James Russell Lowell, A Biography; vol 2/2

by Horace Elisha Scudder

In his first lecture Lowell said that he should have preferred to entitle his course “Readings from the Old English Dramatists with illustrative comments,” and that is practically what he made of his work. The slim volume in which, after his death, the six lectures were contained, does not at all stand for six hours’ entertainment of his audience; long passages which he read from printed books do not appear at all, as there were no passages in his written lectures which introduced or followed them. Lowell was recurring to a familiar theme, and his intention plainly was to speak freely out of a full mind. He does not appear to have re-read his early “Conversations;” he had not seen it, he said, for many years, and he was not quite sure just what its subjects were. A comparison of the two treatments separated by forty-four years shows curious likenesses and differences. As will be remembered, the young critic was so zealous over his ideas of reform that Chapman and Ford, the only dramatists he treated, and Chaucer, were often no more than mere prompters in the discussion of some current phase of morals or society. A little of this disposition to vagrancy reappears in these later talks, for they are quite as informal in their way as were the earlier Conversations. But in place of the topics connected with reform, there are more cognate themes. Since he is to speak of Marlowe, he finds it easy to make, by way of preface, an enquiry into the refinement which had been going on in the language, and so, by natural association, to one of his old themes, the sanctity of the English tongue. In introducing Webster also, he has some quiet criticism on the function of Form; and when he passes to Chapman, an enquiry into the personal element in literature leads him into some remarks on biographies, autobiographies, and the modern zest for intimacies in the lives of men, remarks which gain some earnestness, no doubt, from experiences which he had undergone.

But for the most part, he keeps closely to his business of inviting his hearers to share with him the enjoyment of the dramatists whom he reads and comments on, and when we compare the actual appreciation and criticism in the two books, the difference is mainly in the mellowness and quiet assurance which pervade the later treatment, and in the fact that in the earlier book he was more concerned with what in old-fashioned terms were the “beauties” of the poets, in the later, with the art and the constructive faculty.

In his half-homeless condition, Lowell looked with eagerness to his summers in England. There he had in its leisurely form the social life which had come to be a real solace to him, and there too he found the world arranged for the ease and comfort of a solitary. He sailed for England this year on the 21st of April, and found himself shortly in his familiar lodgings in London. He liked the sense of world activity which he felt in the heart of that great city. “Nothing can be more bewildering,” he wrote to his daughter, “than the sudden change in my habits and surroundings. Were it merely from the dumbness of Southborough to the clatter and chatter of London, it would be queer enough; from the rising and falling murmur of the mill to this roar of the human torrent. But I can hardly help laughing sometimes when I think how a single step from my hermitage takes me into Babylon. Meanwhile it amuses and interests me. My own vitality seems to reënforce itself as if by some unconscious transfusion of the blood from these ever-throbbing arteries of life into my own.”[99]

There were two places in England, outside of London, in which he especially delighted: one was St. Ives in Cornwall, the resort of his friends Mr. and Mrs. Leslie Stephen, the other was Whitby in Yorkshire. For six years, with the exception of 1885, he had made a summer stay in Whitby. It was then a quiet, primitive place; now it knows the flood of summer excursionists. Lowell liked the folk he met there, who reminded him of New England country folk. He liked the walks in the neighborhood and the sounding sea, and he was wont to invite to his lodgings friends whose companionship he cared for. An appreciative follower in Lowell’s footsteps has made an agreeable record of the memories he left behind in Whitby, especially with the two Misses Gallillee, with whom he lodged.[100] The paper deals with the picturesque properties of the little village, and has also a faint fragrance from the very human reminiscences of Lowell that remained in the minds of those who came near to him. “In the eyes of the positive little person—an innate Yankee of Yorkshire blood—whose duty it was to change the courses on these occasions, literary men as such have no glamour at all. Her acquaintance includes a number, and her North Country vocabulary has terms wherewith to dispose of them briefly. But there is neither reservation nor qualification in the tone in which she says of the conclusion of a certain discussion, listened to between times in the serving, ‘I never forgot it.’ It had wound up in a round-robin agreement, according to which each person present was to say by what he should best like to be remembered. The host spoke last, and the sentence in which his admiring hearer puts him on record is, ‘By kindly acts and helpful deeds.’”

