A Manual of American Literature

by Unknown

James Russell Lowell.—By general consent, Longfellow is our American poet, par excellence, Emerson our philosopher, James Russell Lowell our man of letters. Others, Lowell among them, have shared more richly than Longfellow in a distinctively lyrical temperament; others have thought more consecutively than Emerson. No one, however, when his initial talents are considered, has produced so much good poetry as Longfellow; no one in the realm of philosophic thought has been so patently influential as Emerson; and no one, not even Irving, has fared well in so many avenues of literature and popular scholarship as Lowell. He was poet, critic, professor, editor, diplomat, patriot, humanist; and withal he was a man and a friend.

He was born on Washington’s birthday, February 22, 1819, at “Elmwood,” Cambridge, a house still in the possession of his family. On his father’s side he was of English blood, being descended from Percival Lowell, who came from Somersetshire to Massachusetts Colony in 1639; through his mother he drew his lineage from the folk of the Orkney Islands. His father was a well educated clergyman, faithful and affectionate; his mother, whether really gifted with second sight or not, was of a less usual type, imaginative, high-strung, with a tendency to mental derangement. During his infancy her youngest son heard ballads for lullabies. As a child he was read to sleep with Spenser’s “Faerie Queene.” When he grew older, he had the range of his father’s generously stocked library. At the age of nine, he was devouring Walter Scott, and, like Scott at the same age, was astonishing his companions with improvised tales of fear and wonder. His imagination was not unduly stimulated; he lived a wholesome outdoor life, and he had a sound schooling in the classics. When he went to Harvard, in 1834, “he was a shy yet not very tractable youth, given, like so many boys who are shy from excess rather than from defect of ability, to occasional violence and oddity of expression or act.” At Harvard, he gradually rebelled against the rigour of a fixed curriculum, but read omnivorously in English literature of the sixteenth and the nineteenth century, and, following the English romanticists of a generation previous, paid particular attention to Spenser and Milton. “Milton,” he observes, “has excited my ambition to read all the Greek and Latin classics which he did.” Lowell had gone through a precocious love affair at the age of ten; while in college he was again “hopelessly in love.” His efforts in the way of serious writing were at this time facile and, naturally, not profound; his humour was naïve, and more engaging. His gradual neglect of the prescribed routine, in spite of his father’s attempts to stir up in the young man a respect for academic honours, at length brought upon Lowell the open displeasure of the Harvard faculty; so that in his senior year he was temporarily suspended, and directed to regain his standing under the private instruction of the Rev. Barzillai Frost at Concord. Longfellow was one of his teachers in Cambridge; in his retirement, he met Emerson and Thoreau. When he left his tutor and returned to Harvard, Class Day was past; but he brought back his Class Poem finished, and allowed it to circulate among his friends. It is interesting as an evidence of Lowell’s early freedom in using a variety of metres, of his feeling for nature, of his New England heritage of conservatism, of his inability as yet to enter into sympathy with the movement for the abolition of slavery, or with Emerson and Transcendentalism. It is interesting as a mixture of the old and the new; its touches of enthusiasm are in odd contrast with its general manner, which is strongly reminiscent of post-Revolutionary satire.

