SIX YEARS
1845-1851
When, in the spring of 1845, the Lowells returned to Cambridge from
Philadelphia, where they had spent the first four months of their
married life, it was to share the family home of Elmwood for the next
six years. Lowell’s father retired in the summer of 1845 from active
charge of the West Parish in Boston, but retained his interest in
various societies which gave him partial occupation, leaving him leisure
for the indulgence of his taste for reading and for the pleasures of
gardening and small farming. His mother, whose malady slowly but
steadily increased, was under watchful care. She was taken to various
health resorts in hopes of recovery, and spent a part of her last years
under more constant treatment at an asylum for the mentally deranged.
Miss Rebecca Lowell had charge of the little household, and now and then
went on journeys with her father or mother or both, leaving the young
couple to themselves. As one child after another came into the circle,
the grandfather found a solace for the sorrow which lay heavily upon
him, and his letters, when he was on one of his journeys, were filled
with affectionate messages for his new daughter and her children,
mingled with careful charges to his son concerning the well-being of the
cattle, small and large, and the proper harvesting of the little crops.
Mrs. Lowell’s family lived near by in Watertown, and one by one her
sisters married, one of them coming to Cambridge to live. The society of
the college town was open, and it was in these early years that Lowell
formed one of a whist club, which, with but slight variation in
membership, continued its meetings to the end of his life, and the
simple records of which were kept by Lowell. Its most constant members
were Mr. John Holmes, a younger brother of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes,
Mr. John Bartlett, who was for a while a bookseller in Cambridge, and
afterward until his retirement a member of the publishing firm of
Little, Brown & Co. of Boston, and best known by his handbook of
“Familiar Quotations” and his elaborate “Concordance to Shakespeare,”
and finally Dr. Estes Howe, who married Mrs. Lowell’s sister.
Lowell was much given to concealing in his verse or prose little
allusions which might be passed over by readers unaware of what lay
beneath, but would be taken as a whispered aside by his friends. Thus in
a “Preliminary Note to the Second Edition” of “A Fable for Critics,” he
says: “I can walk with the Doctor, get facts from the Don, or draw out
the Lambish quintessence of John, and feel nothing more than a half
comic sorrow, to think that they all[81] will be lying to-morrow tossed
carelessly up on the waste-paper shelves, and forgotten by all but their
half dozen selves.”
In the summer of 1846 the sickness of little Blanche took the family
suddenly to Stockbridge in the Berkshire Hills, whence Lowell wrote to
Carter: “Stockbridge is without exception the quietest place I was ever
in, and the office of postmaster here one of the most congenial to my
taste and habits of any I ever saw or heard of. The postmaster has no
regular hours whatever. Even if engaged in sorting the mail, he will run
out and lock the door behind him, to play with his grandchildren. I do
not believe that in the cabinet of any postmaster-general there is a
more unique specimen. He is a gray-bearded old gentleman of between
sixty and seventy, wears the loose calico gown so much in vogue among
the country clergy, and feels continually that he is an important limb
of the great body politic. I do not mean that he is vain. There is too
profound a responsibility attached to his office to allow of so light
and unworthy a passion. There is a solemn, half-melancholy grandeur
about him, a foreboding, perchance, of that change of administration
which may lop him from the parent tree,--a Montezuma-like dread of that
mysterious stranger into whose hands his sceptre must pass. In
purchasing a couple of steel pens or a few cigars of him (for he keeps a
small variety store) you feel that the parcel is done up and handed over
the counter by one of the potent hands of government itself.... We have
found Stockbridge an exceedingly pleasant place and have made many
agreeable acquaintances. Blanche is a favorite throughout the village
and knows everybody.”
Longfellow, who was near by in Pittsfield at this time, notes in his
Diary, 16 August: “In the afternoon Lowell came with his wife from Lenox
to see us. He looks as hale as a young farmer; she very pale and
fragile. They are driving about the country and go southward to Great
Barrington and the region of the Bash Bish.”
The illness of Blanche which led her parents to take her into the
country was slight and temporary. The child grew in beauty and winning
grace, and endeared herself to her father in a manner which left its
signs long afterward. Early in March, 1847, however, when she was
vigorous and gave promise of a hearty life, she was seized suddenly with
a malady consequent upon too rapid teething, and after a week’s sickness
died. “In the fourteen months she was with us (for which God be
thanked),” Lowell wrote to Briggs, “she showed no trace of any evil
tendency, and it is wonderful how in so brief a space she could have
twined her little life round so many hearts. Wherever she went everybody
loved her. My poor father loved her so that he almost broke his heart in
endeavoring to console Maria when it was at last decided the dear child
was not to be spared to us.” After Blanche was buried, her father took
her tiny shoes, the only ones she had ever worn, and hung them in his
chamber. There they stayed till his own death. “The Changeling”
preserves in poetry the experience of the father in this first great
sorrow of his life, and “The First Snow-Fall” intimates the consolation
which was shortly to be brought, for in September the second child,
Mabel, was born.
The literary product of 1847 was inconsiderable. A few poems appeared,
and Lowell even contemplated trying his hand at a tragedy founded on the
Conquest of Mexico,--the first conquest, as one of his friends slyly
remarks,--suggested no doubt by Prescott’s history, which had appeared
four years earlier, and had just been followed by the “Conquest of
Peru.” He made some progress with the tragedy, and even purposed
offering it in competition for the large prize promised by Forrest for a
good acting tragedy, but no line of it appears to have been preserved.
He contributed also two or three articles to the _North American
Review_, and in the fall of the year he set about the collection of such
poems as he had written since his previous volume appeared. In the midst
of this work he wrote to his friend Carter, then in the little village
of Pepperell, and his letter reflects pleasantly the attitude he always
took toward New England country life, as well as shows the wistfulness
of his regard for his lost child.
“There are pleasanter ways of looking at a country village like
Pepperell,” he writes to his somewhat discontented correspondent; “there
are good studies both within doors and without, and either picture will
be new to you. Talk to the men about farming, and you will find yourself
in good society at once. Inquire of the women about the mysteries of
cheese--and butter-making, and you will be more entertained than with
the Georgics. At first, you find yourself in a false relation with them.
