J. B. seemed to like them! A part of Lowell's full harvest of prose sprang from that habit of enormous reading which he had indulged since boyhood. He liked to think of himself as "one of the last of the great readers"; and though he was not that, of course, there was nevertheless something of the seventeenth century tradition in his gluttony of books. The very sight and touch and smell of them were one of his pieties. He had written from Elmwood in 1861: "I am back again in the place I love best. I am sitting in my old garret, at my old desk, smoking my old pipe and loving my old friends." That is the way book-lovers still picture Lowell--the Lowell of the "Letters"--and though it is only a half-length portrait of him, it is not a false one. He drew upon his ripe stock of reading for his college lectures, and from the lectures, in turn, came many of the essays. Wide as the reading was in various languages, it was mainly in the field of "belles-lettres." Lowell had little or no interest in science or philosophy. Upon one side of his complex nature he was simply a book-man like Charles Lamb, and like Lamb he was tempted to think that books about subjects that did not interest him were not really books at all.
Recent critics have seemed somewhat disturbed over Lowell's scholarship. He once said of Longfellow: "Mr. Longfellow is not a scholar in the German sense of the word--that is to say, he is no pedant, but he certainly is a scholar in another and perhaps a higher sense. I mean in range of acquirement and the flavor that comes with it." Those words might have been written of himself. It is sixty-five years since Lowell was appointed to his professorship at Harvard, and during this long period erudition has not been idle here. It is quite possible that the University possesses to-day a better Dante scholar than Lowell, a better scholar in Old French, a better Chaucer scholar, a better Shakespeare scholar. But it is certain that if our Division of Modern Languages were called upon to produce a volume of essays matching in human interest one of Lowell's volumes drawn from these various fields, we should be obliged, first, to organize a syndicate, and, second, to accept defeat with as good grace as possible.
Contemporary critics have also betrayed a certain concern for some aspects of Lowell's criticism. Is it always penetrating, they ask? Did he think his critical problems through? Did he have a body of doctrine, a general thesis to maintain? Did he always keep to the business in hand? Candor compels the admission that he often had no theses to maintain: he invented them as he went along. Sometimes he was a mere guesser, not a clairvoyant. We have had only one Coleridge. Lowell's essay on Wordsworth is not as illuminating as Walter Pater's. The essay on Gray is not as well ordered as Arnold's. The essay on Thoreau is quite as unsatisfactory as Stevenson's. It is true that the famous longer essays on Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Dryden, Milton, are full of irrelevant matter, of facile delightful talk which often leads nowhere in particular. It is true, finally, that a deeper interest in philosophy and science might have made Lowell's criticism more fruitful; that he blazed no new paths in critical method; that he overlooked many of the significant literary movements of his own time in his own country.
But when one has said all this, even as brilliantly as Mr. Brownell has phrased it, one has failed to answer the pertinent question: "Why, in spite of these defects, were Lowell's essays read with such pleasure by so many intelligent persons on both sides of the Atlantic, and why are they read still?" The answer is to be found in the whole tradition of the English bookish essay, from the first appearance of Florio's translation of Montaigne down to the present hour. That tradition has always welcomed copious, well-informed, enthusiastic, disorderly, and affectionate talk about books. It demands gusto rather than strict method, discursiveness rather than concision, abundance of matter rather than mere neatness of design. "Here is God's plenty!" cried Dryden in his old age, as he opened once more his beloved Chaucer; and in Lowell's essays there is surely "God's plenty" for a book-lover. Every one praises "My Garden Acquaintance," "A Good Word for Winter," "On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners" as perfect types of the English familiar essay. But all of Lowell's essays are discursive and familiar. They are to be measured, not by the standards of modern French criticism--which is admittedly more deft, more delicate, more logical than ours--but by the unchartered freedom which the English-speaking races have desired in their conversations about old authors for three hundred years. After all,
"There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays
And every single one of them is right."
Lowell, like the rest of us, is to be tested by what he had, not by what he lacked.
His reputation as a talker about books and men was greatly enhanced by the addresses delivered during his service as Minister to England. Henry James once described Lowell's career in London as a tribute to the dominion of style. It was even more a triumph of character, but the style of these addresses is undeniable. Upon countless public occasions the American Minister was called upon to say the fitting word; and he deserves the quaint praise which Thomas Benton bestowed upon Chief Justice Marshall, as "a gentleman of finished breeding, of winning and prepossessing talk, and just as much mind as the occasion required him to show." I cannot think that Lowell spoke any better when unveiling a bust in Westminster Abbey than he did at the Academy dinners in Ashfield, Massachusetts, where he had Mr. Curtis and Mr. Norton to set the pace; he was always adequate, always witty and wise; and some of the addresses in England, notably the one on "Democracy" given in Birmingham in 1884, may fairly be called epoch-making in their good fortune of explaining America to Europe. Lowell had his annoyances like all ambassadors; there were dull dinners as well as pleasant ones, there were professional Irishmen to be placated, solemn despatches to be sent to Washington. Yet, like Mr. Phelps and Mr. Bayard and Mr. Choate and the lamented Walter Page in later years, this gentleman, untrained in professional diplomacy, accomplished an enduring work. Without a trace of the conventional "hand across the sea" banality, without either subservience or jingoism, he helped teach the two nations mutual respect and confidence, and thirty years later, when England and America essayed a common task in safeguarding civilization, that old anchor held.
This cumulative quality of Lowell's achievement is impressive, as one reviews his career. His most thoughtful, though not his most eloquent verse, his richest vein of letter-writing, his most influential addresses to the public, came toward the close of his life. Precocious as was his gift for expression, and versatile and brilliant as had been his productiveness in the 1848 era, he was true to his Anglo-Saxon stock in being more effective at seventy than he had been at thirty. He was one of the men who die learning and who therefore are scarcely thought of as dying at all. I am not sure that we may not say of him to-day, as Thoreau said of John Brown, "He is more alive than ever he was." Certainly the type of Americanism which Lowell represented has grown steadily more interesting to the European world, and has revealed itself increasingly as a factor to be reckoned with in the world of the future. Always responsive to his environment, always ready to advance, he faced the new political issues at the close of the century with the same courage and sagacity that had marked his conduct in the eighteen-forties. You remember his answer to Guizot's question: "How long do you think the American Republic will endure?" "So long," replied Lowell, "as the ideas of its founders continue to be dominant"; and he added that by "ideas" he meant "the traditions of their race in government and morals." Yet the conservatism revealed in this reply was blended with audacity--the inherited audacity of the pioneer. No line of Lowell's has been more often quoted in this hall than the line about the futility of attempting to open the "Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key." Those words were written in 1844. And here, in a sentence written forty-two years afterward, is a description of organized human society which voices the precise hope of forward-looking minds in Europe and America at this very hour: "The basis of all society is the putting of the force of all at the disposal of all, by means of some arrangement assented to by all, for the protection of all, and this under certain prescribed forms." Like Jefferson, like Lincoln, like Theodore Roosevelt at his noblest, Lowell dared to use the word "all."
Such men are not forgotten. As long as June days come and the bobolink's song "runs down, a brook of laughter, through the air"; as long as a few scholars are content to sit in the old garret with the old books, and close the books, at times, to think of old friends; as long as the memory of brave boys makes the "eyes cloud up for rain"; as long as Americans still cry in their hearts "O beautiful, my country!" the name of James Russell Lowell will be remembered as the inheritor and enricher of a great tradition.