“I didn’t mean to write all this and shouldn’t if I hadn’t had something else I ought to be doing. How tempting the duty that lies farthest from us always is, to be sure!”
It may have struck the reader how little comment, comparatively, Lowell made during his life upon his fellows in American literature. We must except of course his poetic criticism in “A Fable for Critics” and “Agassiz;” but in his prose criticism he occupied himself most constantly with the dead, not the living. When, later, he spoke on “Our Literature” at the Washington Centennial in New York he confined himself to generalities. It is worth noting, therefore, that on an occasion when he was called on to preside at an Authors’ Reading for the benefit of the Copyright League[101] he prefaced his argument for an international copyright act with a résumé of the course of American literature, and some more specific characterization of the contemporaries with whom his own name always will be associated. As a somewhat unwonted personal sketch, even though scarcely more than an off-hand deliverance, it may well be given here as one of the last of Lowell’s public addresses.
“When I was beginning life, as it is called,—as if we were not always beginning it!—the question ‘Who reads an American book?’ still roused in the not too numerous cultivated class among us a feeling of resentful but helpless anger. The pens of our periodical writers fairly sputtered with rage, and many a hardly suppressed imprecation might be read between their lines. Their position was, in truth, somewhat difficult. We had had Jonathan Edwards, no doubt; and people were still living who thought Barlow’s ‘Hasty Pudding’ a lightsome jeu d’esprit, and who believed that Dwight’s ‘Conquest of Canaan’ was a long stride towards that of posterity and the conversion of the heathen there. We had had Freneau, who wrote a single line,—
‘The hunter and the deer a shade,’
which had charmed the ear and cheated the memory of Scott (I think it was) till he mistook it for his own. We had the ‘Star Spangled Banner,’ and two or three naval ballads which, to my ear, have the true rough and ready tone. Philip Cook, of Virginia, had written a few graceful and musical lyrics. We had ‘McFingal,’ as near its model as any imitation of the inimitable can be, but far indeed from that intricate subtlety of wit which makes ‘Hudibras’ a metaphysical study as well as an intellectual delight. We had in the ‘Federalist’ a mine of political wisdom by which even Burke might have profited, and whose golden veins are not yet exhausted, as foreign statists and jurists are beginning to discover. But of true literature we had next to nothing. Of what we had, Duyckinck’s scholarly ‘Cyclopædia of American Literature’ gives us an almost too satisfactory notion. Of what we had not, there was none to tell us, for there were no critics. We had no national unity, and therefore no national consciousness, and it is one of the first conditions of a virile and characteristic literature that it should feel solid and familiar earth under its feet. New England had indeed a kind of unity, but it was a provincial unity, and those hardy commonwealths that invented democracy were not and could not yet be quite in sympathy with the new America that was to adopt and expand it. Literature thrives in an air laden with tradition, in a soil ripe with immemorial culture, in the temperature, steady and stimulating, of historic associations. We had none of these. What semblance we had of them was English, and we long continued to bring earth from the mother-country to pot our imported plants with, as the crusaders brought home that of Palestine to be buried in. And all this time our native oak was dropping its unheeded acorns into the crannies of the rock where by and by their sturdy roots would make room for themselves and find fitting nourishment.
“Never was young nation on its way to seek its fortune so dumfounded as Brother Jonathan when John Bull, presenting what seemed to his startled eyes a blunderbuss, cried gruffly from the roadside, ‘Stand, and deliver a literature!’ He was in a ‘pretty fix,’ as he himself would have called it. After fumbling in all his pockets, he was obliged to confess that he hadn’t one about him at the moment, but vowed that he had left a beautiful one at home which he would have fetched along—only it was so everlasting heavy. If he had but known it, he carried with him the pledge of what he was seeking in that vernacular phrase ‘fix,’ which showed that he could invent a new word for a new need without asking leave of anybody.
