Is not the decline of poetry a very curious, if not a fatal, reply to the hypothesis of evolution, carried logically into the moral and intellectual world?
Mr. Lowell completes his essay by a minute examination of Dante’s thought and style, as exhibited in the Divine Comedy; and we can find space only for the closing period:
“At the Round Table of King Arthur there was left always one seat empty for him who should accomplish the adventure of the Holy Grail. It was called the perilous seat, because of the dangers he would encounter who would win it. In the company of the epic poets there was a place left for whoever should embody the Christian idea of a triumphant life, outwardly all defeat, inwardly victorious; who should make us partakers in that cup of sorrow in which all are communicants with Christ. He who should do this would achieve indeed the perilous seat; for he must combine poesy with doctrine in such cunning wise that the one lose not its beauty nor the other its severity—and Dante has done it. As he takes possession of it we seem to hear the cry he himself heard when Virgil rejoined the company of great singers:
‘All honor to the loftiest of poets!’”
Mr. Lowell’s Dante is a man divinely inspired and overshadowed by divinity to the grave itself—a character austere, devoid of humor, unflinchingly faithful to his
conceptions of right whether moral or political, self-respecting, and believing in his own commission from God; a mind logical, systematic, and illuminated by Heaven, consciously developing its marvellous genius in the midst of contumely; a heart consumed first by human love for Beatrice, and by it purged and refined out of personality into the love of God and the proper relative appreciation of all creatures; a sublime human soul, in brief, transformed from the individual into the universal, and teaching all men, as it was taught in sorrow and in love, to seek eternity as the sole object worthy of human effort; and teaching in a lofty splendor of phrase and successions of exquisite imagery which continue to astonish posterity and will for ever adorn general literature.
The essay on Milton is devoted rather to Mr. David Masson than to the poet. There is nothing to indicate that the critic is in love with either the poems or the personality of the sublime Puritan who officiated in the capacity of Latin secretary to Oliver Cromwell, and who devoted himself to epic verse after his services ceased to be available for the oppression of his fellow-men. Still less is he enamored of Mr. David Masson as a biographer of Milton, and the jovial though thoroughly effective manner in which he demonstrates the Scotch professor’s unfitness for this office adds to his volume a flavor of pungency which brings back happy recollections of the “Table for Critics.” Masson is very voluminous and exasperatingly given to remote and often irrelevant detail; and Macaulay, in extinguishing some of the literary pretenders of his time, was never more dextrous than Lowell in this grotesque joust at
the Edinburgh professor’s faults, nor half so witty. Referring to the length of the biography—there are eight volumes octavo of the Life and Works—Lowell says with perfect gravity: “We envy the secular leisures of Methuselah, and are thankful that his biography, at least (if written in the same longeval proportion), is irrecoverably lost to us. What a subject that would have been for a person of Mr. Masson’s spacious predilections!” And he goes on to say: “It is plain, from the preface to the second volume, that Mr. Masson himself has an uneasy consciousness that something is wrong, and that Milton ought to be more than a mere incident of his own biography.” Masson, on the other hand, is of opinion “that, whatever may be thought by a hasty person looking in on the subject from the outside,” no one can study Milton without being obliged to study also the history of England, Scotland, and Ireland; whereupon Lowell retorts that, even for a hasty person, eleven years is “rather long to have his button held by a biographer ere he begins his next sentence.”
Masson’s rambling history of the seventeenth century “is interrupted now and then,” says Lowell, “by an unexpected apparition of Milton, who, like Paul Pry, just pops in and hopes he does not intrude, to tell us what he has been doing in the meanwhile.” Blinded by the dust of old papers which Masson ransacks, to discover that they have no relation to his hero, the critic compares the ponderous biography to Allston’s picture of Elijah in the wilderness, “where a good deal of research at last enables us to guess at the prophet absconded like a conundrum in the landscape, where the very ravens could scarce have found him out.”
This characterization of Edinburgh by Harvard will certainly inspire suggestion, if it does not awaken hope; but Lowell’s right to criticise the sedate and prolix gentleman who occupies in the Scottish metropolis the chair which he himself fills at Cambridge does not rest, as we have already seen in the essay on Dante, on Susarion’s faculty of turning the serious and dull into actual comedy.