You touch at no points and bristle repellingly at all. They flounder in
their conversation and seek shelter in the weather or the price of pork,
because they consider themselves under a painful necessity to entertain
you. They can’t converse because they try--effort being the untimely
grave of all true interchange of natures. They make a well where there
should be a fountain. Get them upon any common ground, and you will find
there is genuine stuff in them. The essence of good society is simply a
community in habits of thought and topics of interest. When we approach
each other naturally, we meet easily and gracefully; if we hurry too
much we are apt to come together with an unpleasant bump.
“Who knows how much domestic interest was involved in that question the
goodwife asked you about Mr. Praisegod’s servant? Perhaps she has a son,
or a daughter betrothed to a neighbor’s son, who thinks of beginning
life (as many of the farmers’ children in our country towns do) by
entering into service in the city. Perhaps she wished and yet did not
dare to ask of the temptations he would be exposed to. I love our
Yankees with all their sharp angles.
“Maria is and has been remarkably well ever since the birth of our
little darling, if I may call her so when Blanche still holds the first
place in our hearts. Little Miss Mabel thrives wonderfully. She is, I
think, as good a child as her little sister--though I tremble to trace
any likeness between the two. She certainly has not Blanche’s noble and
thoughtful eyes, which were noticeable even when she was first born. But
some of her ways are very like her sister’s. Those who have seen her say
that she is a very beautiful child.”
Toward the end of the year the volume of poems pressed hard upon him. “I
should have written to you,” he writes to Briggs, 13 November, 1847, “at
any rate just to say that I loved you still and to ask how you did, had
I not been most preposterously busy with the printers. I had calculated
in a loose way that I had ‘copy’ enough prepared to make as large a
volume as I intended mine should be, but about three weeks ago the
printers overtook me, and since then we have been neck and neck for
something like a hundred pages--thirty page heats. It was only yesterday
that I won the cup. Everybody has a notion that it is of advantage to be
out before Christmas; and though I feel a sort of contempt for a demand
so adventitiously created, and do not wish anybody to buy my book but
those who buy to read, yet it is one of these little points which we
find it convenient to yield in life, and not the less readily because it
will be for our advantage not to be obstinate. I have a foolish kind of
pride in these particulars. I had rather, for example, that you should
have copied into the _Mirror_ a column of abuse than those exaggerated
commendations of my Louisville friend. I do not know whether it is a
common feeling or not, but I can never get to consider myself as
anything more than a boy. My temperament is so youthful, that whenever I
am addressed (I mean by mere acquaintances) as if my opinion were worth
anything, I can hardly help laughing. I cannot but think to myself with
an inward laugh: ‘My good friend, you would be as mad as a hornet with
me, if you knew that I was only a boy of twelve behind a bearded vizor.’
This feeling is so strong that I have got into a way of looking on the
Poet Lowell as an altogether different personage from myself, and feel a
little offended when my friends confound the two.”
The volume of poems to which Lowell refers in this letter came out just
before Christmas, 1847. It bore the words “Second Series” on the
title-page, being coupled in the author’s mind with the Poems issued
four years previous. It is in the main a collection of the poems which
Lowell in the past four years had scattered through papers and
magazines, though he omitted several which had appeared in print, one or
two of which indeed he went back and picked up on issuing his next
collection a score of years later. He did not draw on his Biglow poems,
reserving them for a volume by themselves, and he omitted several that
were in a similar vein. There was perhaps no single poem in the new
series which struck a deeper note than is to be found in one or two of
the poems in the earlier collection, yet the art of the second series is
firmer than that of the first, and the book as a whole is distinctly
more even and more free from the mere sentimentalism which marks the
previous volume. Scattered through it are a few of the more serious of
his anti-slavery poems, as if for a testimony; but he does not retain
the violent, not to say turgid, songs which he had thrown out upon
occasions of public excitement.
There is one poem among the few contributed directly to the volume,
which is familiar to lovers of Lowell himself rather than of Lowell the
poet, if we may take his own discrimination, and it is most likely that
it was written under conditions referred to in the letter just quoted.
“An Indian-Summer Reverie,” which fills sixteen pages of the little
volume, near its close, bears the marks of rapid writing. It is easy to
believe that Lowell, coming away from the printing-office, where he had
learned that the printers needed at once more copy, paused near the
willows, and in the warm, hazy November afternoon let his mind drift
idly over the scene and blend with it reflections on his own life. The
poet, by virtue of his gift, is always young, and yet when young is the
most retrospective of men. Not yet thirty, Lowell could remember his
youth, and helped by the autumn that was in the air, could see nature
and man and his own full life through a medium which has the mistiness
and the color of the Indian Summer. There are poetic lines and phrases
in the poem, and more than all the veil of the season hangs tremulously
over the whole, so that one is gently stirred by the poetic feeling of
the rambling verses; yet, after all, the most enduring impression is of
the young man himself in that still hour of his life, when he was
conscious, not so much of a reform to which he must put his hand, as of
the love of beauty, and of the vague melancholy which mingles with
beauty in the soul of a susceptible poet. The river winding through the
marshes, the distant sound of the ploughman, the near chatter of the
chipmunk, the individual trees, each living its own life, the march of
the seasons flinging lights and shadows over the broad scene, the
pictures of human life associated with his own experience, the hurried
survey of his village years--all these pictures float before his vision;
and then, with an abruptness which is like the choking of the singer’s
voice with tears, there wells up the thought of the little life which
held as in one precious drop the love and faith of his heart. Mr.
