lain for fifteen years and furbished up for a new tragi-comedy. The
second series of _The Biglow Papers_ was read no less eagerly than the
first had been. Quite as brilliant as their predecessors, the later
poems are more impassioned, and in those touching on English hostility
to the North the satire is bitterly stinging.
While the numbers of the first series were in course of publication
Lowell produced a rhymed primer of contemporary American literature
under the title of _A Fable for Critics_. It was an improvisation,
and therefore the buoyancy, the jovial off-hand manner, the impudence
even, were a matter of course and all in its favor. Often penetrating
and just in his criticisms, Lowell was invariably amusing, and in the
cleverness of the rhyme and word play quite inimitable.
Two months after the appearance of the _Fable_ the popular _Vision
of Sir Launfal_ was published. Though undoubtedly read more for the
sake of the preludes than for the slight but touching story, it is
by no means certain that the preludes, brought out as independent
poems, could have won the number of readers they now have. In other
words, _The Vision of Sir Launfal_ has a unity which it seems on first
acquaintance to lack.
V
_UNDER THE WILLOWS_, _THE CATHEDRAL_, _COMMEMORATION ODE_, _THREE
MEMORIAL POEMS_, _HEARTSEASE AND RUE_
‘Under the Willows’ is a poem of Nature in which the poet at no time
loses sight either of the world of books or of the world of men. If he
be driven indoors by the rigors of May, he is content to sit by his
wood-fire and read what the poets have said in praise of that inclement
month. Or if June has come and he can dream under his favorite willows,
his reveries gain a zest from the interruptions of the tramp, ‘lavish
summer’s bedesman,’ the scissors-grinder, that grimy Ulysses of New
England, the school-children, and the road-menders,
Vexing Macadam’s ghost with pounded slate.
It is a poem of thanksgiving in which the poet voices his gratitude for
the benediction of the higher mood and the human kindness of the lower.
The volume to which ‘Under the Willows’ gives its name is typical. He
who prizes Lowell’s verse will hardly be content with any selection
which does not include ‘Al Fresco,’ ‘A Winter-Evening Hymn to my Fire,’
‘Invita Minerva,’ ‘The Dead House,’ ‘The Parting of the Ways,’ ‘The
Fountain of Youth,’ and ‘The Nightingale in the Study.’
Its manner of contrasting To-Day with Yesterday, the genius that
creates with the spirit that analyzes, makes _The Cathedral_ an
essentially American poem. The minster in its ‘vast repose,’
Silent and gray as forest-leaguered cliff,
must always seem a marvel to a dweller among temples of ‘deal and
paint.’ The poem is the meditation of a New-World conservative,
altogether catholic of sympathies, who holds no less firmly to the
past because, under the fascination of democracy, he breathes in the
presence of the ‘backwoods Charlemagne’ a braver air and is conscious
of an ‘ampler manhood.’ And what, he asks, will be the faith of
this new avatar of the Goth, what temples will the creature build?
Very beautiful, very suggestive, and in its shifting moods entirely
representative of the poet who wrote it must this fine work always seem.
_The Ode recited at the Harvard Commemoration_ (July 21, 1865) is
Lowell’s supreme achievement in verse. It breathes the most exalted
patriotism, a love of native land that is intense, fiery, consuming.
Though written in honor of sons of the University who had gone to the
war, the spirit of the _Ode_ is not local and particular. The poet
celebrates not individual deeds alone but the sum of those deeds, not
man but manhood:--
That leap of heart whereby a people rise
Up to a noble anger’s height,
And, flamed on by the Fates, not shrink, but grow more bright,
That swift validity in noble veins,
Of choosing danger and disdaining shame,
Of being set on flame
By the pure fire that flies all contact base,
But wraps its chosen with angelic might,
These are imperishable gains,
Sure as the sun, medicinal as light,
These hold great futures in their lusty reins
And certify to earth a new imperial race.
