory and a weakness in his head which alarmed him; the trouble, he decided, was “flying gout,” a disorder to which he had been more or less subject for many years, and which never left him for long after this period. More disturbing still was the “drop of black blood” he had inherited from his mother, which was apt to spread itself over the pupil of his eye, darkening everything, and, as he said, temporarily inducing a mood of suspicion or distrust.

On the other hand, he was at a time of life when uncertainties of income were likely to create anxiety rather than to stimulate exertion. His income from the sale of his land had proved less than he anticipated, and he felt the need of a fixed increase. Moreover, he found that college life had become more of a habit than he suspected; the putting of the sea between him and it did not emancipate him, though it gave a temporary exhilaration. He was timid about experiments in living. Yet he was unwilling to allow himself to be governed in such a matter wholly by financial considerations. As he wrote to a friend: “If the worst came, I could sell my house and go into lodgings, which perhaps wouldn’t be so unwise after all. At any rate, I can’t let that be a prevailing motive to decide me about so sacred an office as that of Teacher.”

“I never was good for much as a professor,” he wrote to Mr. Norton, 2 February, 1874; “once a week, perhaps, at the best, when I could manage to get into some conceit of myself, and so could put a little of my go into the boys. The rest of the time my desk was as good as I. And then, on the other hand, my being a professor wasn’t good for me—it damped my gunpowder, as it were, and my mind, when it took fire at all (which wasn’t often), drawled off in an unwilling fuse instead of leaping to meet the first spark.” There was, besides all this, a possible complication with a friend in whose light he would not stand, and letting this tip the scales, he wrote refusing the reappointment. There came in reply a letter from the president of the college, removing the supposed complication and setting the whole matter in such a light that Lowell revoked his decision and accepted the appointment. It was characteristic of him, that though asked to send his final answer before a certain date, he dismissed the subject from his mind, and wrote from Paris three months later: “I don’t know whether I am a professor or no. On the second of May it suddenly flashed across me that I was to say yes or no before the first of that whimsical month, and that I had forgotten all about it. I meant to say yes on the whole, but if luck has settled it no, perhaps it’s for the best.”

A more consuming interest had driven professorships out of his head. He was in Florence at the time of this correspondence, and in Florence, too, when he heard of the death of Agassiz, and on the eve of leaving for Rome he was moved to write that elegy which, if it does not reach the height of his odes in poetical spirit, has that endearing quality which will continue to make it read as long as people continue to take delight in the verses in which poets celebrate their friendships. But Goldsmith’s “Retaliation,” Longfellow’s Introduction to the “Tales of a Wayside Inn,” Emerson’s “Adirondacs,” and Holmes’s occasional poems are in lighter vein than “Agassiz,” which stands midway in poetry between such poems and Milton’s “Lycidas.” As in the case of the others, it has a succession of portraits, but it strikes a deeper note; the elegiac quality is present, and the complaint, the linking of personal grief with universal emotion, the widening of sympathy, all serve to leave in the mind rather the mood of restless enquiry into deep problems of life, than of sensitive appreciation of a series of portraits. It is perhaps worth noting that he had just been reading Leslie Stephen’s “Essays on Free Thinking and Plain Speaking,” and had been stirred by the book into more or less of an enquiry of his own attitude toward the great questions of life and immortality. Referring to the book, he wrote to Mr. Norton: “I emancipated myself long ago, and any friendly attempt to knock off my shackles is apt to result in barking my shins, don’t you see? Science has scuttled the old Ship of Faith, and now they would fain persuade me that there is something dishonest as well as undignified in drifting about on the hencoop that I had contrived to secure in the confusion. They undertake to demonstrate to me that it’s a hencoop and an unworthy perch for a philosopher. But I shall cling fast. ’Tis as good as a line-of-battle ship if it only keep my head above water. I am so made that I allow no distinction between natural and supernatural. There is none for me. I am as supernatural a ghost as was ever met with. But I like Leslie’s book all the same. It is very able, honest, and clever—full of wit and trained muscle.” And to Mr. Stephen himself he wrote later: “My only objection to any part of your book is, that I think our beliefs more a matter of choice (natural selection, perhaps, but anyhow not logical) than you would admit, and that I find no fault with a judicious shutting of the eyes.”[54]

