“Certainly I will dine with you on Sunday and shall expect you on Thursday if Tuesday should be a fair day. The death of Holmes is an awful warning, but one can’t expect to be very strong at ninety nine. I remember his mother who died near fifty years ago.”
The fun we make often discloses the gravity that lies behind, as if we could exorcise a spirit by jesting at it, and Lowell was tormented, strange to say, by the apprehension of old age long before he approached it. There is, therefore, something pathetic as well as humorous in the fragment of Mr. Wilbur’s letter which introduces the “Latest Views of Mr. Biglow.” It is the imitation palsy again, and yet behind Mr. Wilbur’s tremulous phrases one reads those strong convictions which Lowell held to throughout the perplexing days before Gettysburg. “Though I believe Slavery,” Mr. Wilbur says, “to have been the cause of it [the war] by so thoroughly demoralizing Northern politicks for its own purposes as to give opportunity and hope to treason, yet I would not have our thought and purpose diverted from their true object,—the maintenance of the idea of Government. We are not merely suppressing an enormous riot, but contending for the possibility of permanent order coexisting with democratical fickleness; and while I would not superstitiously venerate form to the sacrifice of substance, neither would I forget that an adherence to precedent and prescription can alone give that continuity and coherence under a democratic constitution which are inherent in the person of a despotick monarch and the selfishness of an aristocratical class. Stet pro ratione voluntas is as dangerous in a majority as in a tyrant.”
Distinct as are the judgments of Mr. Wilbur, it is after all in the poems from Hosea Biglow and his foil Birdofredom Sawin that we get the freest and most luminous expression of Lowell’s mind. He began the new series in a low key by recounting the experience of the renegade Yankee during the years since the Mexican war, but the affair of the Trent happened immediately after he had written the first paper, and before completing Birdofredom’s story he dashed off that quaint fable of the dialogue between the Bridge and the Monument, ending with the verses “Jonathan to John,” which was a genuine delivery of his mind. “If I am not mistaken,” he wrote to Mr. Fields on sending it, “it will take. ’Tis about Mason and Slidell, and I have ended it with a refrain that I hope has a kind of tang to it.” The judgments which he passed in it were not momentary impulses. Three years later he wrote a letter[9] which repeats in prose much the same sentiments. It would be difficult to find a better exponent than Lowell of the temper of educated Americans toward England, a temper which discriminates sharply between the England of history and of personal affection and the England that registered in the nineteenth century the prejudices of a lingering bureaucratic régime.
In the third, fourth, and fifth papers Lowell used his satire effectively to sting his countrymen into a perception of the meaner side of politics, for his incessant cry throughout his political career was for independence and idealism, and the obverse was an unfailing denunciation of shams and cowardly truckling to popular views. It was when he came to the close of the six numbers which he appears to have agreed to write that he gave himself up to the luxury of that bobolink song which always swelled in his throat when spring melted into summer. “Sunthin’ in the Pastoral Line,” like the opening notes of “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” like “Under the Willows,” “Al Fresco,” and similar poems, is the insistent call of Nature which is perhaps the most unmistakable witness in Lowell of a voice most his own because least subject to his own volition. To be sure, Lowell had a truth he wished to press,—the need of crushing the rattlesnake in its head of slavery; but he must needs first clear his throat by a long sweet draught of nature, and the mingling of pure delight in out of doors with the perplexities of the hour renders this number of the “Biglow Papers” one that goes very straight to the reader’s heart.
There is no flagging in this monthly succession, as one reads the “Papers” now, but Lowell hated the compulsory business of a poem a month,—as he says in this latest number:—
“I thought ef this ’ere milkin’ o’ the wits
So much a month, war n’t givin’ Natur’ fits,—
Ef folks war n’t druv, findin’ their own milk fail,
To work the cow that hez an iron tail,
An’ ef idees ’thout ripenin’ in the pan
Would send up cream to humor ary man.”
And he wrote to Fields, 5 June, 1862: “It’s no use. I reverse the gospel difficulty, and while the flesh is willing enough, the spirit is weak. My brain must lie fallow a spell,—there is no super-phosphate for those worn-out fields. Better no crop than small potatoes. I want to have the passion of the thing on me again and beget lusty Biglows. I am all the more dejected because you have treated me so well. But I must rest awhile. My brain is out of kilter.” And again in August he wrote to the same: “Give me a victory and I will give you a poem: but I am now clear down in the bottom of the well, where I see the Truth too near to make verses of.”
So it was six months before he wrote again, this time the “Latest Views of Mr. Biglow.” He carried out his plan, after this interval, of putting an end to Mr. Wilbur. The verses repeat his impatience for some action, some great leader, but at the close he bursts forth into exultation over Lincoln’s proclamation of emancipation. And then, for two years and more, Hosea keeps silence.
Yet if victory did not arouse him, the greater theme of sacrifice called out one of his most solemn and stirring odes, that dedicated to the memory of Robert Gould Shaw, and entitled “Memoriæ Positum R. G. Shaw.” It may well be read in connection with the other poem suggested by the events of the war in 1863, “Two Scenes from the Life of Blondel.” There is in this parable a half confession of failure, a reflection upon ideals once held gallantly and then trailed in the dust of disappointment. He seems to have written the first scene, in which Lincoln is the ideal captain, without at first designing the second, for he writes to Mr. Fields, who already had the first: “I have written a Palinode to ‘Blondel,’ and so made two poems of it. The latter half is half-humorous and, I think, will help the effect. You see how dangerous it is to pay a poet handsomely beforehand. I don’t know where I shall stop. I shall be sending an epic presently.... I should like your notion of the second part of Blondel, which (in the first relief of incubation) I am inclined to think clever. But there was nothing wiser than Horace’s ninth year—only it overwhelms us like a ninth wave (that’s Wendell’s, tenth the Latins said, but I wanted nine), and if we kept our verses so long we should print none of them. A strong argument for monthly magazines, you see.” There is so little of the essentially dramatic about Lowell’s poetry that it is not unfair to hear his voice only slightly changed in such a poem as this. But all such speculative and half-moody expressions gave way before the dignity of Shaw’s death. “I would rather have my name known and blest, as his will be,” Lowell writes to Colonel Shaw’s mother, “through all the hovels of an outcast race, than blaring from all the trumpets of repute.” And the ultimate judgment which he held, despite the confusion wrought by all the meaner passions of the time which vext his soul, rings out clearly in the final lines:—
“Dear Land, whom triflers now make bold to scorn,
(Thee! from whose forehead Earth awaits her morn,)
How nobler shall the sun
Flame in thy sky, how braver breathe thy air,
That thou bred’st children who for thee couldst dare
And die as thine have done!”[10]