The mingling of proud humility, tenderness, and reverence, the
throbbing passion and the exultant fervor of the concluding verses,
lift this ode to a high place in American poetry, it may be to
the highest place. To the many, however, the chief value of _The
Commemoration Ode_ lies in the stanza on Lincoln. So just as an
estimate of character, so restrained in its accents of praise, American
in all finer meanings of the word, splendid in its imagery and poignant
in the note of grief, this beautiful tribute to the great president is
final and satisfying.
The first of the _Three Memorial Poems_ is an ‘Ode, read at the One
Hundredth Anniversary of the Fight at Concord.’
In the opening stanzas on Freedom the poet strikes the notes of
exultation fitting the time and the place, then passes to those
inevitable allusions which appeal to local pride (and Lowell handles
this passage with utmost skill), draws the lesson that must of
necessity be drawn from the ‘home-spun deeds’ of the men of old, makes
Freedom utter her warning to the men of the present, and, no prophet of
evil, closes in the triumphant spirit in which he began.
‘Under the Old Elm’ is a magnificent tribute to a man so great that
there is need of odes like this to help us comprehend his greatness.
After calling up the scene when Washington, ‘a stranger among
strangers,’ stood beneath that legendary tree to take command of his
army, ‘all of captains,’ a motley rout, valorous deacons, selectmen,
and village heroes among others, more skilled in debating their
orders than obeying them, good fighters all, but ‘serious drill’s
despair,’--the poet chants those beautiful lines in which is drawn the
distinction between ‘Nation’ and ‘Country.’ The one is fashioned of
computable things, good each in its kind and important in its place:--
But Country is a shape of each man’s mind
Sacred from definition, unconfined
By the cramped walls where daily drudgeries grind;
An inward vision, yet an outward birth
Of sweet familiar heaven and earth;
A brooding Presence that stirs motions blind
Of wings within our embryo being’s shell
That wait but her completer spell
To make us eagle-natured, fit to dare
Life’s nobler spaces and untarnished air.
You who hold dear this self-conceived ideal,
Whose faith and works alone can make it real,
Bring all your fairest gifts to deck her shrine
Who lifts our lives away from Thine and Mine
And feeds the lamp of manhood more divine
With fragrant oils of quenchless constancy.
When all have done their utmost, surely he
Hath given the best who gives a character
Erect and constant, which nor any shock
Of loosened elements, nor the forceful sea
Of flowing or of ebbing fates, can stir
From its deep bases in the living rock
Of ancient manhood’s sweet security....
And the poet longs for skill to praise him fitly whom he does fitly
praise in the stanzas that follow. It is a thoughtful, nobly eloquent,
and poetically beautiful characterization of the great Virginian,
and appropriately closes with a fine apostrophe to the historic
Commonwealth from which Washington sprang.
The ‘Ode for the Fourth of July, 1876,’ though not lacking in forceful
lines and fine imagery, is the least happy of the three poems.
The questioning and critical mood is prominent. But the spirit of
confidence prevails and is voiced in the invocation with which the ode
concludes.
Various notes are touched in the collection of eighty-eight poems to
which its author gave the title of _Heartsease and Rue_. Here are
verses new and old, grave and gay, satirical, humorous, sentimental,
and elegiac, epigrams, inscriptions, lyrics, poems of occasion,
sonnets, epistles, and, chief among them, the ode written on hearing
the news of the death of Agassiz. Whether, as has been asserted, ‘this
poem takes its place with the few great elegies in our language, gives
a hand to “Lycidas” and to “Thyrsis,”’ is a question to be decided
by the suffrages of many good critics, rather than by the dictum of
one. There is no doubt, however, that by virtue of its human quality,
depth of personal feeling, sincerity in the accent of bereavement, and
felicity of phrase, the ‘Agassiz’ will always stand in the first rank
of Lowell’s greater verse.
VI
_FIRESIDE TRAVELS_, _MY STUDY WINDOWS_, _AMONG MY BOOKS_, _LATEST
LITERARY ESSAYS_
_Fireside Travels_ is so entertaining a book as to make one wish that
Lowell had chronicled more of his journeyings at home and abroad in
the same amusing style. Two of the six essays--‘Cambridge Thirty Years
Ago’ and ‘A Moosehead Journal’--take the form of letters addressed to
the author’s friend, ‘the Edelmann Storg’ (W. W. Story). The others are
grouped under the general title of ‘Leaves from my Journal in Italy and
Elsewhere.’