When one compares the portraits in “Agassiz” with the earlier sketches, sometimes of the same persons, in “A Fable for Critics,” one finds it easy to mark the mellower, richer tints in the later work. The poem was indeed almost a real posthumous work. Lowell, removed by an ocean’s width from his old comrades and his familiar haunts, mingled the dead and the living in his imagination and found in the whole concourse, headed by Agassiz himself, a microcosm of that world in which he took the greatest delight, the world of friendly, wise, and witty men. As in the case of the Commemoration Ode, it drew virtue from him, for he had put into it a large part of himself, and had been possessed by it. Shortly after finishing it, he wrote of his experience in the composition to Mr. Norton,[55] and later, when there had been time for the sensation to cool, for an interchange of comment and criticism, and for the poem itself to meet his eyes in its printed form, he wrote again:—

“To tell the truth, my collapse from the happy excitement of composition was so great, that when the poem came to me in print, it inspired me with something like that disgust a freshman feels at sight of an empty bottle the next morning after his first debauch. I have not been able to read it through yet, but have only turned to such passages as you thought needed retouching. In doing this a few others caught my eye. My dear boy, don’t you see (to answer what I forgot before and what you remind me of again) that Emerson and Longfellow are both, thank God, still in the flesh, and that I should not have mentioned them at all, but that I saw them so vividly I couldn’t help it. This, too, is my reply to what you say of a resemblance to a passage in Rogers (I thought it was Beckford). I think I see what you mean, but I regard it not, for the thought is altogether unlike, and came to me (as the receivers of stolen goods say) in the way of my business. I had gone out of myself utterly. I was in the dining-room at Parker’s, and when I came back to self-consciousness and solitude, it was in another world that I awoke, and I was puzzled to say which. It was a case of possession but not of self-possession. I was cold, but my brain was full of warm light, and the passage came to me in its completeness without any seeming intervention of mine. I was delighted, I confess, with this renewal of imagination in me after so many blank years. If there be any verbal coincidence with Rogers, I shall be surprised and sorry. It had never occurred to me, and I think if anywhere it must be in the couplet beginning: ‘In this abstraction.’ But I hope you will turn out to be mistaken. I am glad the poem is liked, though I cannot yet see it fairly. I thought it should be good by the state in which it left me and by the unconscious way in which it came. The only part I composed was the concluding verses, which I suspect to be the weakest part. The verse that cost me most trouble was the first, which, do what I would, insisted on being as Johnsonian as ‘Observation, with extensive view.’ But it is hard to put a wire into a verse without stiffening the latter.

“I surrendered the last verse about Longfellow without a murmur. I spoiled it by thinking more of the vehicle than what it was to carry. But Emerson’s nose must stand.[56] I will give you ‘shrewd’ instead of ‘wise,’ however, for it is better and (I think) the word that came first. I have not left my opinion of either of these two doubtful, for I have celebrated one in prose, and the other in verse, which is more than either of ’em has done for me, go to!

“I thank you heartily, my dear Charles, for all your criticisms. I like to hear them, and when I don’t agree it is not from self-love, of which (in such matters) I have as little as most men. But I have a respect for things that are given me, as the greater part of this was, and my poetry ought to show marks of design if it doesn’t. If I have done anything good, I owe it more largely to your sympathy, which spurred me out of my constitutional indolence and indifference, than to anything else. I like to tell you so, for it is true. I value my own natural gifts (as I think I have a right) but set no great store by my performance. I came into the world with a strong dose of poppy in my veins, and love dreaming better than doing. This has been a great hindrance to me, and I have struggled hard against it, but never against my consciousness of it.” ...