His course at Harvard over—for better or worse,—Lowell consigned himself, with misgivings and vacillation, to the study of law. An unfortunate love affair, the financial reverses of his father, uncertainty about his own livelihood, and his seemingly thwarted longing to become an author conspired to render him at times almost desperate. It appears that he even meditated suicide. His humour saved him. He continued his study of ancient and modern poets and certain aspects of their art; through this study, as well as through his mental sufferings, his knowledge of humanity was broadened and enriched. He began to understand the position of the Abolitionists. With his engagement to Miss Maria White, the horizon finally cleared. He had taken his degree in law. Though he could not immediately be married, the constant influence of Miss White, herself a poetess, and his contact with the circle of young people in which she moved—“the Band”—were from now on vital elements in his spiritual development. His head was full of literary plans. He would write a life of Keats; he would compose a “psycho-historical” tragedy. He became a contributor of verse to Graham’s Magazine. In 1840 he brought out the volume of poetry entitled “A Year’s Life,” labelled by reviewers as “humanitarian and idealistic”; and in the next year or so he wrote for other periodicals an assortment of sonnets, prose sketches, and literary essays on the Elizabethan dramatists. By the close of 1842, he had resolved to abandon the law, and associated himself with Robert Carter in founding a magazine to be known as The Pioneer. The venture was short-lived, owing to Lowell’s enforced removal to New York, where he was under the care of an eye-specialist. The failure of his periodical involved him in debt; however, he had gained valuable experience as an editor, and had widened his acquaintance among men of letters. Settling once more at Cambridge, he watched over the persons of his mother, whose mind was now astray, and his eldest sister, who already began to show signs of a similar malady. The fruit of two years of poetical activity appeared at the end of 1843 in his first series of “Poems.” He married Miss White on December 26, 1844. Immediately afterward, he assumed for a brief space a position in Philadelphia on The Pennsylvania Freeman, he and his wife eking out a slender income by writing for The Broadway Journal of New York. An ardent Abolitionist now, Lowell, on his return to Cambridge, gave his attention during the next four years mainly to articles for The National Anti-Slavery Standard. From this point it is impossible in so short an account as the present to record many details of his productivity as a writer. In 1846 appeared the first of the “Biglow Papers,” published in The Boston Courier; three more came out the next year. In 1848, besides a large sheaf of articles, Lowell issued the second series of his “Poems,” his “Fable for Critics”—in which he handled contemporary American poets with levity but also with insight—and “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” significant titles in any list of his works. His powers were near their height. His humour was almost as sure as it ever became; his criticism almost as pregnant, his imagination as vital, his attitude toward national issues as uncompromising. The defects in his style and treatment are such as we find even in his later work. Until 1853 Lowell’s life was in the main happy, darkened indeed by the death of several children, and by anxiety over the fading health of his wife. From the grief and loneliness following her death, he sought relief in the preparation of a course of lectures on the English poets, to be delivered before the Lowell Institute in Boston. Their signal success brought him a call to the chair left vacant at Harvard by Longfellow. He gave a year or more to study abroad; returning in 1856, he spent the next sixteen years of his life in the duties of a college professor. He lectured on poetry and fine art, and offered courses in German, Spanish, and Italian literature. He was at his best in teaching Dante, where he could put in motion his belief “that the study of imaginative literature tends to sanity of mind”; that it is “a study of order, proportion, arrangement, of the highest and purest Reason,” and shows “that chance has less to do with success than forethought, will, and work.” Latterly he turned his attention to the literature of Old French. For a man who has been taxed with hereditary indolence, his industry was surprising. His connection with The Atlantic Monthly from its launching, in 1857, until 1861, and with The North American Review from 1864 until 1872, is mentioned elsewhere. His private reading was continuous and discursive. With the approach and outbreak of the Civil War, his heart and pen were enlisted in the service of the North. He wrote perhaps the most stirring political articles in American literature; and his verse ran all the way from a new series of “Biglow Papers” to the “Commemoration Ode” recited at the memorial exercises, July 21, 1865, in honour of the Harvard graduates who had given their lives for their country. After the war, The North American Review provided him with an outlet for many of his best known articles in literary criticism, for example, his essays on Chaucer, Pope, Spenser, and Dante. “The Cathedral,” his most notable poem after the “Commemoration Ode,” appeared in 1870. In 1869, and again in 1870, he delivered a number of lectures, on the poets, at Cornell University. In 1872, unable to secure a leave of absence from Harvard, he resigned his position there, in order to go abroad. After a stay of two years in Europe, where he was the recipient of distinguished honours, he resumed his post at Harvard, retaining it until 1877, when President Hayes appointed him Minister to Spain (1877–80). In 1880 Garfield made him Minister to England; here honours were showered upon him. “The Queen is recorded to have said that during her long reign no ambassador or minister had created so much interest and won so much regard as Mr. Lowell.” Shortly after the death of his second wife, in 1885, he was supplanted in his diplomatic post. For a time he lived with his daughter at Southborough, Massachusetts. Among the later collections of his poetry was “Heartsease and Rue,” published in 1887. The last two years of his life were passed at Cambridge, devoted in part to an edition of his works, in ten volumes. After a season of weakness and pain, borne with fortitude and humour, he died, where he first saw the light, at Elmwood, on August 12, 1891.

It is well-nigh impossible to characterise Lowell briefly. An attempt to sum up a personality that chose so many avenues of expression, and that at bottom was not thoroughly unified, can hardly do justice to the component parts. The most striking thing about the man was his fertility, if not in great constructive ideas, at all events in separate thoughts. What he writes is full of meat. His redundancy is not in the way of useless verbiage; he wants to use all the materials that offer. A less obvious thing in Lowell is what we may term his lack of complete spiritual organisation. He lived in an age of dissolving beliefs and intellectual unrest. Though he was not tormented, as were some others, by fierce internal doubts, he yet failed ever to be quite clear with himself on fundamental questions of philosophy and religion. He was never quite at one with himself. As a writer, his serious and his humorous moods were continually interrupting each other. Partly on this account, he did not possess an assured style. Partly, of course, a kind of indifference, inherited or developed, was to blame; in his formative stage, he did not have the patience—as he himself told Longfellow—to write slowly enough. The result is, our enjoyment of his poetry comes from separate passages, not from organically constituted, harmonious wholes. In the occasional felicitous expression of an individual thought, few can surpass him:

Coy Hebe flies from those that woo,
And shuns the hands would seize upon her;
Follow thy life, and she will sue
To pour for thee the cup of honour.