Briggs, in a letter written upon receiving the volume, says: “I have
just laid it aside with my eyes full of tears after reading ‘The
Changeling,’ which appears to me the greatest poem in the collection,
and I think that it will be so regarded by and by, a good many years
hence, when I shall be wholly forgotten and you will only be known by
the free thoughts you will leave behind you.” Mr. Briggs had himself
lost a child, and his grief had been commemorated by Lowell; this same
letter announces the birth of a daughter. One’s personal experience
often colors if it does not obscure one’s critical judgment; but in
taking account of Lowell’s life and its expression, we may not overlook
the fact that up to this time certainly he was singularly ingenuous in
making poetry, not simply a vehicle for the conveyance of large emotions
generalized from personal experience, but a precipitation of his most
intimate emotions. His love, his tender feelings for his friends, his
generous and ardent hopes for humanity, his passion for freedom and
truth, all lay at the depths of his being; but they rose to the surface
perpetually in his poems and his letters, and he had scarcely learned to
hold them in check by that hard mundane wisdom which comes to most
through the attrition of daily living.
Thus far Lowell had looked out on life pretty steadily from the
sheltered privacy of a happy home, and he was not immediately to change
his surroundings; but a certain induration was now to be effected which
can scarcely be said to have arrested his spontaneity, but may fairly be
looked upon as leading him to regard himself more as others regarded
him, as no longer “a boy of twelve behind a bearded vizor,” but as grown
up and become a man of the world. For it was not long after this that
the relation into which he had entered with the _National Anti-Slavery
Standard_, and which had undergone a sort of suspension as we have seen,
became a very close and exacting one.
The seclusion of his life satisfied Lowell; he was an infrequent visitor
to Boston even, and made but few journeys. Now and then he went to New
York, and, as we have seen, once to Stockbridge. To Canada also he made
one journey; but it is clear from the circumstances attending these
flittings that the Lowells had no money to spend on luxuries. They
could live simply and without much outlay of cash at Elmwood, but
travelling meant hoarding first, and in those early married years the
young couple was not often out of debt. Even a trip to New York had to
be postponed again and again on this account. Mr. Gay’s drafts in
payment of account for contributions to the _Standard_ were irregular
and always seemed to come just in the nick of time.
“I thought to see you this week,” Lowell wrote to Gay, 8 June, 1848,
when acknowledging one of these raven-flights,--“but cannot come yet. I
cannot come without any money, and leave my wife with 62-1/2 cents, such
being the budget brought in by my secretary of the treasury this
week.... I am expecting some money daily--I always am--I always have
been, and yet have never been fairly out of debt since I entered
college.” And again, writing to the same, 26 February, 1849, “The truth
is, that I have just been able to keep my head above water; but there is
a hole in my life-preserver, and what wind I can raise from your quarter
comes just in season to make up for leakage and save me from total
submersion. Since the day after I received your remittance for December,
I have literally not had a copper, except a small sum which I borrowed.
It was all spent before I got it. So is the last one, too. As long as I
have money I don’t think anything about it, except to fancy my present
stock inexhaustible and capable of buying up the world.” A few days
later, on receiving the draft which his half-humorous letter called
for, he wrote in the same strain: “I am not very often down in the
mouth: but sometimes, at the end of the year, when I have done a
tolerable share of work, and have nothing to show for it, I feel as if I
had rather be a spruce clerk on India wharf than a man of letters.
Regularly I look forward to New Year, and think that I shall begin the
next January out of debt, and as regularly I am disappointed.”
Yet all this time, with his frugal living and his vain effort to be even
with the world, he could not refrain from obeying his generous impulses.
His gift of “A Fable for Critics” to Briggs illustrates this spirit, and
a passage in one of his letters shows the secret giver who is perhaps a
little more lovable in the eyes of the Lord than the cheerful public
one. Mr. Briggs had written to him 16 November, 1849: “On Monday evening
Page and I were at Willis’s house, and in the course of a conversation
about Poe, Willis mentioned that you had written him a very pleasant
letter about Poe, and enclosed something really handsome for Mrs. Clemm.
‘I could not help thinking,’ said Willis, ‘that if Lowell had known what
Poe wrote to me about him just previous to his death, he would hardly
have been so liberal.” “What a contemptible idea of me Willis must
have,” Lowell replied, “to think that anything Poe might say of me would
make any difference in my feeling pity for his poor mother-in-law. I
confess it does not raise my opinion of Willis. I knew before as well as
I know now, that Poe must have been abusing me, for he knew that ever
since his conduct toward you about the _Broadway Journal_ I had thought
meanly of him. I think Willis would hardly care to see some letters of
Poe to me in which _he_ is spoken of. My ‘pleasant letter’ to W. was
about ten lines, rather less than more I fancy, and my ‘generous
donation’ was five dollars! I particularly requested of him that it
should be anonymous, which I think a good principle, as it guards us
against giving from any unworthy motive. That Willis should publish it
at the street corners only proves the truth of Swift’s axiom that any
man may gain the reputation of generosity by £20 a year spent
judiciously.”
When Hawthorne lost his place in the Salem Custom House, Lowell with
other of his friends made active effort to set him on his feet. He wrote
to Mr. Duyckinck, 13 January, 1850: “Perhaps you know that Hawthorne was
last spring turned out of an office which he held in the Salem Custom
House, and which was his sole support. He is now, I learn, very poor,
and some money has just been raised for him by his friends in this
neighborhood. Could not something be also done in New York? I know that
you appreciate him, and that you will be glad to do anything in your
power. I take it for granted that you know personally all those who
would be most likely to give. I write also to Mr. O’Sullivan, who is a
friend of Hawthorne’s, but am ignorant whether he is now in New York. Of
course Hawthorne is entirely ignorant that anything of the kind is going
on, and it would be better that ‘a bird in the air’ should seem to have
carried the news to New York, and that if anything be raised, it should
go thence, directly, as a spontaneous gift.”
The money which Lowell and others collected for Hawthorne was sent in
the most anonymous fashion through Mr. George S. Hillard, and Hawthorne
acknowledged the gift in a letter which moves one by its mingling of
gratitude and humiliation. “I read your letter,” he writes to Hillard,
“in the vestibule of the post office [at Salem]; and it drew--what my
troubles never have--the water to my eyes; so that I was glad of the
sharply cold west wind that blew into them as I came homeward, and gave
them an excuse for being red and bleared.
