Who dare again to say we trace
Our lines to a plebeian race?
The point is not in the least that Lowell did not believe in democracy; every deprecating remark of this sort was prefatory to a fresh defense of it. The point is that, as with a quarrel, it takes two to make a condescension and that Lowell did his part. It is difficult to imagine the young foreigner of “German-silver aristocracy” condescending with success to Lincoln or Emerson or to Mark Twain or Whitman.
The frequent expression of this self-defensive mood is an illustration of another leading trait in Lowell—his spontaneity. Since he felt as he did there would have been no virtue in concealing the fact, and Lowell seldom concealed anything. He wrote readily and fully, often beyond the verge of prolixity. He gave his ideas free rein as they filed or crowded or raced into his mind, not only welcoming those that came but often seeming to invite those that were tentatively approaching. Only in a few of his lyrics did he compact his utterance. Most of the introductions to essays and longer poems proceed in the manner of the “musing organist” of the first stanza in “Sir Launfal,” “beginning doubtfully and far away,” and what follows is in most cases somewhat lavishly discursive. The consequences of this manner of expression of a richly furnished mind are not altogether fortunate. Much of his writing could have been more quickly started and more compactly stated, and practically all of it could have been more firmly constructed. Emerson’s essays lack firm structure because they were not written to a program, but were aggregations of paragraphs already set down in his journals. Lowell’s essays, although deliberately composed, were equally without design. His method was to fill himself with his subject of the moment and then to write eagerly and rapidly, letting “his fingers wander as they list.” His productions were consequently poured out rather than built up. They have the character of most excellent conversation which circles about a single theme, allows frequent digression, admits occasional brilliant sallies, includes various “good things,” and finally stops without any definitive conclusion. In this respect, while Lowell was by no means artless in the sense of being unsophisticated, he was also by no means artful in the sense of calculating his effects upon the reader. The only reader of whom he seems to have been distinctly conscious was the bookish circle of his own associates. He would fling out recondite allusions as though in challenge, and he wrote in a flowing, polysyllabic diction which was nicely exact but which rarely would concede the simpler word.
This same surging spontaneity was both the strength and weakness of his poetry. He inclined too much to foster the theory of inspiration. “’Tis only while we are forming our opinions,” he once wrote, “that we are very anxious to propagate them”; and as he indited most of his poems while he was in this state of “anxiety” they became effusions rather than compositions. His first drafts, in fact, were fulfillments of Bryant’s injunction in “The Poet”:
While the warm current tingles through thy veins
Set forth the burning words in fluent strains.
But in his revisions he was unable to follow the instructions to the end:
Then summon back the original glow, and mend
The strain with rapture that with fire was penned.