As a colourist in words, when he happens not to overdo the impression, his art often seems masterly. Yet if we look closely, even in the much lauded “Commemoration Ode,” his technique is seldom if ever inevitable. His prose is stylistically more continuous than his verse, owing to his experience as an editor. He healed others; himself he could heal at least partially. But even as a prose writer, in spite of his studies in the history of literature, he did not reach the point where science and the understanding are seen to be in harmony with poetry and the imagination. It appears that he did not succeed in distinguishing between what was temporary and what was permanent in science, so that he did not escape the danger of confusing the errors of scientists with their ideals; and as he was not in full sympathy, as Dante was, with minute literary research, so he was not willing to subject himself to the last, exacting, and detailed labours of the poet or essayist who determines to write verse or prose that shall endure. It follows that most of his writing, both poetry and prose, lacks finality. Thus in his article on Chaucer, though he met the approval of no less an authority than Professor Child, he could not ultimately have satisfied that great scholar and critic, since Lowell did not confine himself to generalisations based upon exhaustive induction. He does not clearly discriminate between “I think” and “I know.”

The fact is that he wrote mainly for his own time, and was bound to have but a temporary reward. This is not saying that the reward was not worth while. His interpretations of Spenser, of Dante, of Milton, of the elder dramatists, sent to those poets many a reader who would not otherwise have gone; for America, he opened the road in the study of Chaucer; and his own “Vision of Sir Launfal” has unlocked many a hard heart to divine influences. When he wrote in dialect, as in the “Biglow Papers,” he was manifestly writing for a time; but in their time the second series did more to justify the Northern cause than almost any other publication that could be mentioned, Whittier’s poems not excepted. It may be thought that his wonderful command of dialect, contrasted with a less perfect and less instinctive success in any higher medium, marks him as above all else a satiric poet. When he was once sitting for his portrait, he so denominated himself, speaking generally—“a bored satiric poet.” Yet were we to name Lowell the greatest of all American satirists, his urgent poems of patriotism—“The Washers of the Shroud,” the “Commemoration Ode”—his “Vision of Sir Launfal,” and “The Cathedral” would immediately proclaim him something greater than any satiric poet could be. Last of all, nobler than the sum of his writings was the work which he effected in bringing together his native land and the mother country, England, in a bond of sympathy unknown since their separation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson.—Emerson usually passes for a philosophical mystic and lay preacher. He deemed himself more of a poet than anything else, for he always hoped to attain perfect utterance in rhythmical language. Yet the fact that he wrote much more prose, however imaginative, than verse, has relegated the main treatment of him to another section of this volume. Such an arrangement, of course, is grounded in uncritical custom, not in reason.

Arbitrarily limiting ourselves here to his compositions in metre, we find that throughout his life (1803–82), or throughout the years in which he was productive, Emerson was responsible for much more poetry, in the narrower sense, than most of his readers are aware of, and that his poems are as well worth attention as his essays. In his verse, which was written for himself, he is, to be sure, less at home so far as concerns the form, but being less hampered by any regard for an audience, he is more spontaneous in his thought. At the same time, his stock of fundamental ideas and sentiments, however vivid and pure, was pretty much exhausted in his prose, so that, to a considerable extent, he repeated himself when he changed his medium of expression. Moreover, as the hierophant of intellectual independence, he did not come to a practical realisation of the way in which the opulence of the greatest poets and thinkers is related to the wealth and continuity of their reading. Emerson, indeed, read multifariously if not thoroughly; and it is true that his essays are liberal in the use of borrowed matter; the production of an essay on Montaigne might appear to mean little more than throwing together an anthology of excerpts, cemented with Emerson’s own marginal notes. He rarely mastered any single author entire. His insight went by leaps and bounds, and he appropriated what he found congenial, not being pliant enough to enter steadily and long into the thought of another. His prose in general lacks plan. Some of his poems, on the contrary, are more unified, having an organic wholeness which is absent from his longer essays. In an essay, mere continuity of sentiment and preservation of individual style do not constitute an adequate link between the parts. In a lyric poem, such consistency may suffice. Virtually, all of Emerson’s poetry is lyrical and meditative. The technique is seldom smooth, not for want of pains, since it was laboured and continually retouched, but for want of capacity in the artist. The style is apt to be brittle, the cadence is not maintained through passages of any length, and the separate sentences are easily detached from their context. Even so, they are not always clear, but may need commentary and parallel from the “Essays” to explain them. Emerson’s poetry is largely autobiographical and, in no harsh sense, egoistic, a picture of the successive and recurrent states of his own soul. His vision of the universe in each of its parts, his belief in the immanence of God and the educational potency of solitude, and his confidence in the ability of Nature to prepare and suddenly to produce ideal or “representative” men, are ever near the surface. In his descriptions of the external world he is faithful to detail; but as he discovers in each individual thing an intrinsic value transcending the value of its dependence on the whole, he is likely to see the parts without being ready to seize the perspective. Among details his selection, if he makes any, seems altogether an affair of his mood, not of logic. His power of choice is nevertheless stronger than Whitman’s. He has a more than Wordsworthian distaste for analytic science:

But these young scholars, who invade our hills,
Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,
And travelling often in the cut he makes,
Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,
And all their botany is Latin names.