“There was much that was very sweet--and something too that was very
bitter--mingled with that same moisture. It is sweet to be remembered
and cared for by one’s friends--some of whom know me for what I am,
while others, perhaps, know me only through a generous faith--sweet to
think that they deem me worth upholding in my poor work through life.
And it is bitter, nevertheless, to need their support. It is something
else besides pride that teaches me that ill-success in life is really
and justly a matter of shame. I am ashamed of it, and I ought to be. The
fault of a failure is attributable--in a great degree at least--to the
man who fails. I should apply this truth in judging of other men; and it
behooves me not to shun its point or edge in taking it home to my _own_
heart. Nobody has a right to live in the world, unless he be strong and
able, and applies his ability to good purpose.
“The money, dear Hillard, will smooth my path for a long time to come.
The only way in which a man can retain his self-respect, while availing
himself of the generosity of his friends, is by making it an incitement
to his utmost exertions, so that he may not need their help again. I
shall look upon it so--nor will shun any drudgery that my hand shall
find to do, if thereby I may win bread.”
Nearly four years later, when Hawthorne had leapt into fame and
prosperity after the publication of “The Scarlet Letter,” he wrote again
to Hillard from Liverpool: “I herewith send you a draft on Ticknor for
the sum (with interest included) which was so kindly given me by unknown
friends, through you, about four years ago. I have always hoped and
intended to do this, from the first moment when I made up my mind to
accept the money. It would not have been right to speak of this purpose,
before it was in my power to accomplish it; but it has never been out of
my mind for a single day, nor hardly, I think, for a single working
hour. I am most happy that this loan (as I may fairly call it, at this
moment) can now be repaid without the risk on my part of leaving my wife
and children utterly destitute. I should have done it sooner; but I felt
that it would be selfish to purchase the great satisfaction for myself,
at any fresh risk to them. We are not rich, nor are we ever likely to
be; but the miserable pinch is over.
“The friends who were so generous to me must not suppose that I have not
felt deeply grateful, nor that my delight at relieving myself from this
pecuniary obligation is of any ungracious kind. I have been grateful all
along, and am more so now than ever. This act of kindness did me an
unspeakable amount of good; for it came when I most needed to be assured
that anybody thought it worth while to keep me from sinking. And it did
me even greater good than this, in making me sensible of the need of
sterner efforts than my former ones, in order to establish a right for
myself to live and be comfortable. For it is my creed (and was so even
at that wretched time) that a man has no claim upon his fellow
creatures, beyond bread and water, and a grave, unless he can win it by
his own strength or skill. But so much the kinder were those unknown
friends whom I thank again with all my heart.”[82]
Aside from his modest salary from the _Standard_, Lowell’s income from
his writings was meagre enough. In publishing his volumes of poetry, he
appears to have been largely if not entirely at the expense of
manufacture, and in the imperfectly organized condition of the book
market at that time, he had himself to supervise arrangements for
selling his volume of poems in New York. There are one or two hints
that, after his release from contributing to the _Standard_, he
contemplated some new editorial position, perhaps even meditated a fresh
periodical venture. At any rate, his friend Briggs remonstrated with
him, in a letter written 15 March, 1849: “Don’t, my dear friend, think
of selling yourself to a weekly or monthly periodical of any kind,
except as a contributor _deo volente._ The drudgery of editorship would
destroy you, and bring you no profit. Make up your mind resolutely to
refuse any offers, let them be never so tempting. In a mere pecuniary
point of view, it would be more profitable for you to sell your writings
where you could procure the best pay for them; they will be worth more
and more as your wants grow.” And in December, 1850, Emerson, who was
enlisting Hawthorne’s interest in a new magazine projected by Mr. George
Bradburn, “that impossible problem of a New England magazine,” as he
calls it, writes: “I told him to go to Lowell, who had been for a year
meditating the like project.”
It is possible that there was some plan for turning the _Massachusetts
Quarterly Review_ into a brisker and more distinctly literary journal.
At any rate, Lowell, writing to Emerson 19 February, 1850, says: “The
plan seems a little more forward. I have seen Parker, who is as placable
as the raven down of darkness, and not unwilling to shift his Old Man of
the sea to other shoulders. Longfellow also is toward, and talks in a
quite Californian manner of raising funds by voluntary subscription.”
The _Massachusetts Quarterly_, which had been started in 1847 as an
organ of more progressive thought than the _North American Review_, was
under the management of Theodore Parker, and Lowell was evidently a
welcome though not constant contributor, as this letter to the editor
intimates:--
ELMWOOD, July 28, [1848].
MY DEAR SIR:--Do _you_ know where parsons go to who don’t believe
in original sin? I think that your experience as an editor will
bring you nearer orthodoxy by convincing you of the total depravity
of contributors. I have no doubt that the plague of booksellers was
sent to punish authors for their sins toward editors.
Your note was so illegible that I was unable to make out that part
of it in which you reproached me for my remissness. I shall choose
rather to treasure it as containing I know not what commendations
of my promptitude and punctuality. I will have it framed and glazed
and exhibit it to editors inquiring my qualifications, as the
enthusiastic testimony of the Rev. Theo. Parker, and fearlessly
defy all detection.
I assure you that it is not my fault that I did not send the
enclosed[83] earlier. I have suffered all this summer with a severe
pain in the head, which has entirely crippled me for a great part
of the time. It is what people call a _fullness_ in the head, but
its effect is to produce an entire emptiness.
As it is, I am reluctant to send the article. I hardly know what
is in it myself, but I am quite conscious that it is disjointed and
wholly incomplete. I found it impossible to concentrate my mind
upon it so as to give it any unity or entireness. Believe the
writing it has worried me more than the not receiving it worried
you.
I send it as to a man in a strait to whom _anything_ will be
useful. I throw it _quasi lignum naufrago._ If I had one of the
cedarn columns of the temple, I would cast it overboard to you; but
having only a shapeless log, I give you that, as being as useful to
a drowning man as if it were already made into a Mercury.