One spirit animates the pages of this book,--a love of plain people,
homely adventures, everyday sights and sounds. In a half-serious way
(as if to show that he knows how to ‘do’ a tempest in the mountains
or an illumination of St. Peter’s) Lowell throws in a number of
unconventional passages on entirely conventional themes. But the
strength of the book lies in the sympathetic and humorous accounts of
that protean animal Man, who, whether he showed himself in the guise
of a denizen of Old Cambridge, or of Uncle Zeb, who had been ‘to
the ‘Roostick war,’ or of the Chief Mate of the packet ship, or of
Leopoldo, the Italian guide, was more interesting to Lowell than any
other object of his study.
Together with _Fireside Travels_ may be read ‘My Garden Acquaintance’
and ‘A Good Word for Winter,’ from _My Study Windows_, gossipy
papers on Nature by one who looked on ‘a great deal of the modern
sentimentalism about Nature as a mark of disease ... one more symptom
of the general liver complaint.’ The sincerity of Lowell’s love of
birds, beasts, flowers, trees, the sky and the landscape, admits of no
question. Yet he approached Nature more or less through literature, as
was becoming in a man brought up on White’s _Selborne_; and he seems
his characteristic self when, having pulled a chair out under a tree,
he sits there with a volume of Chaucer in his hands, looking up from
the page now and then to watch his feathered neighbors, and make wise
and humorous comments on their doings.
_Among My Books_ is a volume of literary and historical studies, six
in number, entitled respectively, ‘Dryden,’ ‘Witchcraft,’ ‘Shakespeare
Once More,’ ‘New England Two Centuries Ago,’ ‘Lessing,’ ‘Rousseau and
the Sentimentalists.’ All are in Lowell’s best manner, and the ‘Dryden’
and ‘Shakespeare’ are particularly fine examples of those leisurely,
stimulating, and always brilliant literary studies which this scholar
knew so well how to write.
Of the thirteen papers in _My Study Windows_ that on ‘Abraham
Lincoln’[67] and the one ‘On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners’
have a political bearing; those on ‘A Great Public Character’ (Josiah
Quincy) and ‘Emerson the Lecturer’ are studies in personality; the
‘Library of Old Authors’ is an exercise in textual criticism, a
merciless arraignment of certain unfortunate editors; the ‘Carlyle,’
‘James Gates Percival,’ ‘Thoreau,’ ‘Swinburne’s Tragedies,’ ‘Chaucer,’
and ‘Pope’ are studies in literary history and interpretation.
_Among My Books_, ‘second series,’ contains five essays. More than
a third of the volume is devoted to a study of ‘Dante,’ elaborate
and exhaustive--as the word ‘exhaustive’ might be used in speaking
of an essay not of a book. Then follows a most sympathetic essay on
‘Spenser,’ together with papers on ‘Milton,’ ‘Wordsworth,’ and ‘Keats.’
Of Lowell’s critical writings as a whole it may be said that better
reading does not exist; and among the virtues of these essays is their
length. Lowell would have been ill at ease in the limits of three or
four thousand words too often imposed by the editors of our current
magazines. He might even have been scornful of a public taste which
dictated to editors to dictate to their contributors limits so narrow.
Writing from the fulness of a well-stored mind, he liked room in which
to display his thought. Having much to say, he did not scruple to
take time to say it; but the time always goes quickly. He understood
perfectly the art of beguiling one into forgetting the hours as they
pass.
These essays, so rich in critical suggestiveness, abound in
matter-of-fact knowledge. We read for information and get it. Lowell
shares with us the wealth of his acquaintance with books. His manner
is unostentatious. Macaulay staggers us with his array of facts and
his range of allusion. We are overwhelmed, intellectually cowed by the
display of knowledge. Lowell too astonishes, but only after a while.
Macaulay declaims at his reader, Lowell converses with him. All is so
easy, good-humored, and witty, that the reader for a moment labors
under the mistake of supposing that he is being instructed less than
he would like. Later he begins to count up his mental gains, and is
surprised at the display they make.