Yet much at home as he was in Whitby, Lowell could not well resist the contagion which attacks all summer wanderers. As he wrote to Lady Lyttleton from Whitby, 7 September: “I am a bird of passage now, and that makes me feel unsettled wherever I am, but I have enjoyed my stay here, and the hogsheads of fresh air I have drunk have done me good.... I go down to Somersetshire on Saturday to Mr. Hobhouse, who has promised to show me Wells Cathedral, the only one in England I have not seen. Thence I go to the Stephens.” During this summer he was fitfully engaged in bringing together such poems as he had written since the volume “Under the Willows,” or had written before but had not included in that volume, and he continued his work upon it after his return to Deerfoot Farm in the fall. He pondered over what he should include, what leave out, and the medley which resulted caused him, in the volume “Heartsease and Rue,” to distribute the contents without regard to chronology under a variety of headings,—Friendship, Sentiment, Fancy, Humor and Satire, Epigrams. “My book will be a raft manned by the press-gang, I fear,” he wrote. “There will be some hitherto unprinted things in it—many of them trifles—some of which, however, please my fancy and may another’s here and there.” As he went on with the work of collection, he grew more and more distrustful. “I feel,” he wrote 22 December, 1887, “like a young author at his first venture. I think there will be some nice things in the book, but fear that my kind of thing is a little old-fashioned. People want sensation rather than sense nowadays.” Again, 4 January, 1888, he writes: “I am wondering more and more if my poems are good for anything after all. They are old-fashioned in their simplicity and straightforwardness of style,—and everybody writes so plaguily well nowadays. I fear that I left off my diet of bee bread too long and have written too much prose. A poet shouldn’t be, nay, he can’t be anything else without loss to him as poet, however much he may gain as man.”

Yet he liked the little task of collecting the volume, and there was a pleasurable content in his uneventful country life with his books and pipe. “My mind is busy,” he wrote, “and I like it. I am sitting in the sun without fire and I like that. My pipe tastes good and I like that too, for it enables me to treat with indifference some alarums and incursions of the gout which I was sharply aware of yesterday and this morning. No weather-sign is so truthful as this: If your pipe is savory, nothing is the matter with you. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!”

Lowell’s friendliness showed itself in the informal visits he liked to make to his friends when he was in town, and the familiar letters he wrote from the country. He was rather more ready to entertain a correspondent with a bit of criticism than to heed the calls made on him by editors for the same kind of writing done with formal purpose. Thus he writes to Mrs. Bell from Deerfoot Farm, Thanksgiving Day, 1887: “A second-rate author two hundred years old has a great advantage over his juniors of our own day. If he himself have not the merit of originality, his language has that of quaintness which sometimes gives him a charm similar in its effect though very inferior in quality. I think this is true of Feltham, though it be now more than twenty years since I have looked into him. I had read him in the day of my superstition when one takes all established reputations for granted, and read him over again after Experience had let fall her fatal clarifying drops into my eyes. Woe’s me, how he has dwarfed! I wrote my opinion of him on the flyleaf of my little quarto edition, and all I can recollect of him is that I called his style ‘lousy with Latinisms.’ Pardon me. Swift was still read when I was young, and how resist the alliteration? I can pardon Browne’s Latinisms, nay, his Græcisms too, and even like them. They are resolved in the powerful menstruum of his thought. They are farsought and yet seem not farfetched. Feltham’s are stuck-in like plums in his poor pudding and make the dough more dismal by contrast. He hasn’t stoned them and we crush between our teeth something hard and out of place that leaves an acrid taste behind it. I remember one phrase of his that tickled me—the ‘spacious ears’ of the elephant. It fits another animal, and sometimes when I have been assfixiated by an audience I have been tempted to beg of them to ‘lend me their spacious ears.’

“I think it possible that I gave Longfellow the references to him, for I was reading him about the time the Dante translation was going on. I could tell if I had my copy here and could take a look at the flyleaves.

“I may do Feltham wrong. The navicella di nostro ingenio draws more water as we grow older, and grounds in the shallows where we found good water-fowling in our youth.

“No doubt the book is in the Athenæum,—but wait, please, till I can lend you my copy. It is at Elmwood, and I can get it after I come back from New York, whither I go to be baited for the benefit of the International Copyright League. I wish there were a concise and elegant Latinism for D—n! I would bring it in gracefully here.