I have, you see, given directions to the printer to copy “The
Hamadryad.” My copy is a borrowed one, and if you own one I should
be obliged to you if you would send it to the printing-office, as
your warning about not smutching, etc., would probably have more
weight with your printers than mine. If you have no copy please let
me know through the P. O. and I will send the one I have, as I have
obtained permission to do.
I should like to see the proofs, and as I am going to New York on
Monday next to be absent a week, I should like to have them sent to
me there to the care of S. H. Gay, 142 Nassau St., if it should be
necessary to print before I return. If there is too much hurry,
will you be good enough to look at them yourself.
If the article seem too short for a Review, you are welcome to
insert it among your literary notices, or to return it.
I must thank you before I close my note for the pleasure I received
in reading a recent sermon of yours which I saw in the
_Chronotype._ You have not so much mounted the pulpit as lifted it
up to you.
Very truly your Eumenides-driven contributor,
J. R. L.[84]
The most substantial magazine in his own neighborhood was the _North
American Review_, and to that, in his early period, Lowell contributed
but half a dozen articles. It is partly characteristic of the manner of
the heavy reviewing of the day, and wholly characteristic of Lowell,
that in each of these cases quite two thirds of the article is taken up
with prolegomena. Before he could settle down to an examination of “The
New Timon,” he must needs analyze at great length the quality of Pope,
who had served as a sort of pattern: it is interesting, by the way, to
note that in the last paragraph of his review, he guesses the book to
have been written by Bulwer. So in reviewing Disraeli’s “Tancred,” he
despatches the book itself somewhat summarily after a dozen pages of
witty reflections on novel-writing. A review of Browning is more
definitely an examination of this poet, with large extracts from
“Luria,” though it has the inevitable long introduction on poetry in
general; but its appreciation and discriminating judgment of Browning at
a time when “Sordello,” “Paracelsus,” and “Bells and Pomegranates” were
the only poems and collection by which to measure him, indicate surely
how direct and at first hand were Lowell’s critical appraisals. “Above
all,” he says, after a glowing rehearsal of the contents of “Bells and
Pomegranates,” “his personages are not mere mouthpieces for the author’s
idiosyncrasies. We take leave of Mr. Browning at the end of ‘Sordello,’
and except in some shorter lyrics see no more of him. His men and women
_are_ men and women, and not Mr. Browning masquerading in different
colored dominoes:” and in the same article occurs a passage which might
lead one to think Lowell was musing over his own qualities: “Wit makes
other men laugh, and that only once. It may be repeated indefinitely to
new audiences and produce the same result. Humor makes the humorist
himself laugh. He is a part of his humor, and it can never be repeated
without loss.”
In the more substantial literary criticism of his maturity Lowell
occupied himself mainly with the great names of world literature, but at
this time he was especially intent on his contemporaries in America and
England, and he was keenly alive to manifestations of spirit which gave
evidence of transcending the bounds of local reputation. In a review of
Longfellow’s “Kavanagh” he made the book really only a peg from which to
hang a long disquisition upon nationality in literature, a subject
which, it will be remembered, receives considerable attention in the
book. Lowell’s own conclusion is that “Nationality is only a less narrow
form of provincialism, a sublimer sort of clownishness and ill manners.”
It was with the heartiest good-will that he welcomed Thoreau’s “Week on
the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” just after the publication of that
book. As in his other reviews of this period, he must needs preface his
consideration of the book itself with some general remarks on
travellers, which he liked well enough to preserve in his “Leaves from
my Journal in Italy and Elsewhere,” published in “Fireside Travels;” but
the main part of his article is a generous appreciation of Thoreau’s
faculty of insight into the things of nature. “A graduate of
Cambridge,--the fields and woods, the axe, the hoe, and the rake have
since admitted him _ad eundem_. Mark how his imaginative sympathy goes
beneath the crust, deeper down than that of Burns, and needs no plough
to turn up the object of its muse.” He makes, however, a clear
distinction between Thoreau the observer and man of reflection and
Thoreau the bookman. “As long as he continues an honest Boswell, his
book is delightful; but sometimes he serves his two rivers as Hazlitt
did Northcote, and makes them run Thoreau or Emerson, or, indeed,
anything but their own transparent element. What, for instance, have
Concord and Merrimack to do with Boodh, themselves professors of an
elder and to them wholly sufficient religion, namely, the willing
subjects of watery laws, to seek their ocean? We have digressions on
Boodh, on Anacreon (with translations hardly so good as Cowley), on
Perseus, on Friendship, and we know not what. We come upon them like
snags, jolting us headforemost out of our places as we are rowing
placidly up stream, or drifting down. Mr. Thoreau becomes so absorbed in
these discussions that he seems, as it were, to catch a crab, and
disappears uncomfortably from his seat at the bow-oar. We could forgive
them all, especially that on Books, and that on Friendship (which is
worthy of one who has so long commerced with Nature and with Emerson),
we could welcome them all, were they put by themselves at the end of the
book. But as it is, they are out of proportion and out of place, and mar
our Merrimacking dreadfully. We were bid to a river-party, not to be
preached at. They thrust themselves obtrusively out of the narrative,
like those quarries of red glass which the Bowery dandies (emulous of
Sisyphus) push laboriously before them as breast-pins.” He finds fault
with Thoreau for some of his verse, but regards with admiration his
prose. “The style is compact, and the language has an antique purity
like wine grown colorless with age.” Lowell expressed the same
admiration for Thoreau’s style when he wrote again about him a dozen
years later, after re-reading his books, but his point of view had by
that time changed, and he was more concerned to look into Thoreau’s
philosophy of life.
