Together with Fireside Travels may be read ‘My Garden Acquaintance’ and ‘A Good Word for Winter,’ from My Study Windows, gossipy papers on Nature by one who looked on ‘a great deal of the modern sentimentalism about Nature as a mark of disease ... one more symptom of the general liver complaint.’ The sincerity of Lowell’s love of birds, beasts, flowers, trees, the sky and the landscape, admits of no question. Yet he approached Nature more or less through literature, as was becoming in a man brought up on White’s Selborne; and he seems his characteristic self when, having pulled a chair out under a tree, he sits there with a volume of Chaucer in his hands, looking up from the page now and then to watch his feathered neighbors, and make wise and humorous comments on their doings.
Among My Books is a volume of literary and historical studies, six in number, entitled respectively, ‘Dryden,’ ‘Witchcraft,’ ‘Shakespeare Once More,’ ‘New England Two Centuries Ago,’
‘Lessing,’ ‘Rousseau and the Sentimentalists.’ All are in Lowell’s best manner, and the ‘Dryden’ and ‘Shakespeare’ are particularly fine examples of those leisurely, stimulating, and always brilliant literary studies which this scholar knew so well how to write.
Of the thirteen papers in My Study Windows that on ‘Abraham Lincoln’[67] and the one ‘On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners’ have a political bearing; those on ‘A Great Public Character’ (Josiah Quincy) and ‘Emerson the Lecturer’ are studies in personality; the ‘Library of Old Authors’ is an exercise in textual criticism, a merciless arraignment of certain unfortunate editors; the ‘Carlyle,’ ‘James Gates Percival,’ ‘Thoreau,’ ‘Swinburne’s Tragedies,’ ‘Chaucer,’ and ‘Pope’ are studies in literary history and interpretation.
Among My Books, ‘second series,’ contains five essays. More than a third of the volume is devoted to a study of ‘Dante,’ elaborate and exhaustive—as the word ‘exhaustive’ might be used in speaking of an essay not of a book. Then follows a most sympathetic essay on ‘Spenser,’ together with papers on ‘Milton,’ ‘Wordsworth,’ and ‘Keats.’
Of Lowell’s critical writings as a whole it may be said that better reading does not exist; and among the virtues of these essays is their length. Lowell would have been ill at ease in the limits of three or four thousand words too often imposed by the editors of our current magazines. He might even have been scornful of a public taste which dictated to editors to dictate to their contributors limits so narrow. Writing from the fulness of a well-stored mind, he liked room in which to display his thought. Having much to say, he did not scruple to take time to say it; but the time always goes quickly. He understood perfectly the art of beguiling one into forgetting the hours as they pass.
These essays, so rich in critical suggestiveness, abound in matter-of-fact knowledge. We read for information and get it. Lowell shares with us the wealth of his acquaintance with books. His manner is unostentatious. Macaulay staggers us with his array of facts and his range of allusion. We are overwhelmed, intellectually cowed by the display of knowledge. Lowell too astonishes, but only after a while. Macaulay declaims at his reader, Lowell converses with him. All is so easy, good-humored, and witty, that the reader for a moment labors under the mistake of supposing that he is being instructed less than he would like. Later he begins to count up his mental gains, and is surprised at the display they make.
Another obvious source of pleasure is the felicity of expression. Lowell had the courage of his cleverness. Brilliancy was natural to him. He defended the practice of piquant phrasing, maintaining that a thought is not wanting in depth because it is strikingly put. Doubtless he loved an ingenious turn for its own sake, but it would be difficult to find an instance of his making a display of verbal vivacity to conceal poverty of thought.
These pages bear constant witness to Lowell’s passion for books, a passion too genuine and deep-seated to admit of any doubt on his part of the worth of literature. He had none of Emerson’s scepticism, who held that if people would only think, they might do without books. The dullest proser and most leaden-winged poet could not make Lowell despair.
A number of essays display no little of the severity which we have learned to associate with reviewing after the manner of Jeffrey and Lockhart. Yet these caustic passages were written by a man who said of himself that he had ‘to fight the temptation to be too good-natured.’ Priggishness was as absurd to him in scholarship and letters as elsewhere, and he never lost a chance to give it a touch of the whip. Happily there is little of this. Lowell was almost uniformly urbane, gracious, reasonable.
If his subject was a great one Lowell treated it in a great way; if circumscribed and provincial he enlarged its boundaries—as in the essay on ‘James Gates Percival,’ where a subject of small intrinsic worth becomes a study of the American literary mind at one of its periods of acute self-consciousness, useful historically and tending to present-day edification. Needless to say, Lowell enjoyed handling this topic. He liked to satirize the early American authors and critics, solemn and important over their great work of inaugurating a New-World literature and quite convinced that, since ‘that little driblet of the Avon had succeeded in producing William Shakespeare,’ something unusual was to be expected of the Mississippi River.