Another obvious source of pleasure is the felicity of expression.
Lowell had the courage of his cleverness. Brilliancy was natural to
him. He defended the practice of piquant phrasing, maintaining that a
thought is not wanting in depth because it is strikingly put. Doubtless
he loved an ingenious turn for its own sake, but it would be difficult
to find an instance of his making a display of verbal vivacity to
conceal poverty of thought.
These pages bear constant witness to Lowell’s passion for books, a
passion too genuine and deep-seated to admit of any doubt on his part
of the worth of literature. He had none of Emerson’s scepticism, who
held that if people would only think, they might do without books.
The dullest proser and most leaden-winged poet could not make Lowell
despair.
A number of essays display no little of the severity which we have
learned to associate with reviewing after the manner of Jeffrey and
Lockhart. Yet these caustic passages were written by a man who said of
himself that he had ‘to fight the temptation to be too good-natured.’
Priggishness was as absurd to him in scholarship and letters as
elsewhere, and he never lost a chance to give it a touch of the whip.
Happily there is little of this. Lowell was almost uniformly urbane,
gracious, reasonable.
If his subject was a great one Lowell treated it in a great way; if
circumscribed and provincial he enlarged its boundaries--as in the
essay on ‘James Gates Percival,’ where a subject of small intrinsic
worth becomes a study of the American literary mind at one of its
periods of acute self-consciousness, useful historically and tending to
present-day edification. Needless to say, Lowell enjoyed handling this
topic. He liked to satirize the early American authors and critics,
solemn and important over their great work of inaugurating a New-World
literature and quite convinced that, since ‘that little driblet of the
Avon had succeeded in producing William Shakespeare,’ something unusual
was to be expected of the Mississippi River.
Although Lowell’s standing as a critic rests on such writings as his
‘Dryden,’ ‘Shakespeare,’ ‘Chaucer,’ ‘Spenser,’ ‘Pope,’ and ‘Dante,’ the
amateur of good literature cannot afford to neglect anything to which
this fine scholar put his hand.
The later volumes contain some of his most illuminating criticism
(notably in the ‘Fielding,’ ‘Don Quixote,’ ‘Gray,’ ‘Walton,’ and
‘Landor’), and his style seems the perfection of ease and suppleness.
Doubtless it is negligent now and then, but always with the winning
negligence of a master in the difficult art of expression.
VII
_POLITICAL ADDRESSES AND PAPERS_
_The Anti-Slavery Papers_ consists of editorial articles reprinted
from ‘The Pennsylvania Freeman,’ and ‘The Anti-Slavery Standard.’[68]
Witty, ironical, and pungent, these fugitive leaves are of value for
the light they throw on the history of the struggle maintained by the
Abolitionists against their powerful enemies both in the North and in
the South, as well as for the idea they give of the militant Lowell at
a time when to conviction of the justness of the cause for which he
fought was added a measure of joyousness in the mere act of fighting.
Of greater significance is the volume of _Political Essays_, twelve
papers written at intervals between 1858 and 1866. Designed for the
most part to serve an immediate purpose, and betraying in every page
the writer’s depth of feeling, intensity of patriotism, and strong but
not bigoted Northern convictions, these essays, by their acuteness of
insight, balanced judgment, admirable temper, and wealth of allusion,
as well as by their literary flavor and their occasional eloquence,
hold a permanent place not only among Lowell’s best writings but among
the best of the innumerable political papers called out by the Civil
War.
Of Lowell’s later political utterances none is more notable than the
address on ‘Democracy,’ delivered at Birmingham in 1884, a cleverly
phrased and thoughtful speech in which the American minister defended
the democratic idea with logic as adroit as it was sound. That the
source of American democracy was the English constitution must have
been news to a part at least of his English audience. It was a happy
thought of Lowell’s to show how stable democracy might be as a system
of government. He made the argument from expediency, that ‘it is
cheaper in the long run to lift men up than to hold them down, and
that a ballot in their hands is less dangerous to society than a sense
of wrong in their heads.’ He would not have been Lowell had he not
also shown that a democracy has its finer instincts, or failed to
recognize the fact that as an experiment in the art of government it
must stand or fall by its own merits. And the whole address is strongly
optimistic, in its insistence that ‘those who have the divine right to
govern will be found to govern in the end.’