The article on Landor, written at this time, was quite exclusively an
examination of the genius of a writer for whom he had long had a great
admiration; and inasmuch as he had himself tried the form of
conversation, it is worth while to note the excellent judgment he passes
on Landor’s art. “Of his ‘Imaginary Conversations’ we may generally say
that they would be better defined as dialogues between the imaginations
of the persons introduced than between the persons themselves. There is
a something in all men and women who deserve the much-abused title of
_individuals_, which we call their character, something finer than the
man or woman, and yet which _is_ the man or woman nevertheless. We feel
it in whatever they say or do, but it is better than their speech or
deed, and can be conceived of apart from these. It is his own
conceptions of the characters of different personages that Landor brings
in as interlocutors. Between Shakespeare’s historical and ideal
personages we perceive no difference in point of reality. They are alike
historical to us. We allow him to substitute his Richard for the Richard
of history, and we suspect that those are few who doubt whether Caliban
ever existed. Whatever Hamlet and Cæsar say we feel to be theirs, though
we know it to be Shakespeare’s. Whatever Landor puts into the mouth of
Pericles and Michael Angelo and Tell, we know to be his, though we can
conceive that it might have been theirs. Don Quixote would never have
attacked any puppets of his. The hand which jerked the wires, and the
mouth which uttered the speeches would have been too clearly visible.”
Here again it is interesting to take up the reminiscences of Landor and
of his own early acquaintance with his writings, which he printed in
1888, when introducing a group of Landor’s letters; for the comparison
shows that though his enthusiasm for this writer had somewhat abated
with years, the general tone of his judgment was the same.
The article on Landor was a deferred one. It was to have been written
for the June number of the _Massachusetts Quarterly Review_, but did not
appear till December. His child’s sickness and work on the “Biglow
Papers” drove other things out of his head. Indeed, as he wrote rapidly
when he was moved to write at all, so he was afflicted with obstinate
inertia when ideas did not come spontaneously. “I am again a
delinquent,” he wrote to Gay, 25 November, 1848,--“and this time I am
ashamed to say, out of pure laziness and having nothing to write about.
But my next article I intend to write on Tuesday, so that you will be
sure of it in time. Do forgive me this once more, and forgive also (if
you can) the stupidity of my contribution. I feel like a squeezed turnip
on which the experiment of extracting blood has been tried. I am
haunted, like Barnaby Rudge’s father, with the sound of a _Bell_, not
having sent anything yet to that horrible annual.[85] Upon my word I am
almost crazy with it. I have not an idea in my head, and believe firmly
that I never shall have one again. And I obtained a reprieve ending a
week ago last Friday!”
But if he groaned thus over writing for publication, he was lavish of
criticism and what might be called material for literature, when writing
to his friends. The letters which Mr. Norton prints, dated in this
period, abound in felicitous comment on men and incidents, and even a
postscript will sometimes ramble on into the dimensions almost of a
separate letter. After indulging in a long epistle to Mr. Briggs, dated
12 May, 1848, he suddenly remembers that he means to send some poems of
his wife’s for a collection which Griswold was making of the writings of
the female poets of America; and after some lively comments on her
contemporaries, he takes note of articles recently written by Briggs,
and falls into a strain which he has disclosed elsewhere in somewhat
similar terms: “You are wrong and N. P. W. is right (as I think) in the
main, in what he says about American Society. There is as striking a
want of external as of internal culture among our men. We ought to have
produced the finest race of _gentlemen_ in the world. But Europeans have
laughed us into a nation of snobs. We are ashamed of our institutions.
Our literature aims to convince Europe that America is as conservative
and respectable as herself. I have often remarked that educated
Americans have the least dignified bearing of any cultivated people.
They all stoop in the shoulders, intellectually as well as physically. A
nation of freemen, we alone of all others have the gait of slaves. The
great power of the English aristocracy lies in their polish. That
impresses the great middle class, who have a sort of dim conception of
its value. A man gains in _power_ as he gains in ease. It is a great
advantage to him to be cultivated in all parts of his nature. Among
scholars, R. W. E. has as fine a manner, as much poise, as I ever saw.
Yet I have seen him quite dethroned by a pure man of the world. His face
degenerated into a puzzled state. I go so far as to believe that all
great men have felt the importance of the outward and visible impression
they should produce. Socrates was as wise as Plato, indeed he was
Plato’s master, but Plato dressed better, and has the greater name.
Pericles was the first gentleman of Greece,--not the George IV. though,
exactly. Remember Cæsar’s laurel-wig.
“I might multiply instances, but I wish to have room to say how much I
have been pleased with Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair.’ He has not Dickens’s
talents as a caricaturist, but he draws with more truth. Dickens can
take a character to pieces and make us laugh immoderately at the comic
parts of it--or he takes only the comic part, as boys take the honey-bag
of the bee, destroying the whole insect to get at it. But Thackeray can
put a character together. He has more constructive power. D. is a
satirizer, T. a satirist. I don’t think D. ever made anything equal to
Becky Sharp. Rawdon Crawley, too, is admirable; so in truth are all the
characters in their way, except Amelia, who is nothing in particular.
“I liked ‘Wuthering Heights,’ too, as you did, though not so much. There
is great power in it, but it is like looking at nature through a crooked
pane of glass. Some English journalist has nicknamed the author
Salvator Rosa, and our journalists of course all repeat it. But it is
nonsense. For it is not wildness and rudeness that the author is
remarkable for, but delicacy. A character may be distorted without being
wild or rude. Unnatural causes may crook a violet as well as an oak.
Rochester is a truly refined character, and his roughness and coarseness
are only the shields (scabs, as it were) over his finer nature. My sheet
ends our conversation.”
There is a picture of the Lowells at home at this time, drawn by Miss
Fredrika Bremer. Lowell had reviewed her writings in their English
dress--it was his first contribution to the _North American_,--and on
her coming to America a meeting occurred, which resulted in a friendly
visit paid by Miss Bremer to Elmwood. The form in which she recorded her
impressions of travel was in letters home, afterward gathered into a
book. It was on 15 December, 1849, that she wrote:--
“The whole family assembles every day for morning and evening prayer
around the venerable old man; and he it is who blesses every meal. His
prayers, which are always extempore, are full of the true and inward
life, and I felt them as a pleasant, refreshing dew upon my head, and
seldom arose from my knees with dry eyes. With him live his youngest
son, the poet, and his wife; such a handsome and happy young couple as
one can hardly imagine. He is full of life and youthful ardor, she as
gentle, as delicate, and as fair as a lily, and one of the most lovable
women that I have seen in this country, because her beauty is full of
soul and grace, as is everything which she does or says. This young
couple belong to the class of those of whom one can be quite sure; one
could not for an hour, nay, not for half an hour, be doubtful about
them. She, like him, has a poetical tendency, and has also written
anonymously some poems, remarkable for their deep and tender feeling,
especially maternal, but her mind has more philosophical depth than his.