“Meanwhile the answer to Sydney Smith’s scornful question was shaping itself. Already we had Irving, who after humorously satirizing the poverty of our annals in his ‘Knickerbocker,’ forced to feel the pensive beauty of what is ancient by the painful absence of it, first tried to create an artificial antiquity as a substitute, and then sought in the old world a kindlier atmosphere and themes more sympathetic with the dainty and carefully shaded phrase he loved. He first taught us the everliving charm of style, most invaluable and most difficult of lessons. Almost wholly English, he is yet our earliest classic, still loved in the Old Home and the New. Then came Cooper, our first radically American author, with the defects of style that come of half-culture, but a man of robust genius who, after a false start, looked about him to recognize in the New Man of the New World an unhackneyed and unconventional subject for Art. Brockden Brown had shown vivid glimpses of genius, but of a genius haunted by the phantasms of imagination and conscious of those substantial realities they mocked only as an opium eater might be. His models were lay figures shabby from their long service in the studios of Godwin and the Germans. Cooper first studied from the life, and it was the homo Americanus with our own limestone in his bones, our own iron in his blood, that sat to him. There had been pioneers before him, like Belknap and Breckenridge, who had, in woodman’s phrase, blazed the way for him, but he found new figures in the forest, autochthonous figures, and on the ocean, whose romance he was the first to divine, he touched a nerve of patriotic pride that still vibrates. I open upon my boyhood when I chance on a page of his best. In prose we had also Channing, who uttered the perceptions, at once delicate and penetrating like root fibres, of a singularly intuitive mind in a diction of sober fervor where the artist sometimes elbows aside the preacher; and Webster, the massive simplicity of whose language and the unwavering force of whose argument, flashing into eloquent flame as it heated, recalled to those who listened and saw before them one of the most august shapes manhood ever put on, no inadequate image of Pericles. We had little more. Emerson was still letting grow or trying in short flights those wings that were to lift him and us to Heaven’s sweetest air. Hawthorne, scarce out of his teens, had given in ‘Fanshawe’ some inkling of his instinct for style and of the direction his maturer genius was to choose, but no glimpse of that creative imagination, the most original and profound of these latter days. Our masters of historical narration were yet to come.
“In poetry we were still to seek. Byrant’s ‘Waterfowl’ had begun that immortal flight that will be followed by many a delighted eye long after ours shall have been darkened; Dana had written some verses which showed a velleity for better and sincerer things; Willis was frittering away a natural and genuine gift; Longfellow was preluding that sweet, pure, and sympathetic song which persuaded so many Englishmen that he must be a countrymen of theirs. In his case the question certainly became not ‘Who reads an American book?’ but ‘Who does not read one?’ Holmes had written one imperishable poem.
“This was the state of things when I was a boy. That old question, once so cruelly irritating, because it was so cruelly to the point, has long ago lost its sting. When I look round me on this platform, I see a company of authors whose books are read wherever English is read, and some whose books are read in languages that are other than their own. The American who lounges over an English railway-book-stall while his train is making-up sees almost as many volumes with names of his countrymen on their backs as he sees of native authors. American Literature has asserted and made good its claim to a definite place in the world. Sixty years ago there were only two American authors, Irving and Cooper, who could have lived by their literary incomes, and they fortunately had other sources of revenue. There are now scores who find in letters a handsome estate. Our literature has developed itself out of English literature, as our political forms have developed themselves out of English political forms, but with a difference. Not as parasitic plants fed from the parent stock, but only as new growths from seeds the mother tree has dropped, could they have prospered as they have done. And so our literature is a part of English literature and must always continue to be so, but, as I have said, with a difference. What that difference is, it would be very hard to define, though it be something of which we are very sensible when we read an American book. We are, I think, especially sensible of it in the biography of any of our countrymen, as I could not help feeling as I read that admirable one of Emerson by Mr. Cabot. There was nothing English in the conditions which shaped the earlier part of Emerson’s life. Something Scottish there was, it may be said, but the later life at Concord which was so beautiful in its noble simplicity, in its frugality never parsimonious, and practised to secure not wealth but independence, that is—or must we say was?—thoroughly American. Without pretension, without swagger, with the need of proclaiming itself, and with no affectation of that commonness which our late politicians seem to think especially dear to a democracy, it represented whatever was peculiar and whatever was best in the novel inspirations of our soil. These inspirations began to make themselves felt early in our history and I think I find traces of their influence even so long ago as the ‘Simple Cobbler of Agawam,’ published in 1647. Its author, Ward, had taken his second degree at Cambridge and was a man past middle life when be came over to Massachusetts, but I think his book would have been a different book had he written it in England. This Americanism which is there because we cannot help it, not put there because it is expected of us, gives, I think, a new note to our better literature and is what makes it fresh and welcome to foreign ears. We have developed, if we did not invent, a form of racy, popular humor, as original as it is possible for anything to be, which has found ideal utterance through the genius of ‘Mark Twain.’ I confess that I look upon this general sense of the comic among our people and the ready wit which condenses it into epigram, as one of the safeguards of our polity. If it be irreverent it is not superstitious; it has little respect for phrases; and no nonsense can long look it in the eye without flinching.”
“Heartsease and Rue” was published in the early spring of 1888 and immediately afterward Lowell printed in the Atlantic his poem “Turner’s Old Téméraire, under a Figure symbolizing the Church.” This poem and “How I consulted the Oracle of the Goldfishes,” which appeared in the Atlantic for August, 1889, were printed in the thin posthumous volume of “Last Poems,” and belong thus in the group which most effectively represents Lowell’s mood on the profoundest themes at the end of his life. The first poem in “Heartsease and Rue,” that on Agassiz, which heads the section entitled Friendship, has already been noted in connection with the time when it was written. A little of the same pathos of parting with old friends is in the postscript of the letter to Curtis, and in this as in the former, the poet’s mind runs on naturally in its speculation to the new To Be. A single hint of a thought which filled many of Lowell’s hours occurs in the poem when he says:—