Singularly enough, I did not discern in him that deeply earnest spirit
which charmed me in many of his poems. He seems to me occasionally to be
brilliant, witty, gay, especially in the evening, when he has what he
calls his ‘evening fever,’ and his talk is then like an incessant play
of fireworks. I find him very agreeable and amiable; he seems to have
many friends, mostly young men.... There is a trace of beauty and taste
in everything she [Mrs. L.] touches, whether of mind or body; and above
all she beautifies life.... Pity it is that this much-loved young wife
seems to have delicate lungs. Her low, weak voice tells of this. [Madame
Lowell was plainly not at home.] Maria reads her husband’s poetry
charmingly well.”[86]
Near the close of 1849 Lowell reissued in two volumes, under the imprint
of W. D. Ticknor & Co., the two series which had appeared in 1843 and
1847, and thus registered himself, as it were, among the regular
vine-growers on the slopes of Parnassus. Moreover, with his former
products thus formally garnered, he began to please himself with the
prospect of some more thoroughgoing piece of poetical composition. He
was practically clear of his regular engagement with the _Standard_, and
his “Biglow Papers” had given him the opportunity to free his mind in an
exhilarating fashion on the supreme question of the hour. There was
something of a rebound from this in “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” but the
free use of the Yankee vernacular with the immediate popularity which it
secured must have set him thinking of the possibility of using this form
in some freer and more genuinely poetic fashion. The little pastoral,
“The Courtin’,” published in a fragmentary form, was an experiment in
this direction at once highly successful, and accordingly we find him
writing to Mr. Briggs on the eve of the publication of his two volumes
of Poems: “I think you will find my poems improved in the new edition. I
have not altered much, but I have left out the poorest and put others in
their places. My next volume, I think, will show an advance. It is to be
called ‘The Nooning.’ Now guess what it will be. The name suggests
pleasant thoughts, does it not? But I shall not tell you anything about
it yet, and you must not mention it.” And a few weeks later, with the
project still high in his mind, he wrote to the same correspondent:
“Maria invented the title for me, and is it not a pleasant one? I am
going to bring together a party of half a dozen old friends at Elmwood.
They go down to the river and bathe, and then one proposes that they
shall go up into a great willow-tree (which stands at the end of the
causey near our house, and has seats in it) to take their nooning. There
they agree that each shall tell a story or recite a poem of some sort.
In the tree they find a countryman already resting himself, who enters
into the plan and tells a humorous tale, with touches of Yankee
character and habits in it. _I_ am to read my poem of the ‘Voyage of
Leif’ to Vinland, in which I mean to bring my hero straight into Boston
Bay, as befits a Bay-state poet. Two of my poems are already
written--one ‘The Fountain of Youth’ (no connection with any other
firm), and the other an ‘Address to the Muse’ by the Transcendentalist
of the party. I guess I am safe in saying that the first of these two is
the best thing I have done yet. But you shall judge when you see it. But
‘Leif’s Voyage’ is to be far better.” The scheme thus formed intended
clearly a group of poems lightly tied together: indeed the plan, always
a favorite one, was carried out on very nearly the same lines by Mr.
Longfellow in his “Tales of a Wayside Inn” a dozen years later, and it
is not impossible that Lowell, who had been interrupted in his plan, was
still more reluctant to complete it, when it would have so much the air
of being a copy of his neighbor’s design. At any rate, the _disjecta
membra_ of the poem found publication in a straggling fashion. Writing
to Mr. J. B. Thayer, in reply to an inquiry about the poem, years
after, Lowell says: “‘The June Idyl’ [renamed ‘Under the Willows’]
(written in ’51 or ’52) is a part of what I had written as the induction
to it. The description of spring in one of the ‘Biglow Papers’ is
another fragment of the same, tagged with rhyme for the nonce. So is a
passage in ‘Mason and Slidell,’ beginning ‘Oh strange new world.’ The
‘Voyage to Vinland,’ the ‘Pictures from Appledore,’ and ‘Fitz-Adam’s
Story’ were written for the ‘Nooning’ as originally planned. So, you
see, I had made some progress. Perhaps it will come by and by--not in
the shape I meant at first, for something broke my life in two, and I
cannot piece it together again. Besides, the Muse asks _all_ of a man,
and for many years I have been unable to give myself up as I would.” To
this list should be added “Fragments of an Unfinished Poem,” which was
printed in the author’s final Riverside edition, when he had abandoned
all thought of completing the “Nooning.”
That Lowell was conscious of his vocation by this time, and that with
the publication of his collected poems he was entering upon a new,
resolute course of poetic action, is clear from a few pregnant sentences
in a letter to Briggs, dated 23 January, 1850: My poems hitherto have
been a true record of my life, and I mean that they shall continue to
be.... I begin to feel that I must enter on a new year of my
apprenticeship. My poems have thus far had a regular and natural
sequence. First, Love and the mere happiness of existence beginning to
be conscious of itself, then Freedom--both being the sides which Beauty
presented to me--and now I am going to try more _wholly_ after Beauty
herself. Next, if I live, I shall present Life as I have seen it. In the
‘Nooning’ I shall have not even a glance towards Reform. If the poems I
have already written are good for anything they are perennial, and it is
tedious as well as foolish to repeat one’s self. I have preached sermons
enow, and now I am going to come down out of the pulpit and _go about
among my parish_. I shall turn my barrel over and read my old
discourses; it will be time to write new ones when my hearers have
sucked all the meaning out of those old ones. Certainly I shall not
grind for any Philistines, whether Reformers or Conservatives. I find
that Reform cannot take up the whole of me, and I am quite sure that
eyes were given us to look about us with sometimes, and not to be always
looking forward. If some of my good red-hot friends were to see this
they would call me a backslider, but there are other directions in which
one may get away from people besides the rearward one.... I am not
certain that my next appearance will not be in a pamphlet on the
Hungarian question in answer to the _North American Review_. But I shall
not write anything if I can help it. I am tired of controversy, and,
though I have cut out the oars with which to row up my friend Bowen, yet
I have enough to do, and, besides, am not so well as usual, being
troubled in my head as I was summer before last. I should like to play
for a year, and after I have written and printed the ‘Nooning’ I mean to
_take_ a nooning and lie under the trees looking at the skies.”
The Hungarian movement interested both Lowell and his sister, Mrs.
Putnam, deeply. Lowell had printed in the _Standard_ his verses to
Kossuth, and Mrs. Putnam had written vigorously in the _Christian
Examiner_. Robert Carter also printed a series of papers on the subject
in the _Boston Atlas_, which were reprinted in a pamphlet. Lowell did
not write the pamphlet he meditated, but a year later he wrote seven
columns in the _Boston Daily Advertiser_, in defence of his sister
against Professor Bowen’s attack. “It was the severest job I ever
undertook,” he wrote Gay. “I believe I was longer at work in actual
hours than in writing all Hosea Biglow and the ‘Fable for Critics.’” He
had displayed his interest previously by a stirring appeal for funds in
aid of the Hungarian exiles.[87]
And now came three events to the little household at Elmwood that
wrought a change in the life of Lowell and his wife. The first was the
death of their third child, Rose, 2 February, 1850, after a half-year’s
life only. The loss brought vividly to remembrance the experience which
had entered so deeply into their lives when the first-born, Blanche, was
taken away. “For Rose,” Lowell writes to Gay, “I would have no funeral;
my father only made a prayer, and then I walked up alone to Mount
Auburn and saw her body laid by her sister’s. She was a very lovely
child--we think the loveliest of our three. She was more like Blanche
than Mabel, and her disease was the same. Her illness lasted a week, but
I never had any hope, so that she died to me the first day the doctor
came. She was very beautiful--fair, with large dark gray eyes and fine
features. Her smile was especially charming, and she was full of smiles
till her sickness began. Dear little child! she had never spoken, only
smiled.”
Again death came that way, and on 30 March, 1850, Lowell’s mother died.
The cloud which had for years hung over her had deepened, and her death
was looked upon as a release, for whether at home or in seclusion she
was alike separated from her family. As Lowell wrote:--
“We can touch thee, still we are no nearer;
Gather round thee, still thou art alone;
The wide chasm of reason is between us;
Thou confutest kindness with a moan;
We can speak to thee, and thou canst answer,
Like two prisoners through a wall of stone.”[88]
The third event was the birth of the fourth child and only son, Walter.
Gay had lately lost a boy, and Lowell’s announcement to him of this
birth was tempered by the fact. “I should have written you a note the
other day,” he writes, 3 January, 1851, “to let you know that we have a
son, only I could not somehow make up my mind to it. It pained me to
think of the associations which such news would revive in you. Yet I
had rather you should hear it from me than from any one else.... The boy
is a nice little fellow, and said (by his mother) to look like me. He
was born on the 22d December, and I am doubting whether to name him
Pilgrim Father or no. I have offered Maria her choice between that name
and Larkin, which last I think would go uncommonly well with Lowell. She
has not yet made up her mind.
“But now for the tragic part of it. Just after we had got him cleverly
born on the 22d, there springs me up an Antiquary (like a Jack in a box)
and asserts that the Pilgrims landed on the 21st, that eleven days were
added instead of ten in allowing for O. S., and that there is no use in
disputing about it. But I appeal to any sensible person (I have no
reference to antiquaries) whether, as applied to Larkin, this decision
be not of the nature of an _ex post facto_ law, by which he, the said
Larkin, ought not of right to be concluded. What was he to know of it in
his retirement, with no access to reading-rooms or newspapers?
Inheriting from his father a taste for anniversaries, no doubt he laid
his plans with deliberation, and is he now to give up his birthright for
a mess of antiquarian pottage? Had proper notice been given, he would
surely have bestirred himself to have arrived a day earlier. On the
whole I shall advise Larkin to contest the point. For my part, I shall
stick to the 22d, though it upset the whole Gregorian calendar, which to
me, indeed, smacks a little too strongly of the Scarlet Woman. Would
[Illustration: _Mrs. Charles Lowell_]
not the Pilgrim Fathers have sworn to the 22d, if they had known that
ever a Pope of Rome would go for the 21st? Surely the Babe Unborn should
not suffer for the want of accurate astronomical knowledge in them of
old time. That other mythological character, the Oldest Inhabitant,
should rather be held responsible as approaching nearer to a
contemporaneousness with the guilty. However, till this matter is
settled, I shall keep it to myself whether the 21st or the 22d were the
day of his kindly nativity.”[89]
Lowell had been longing for a holiday; Mrs. Lowell’s health, never
robust, gave him now new cause of solicitude; the death of his mother
severed one special cord that would tie him to his home, and thus, in
the spring of 1851, it was decided to carry out a design formed more
than once before, and spend a year at least in Europe. The Lowells tried
to persuade the Gays to accompany them, but without success. “We are
going,” Lowell wrote to Gay, “in a fine ship which will sail from Boston
on the 1st July. She was built for a packet, has fine accommodations,
and will land us at Genoa--a very fit spot for us New-Worlders to land
at and make our first discovery of the Old.
À Castilla y à Leon
(To Yankees also be it known)
Nuevo Mundo dió Colon:
And so we Western men owe a
Kind of debt to Genoa.
Also people can live like princes (only more respectably) in Italy on
fifteen hundred a year. We are going to travel on our own land. That is,
we shall spend at the rate of about ten acres a year, selling our
birthrights as we go along for messes of European pottage. Well, Raphael
and the rest of them are worth it. My plan is to sit down in Florence
(where, at least, the coral and bells and the gutta-percha dogs will be
cheaper) till I have cut my eye (talian) teeth. _Tuscany_ must be a good
place for that. Then I shall be able to travel about without being too
monstrously cheated.”