The address on ‘The Place of the Independent in Politics’ supplements
the Birmingham address. As Lowell before an English audience had dwelt
on ‘the good points and favorable aspect of democracy,’ so before a
home audience he discussed its weak points and its dangers. He thought
the system would bear investigation. At no time did he labor under the
mistake of supposing that democracy was a contrivance which ran of its
own accord. Parties there must be and politicians to look after them,
but it is no less essential that there should be somebody to look after
the politicians. The address is a plea for unselfishness in political
action.
* * * * *
Admirers of Lowell find it easy to believe that of all American
makers of verse he had the most of what is called inspiration. With
less catholic tastes he might have become a greater poet and would
undoubtedly have been a finer artist. But granting that it was a
matter of choice, and that Lowell had elected to make mastery in
verse (with all the sacrifices involved) the object of his life, how
serious then would have been the loss to criticism and to politics. The
Lowell we know, with his extraordinary mental vivacity, his grasp of a
multitude of interests that make for culture, is surely a more engaging
figure than the hypothetical Lowell of purely poetical achievement.
FOOTNOTES:
[63] Keith Spence was born at Kirkwall, Orkney. Mrs. Lowell had
Orcadian ancestors on both sides of the house, her maternal
grandfather, Robert Traill, having also come from Orkney.
[64] January, February, and March, 1843.
[65] Scudder.
[66] H. R. Haweis: _American Humorists_.
[67] The remarkable paper on Lincoln was afterwards transferred to
the volume of _Political Essays_.
[68] January, 1845, to November, 1850.
XIX
_WALT WHITMAN_
REFERENCES:
=John Burroughs=: _Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person_,
second edition, 1871.
=R. M. Bucke=: _Walt Whitman_, 1883.
=W. S. Kennedy=: _Reminiscences of Walt Whitman_, 1896.
=I. H. Platt=: _Walt Whitman_, ‘Beacon Biographies,’ 1904.
I
HIS LIFE
Walter Whitman (commonly known as Walt) was born at West Hills, a
village in Huntington Township, Long Island, on May 31, 1819. He was
a son of Walter Whitman, a carpenter and house-builder, who followed
his trade chiefly in New York and Brooklyn. The Long Island Whitmans
claim descent from the Reverend Zechariah Whitman, who came to America
in 1635, and settled at Milford, Connecticut. Zechariah’s son Joseph
crossed the Sound ‘sometime before 1660,’ and may have been the
original purchaser of the farm where successive generations of his
descendants lived, and where the poet was born.
Blended with this English blood was that of a line of Dutch ancestors.
Whitman’s mother, Louisa Van Velsor, daughter of Cornelius Van Velsor
of Cold Spring Harbor, was of ‘the old race of the Netherlands, so
deeply grafted on Manhattan Island and in Kings and Queens counties.’
The Van Velsors were noted for their horses, and in her youth Louisa
was a daring rider.
Whitman’s education was such as a Brooklyn public school of the early
Thirties afforded. After a little experience as an office-boy he
learned to set type. To vary the monotony of life at the composing-case
he taught in country schools or worked at farming. Occasionally he
dabbled in literature, publishing tales and essays in the ‘Democratic
Review.’ In 1839 he started at Huntington a ‘weekly’ paper, the ‘Long
Islander,’ publishing it at such intervals as pleased him best. For a
time he edited the ‘Brooklyn Eagle’ (1848), diverting himself in the
intervals of journalistic work with ‘an occasional shy at “poetry.”’
Nomadic by instinct and of a curious and inquiring turn of mind,
Whitman, accompanied by his brother Jeff, made ‘a leisurely journey
and working expedition’ through the Middle States, down the Ohio and
Mississippi to New Orleans, returning in the same deliberate manner
by the Great Lakes, Lower Canada, and the Hudson. During his stay in
New Orleans (1849–50) he was an editorial writer on the’ Crescent.’
In Brooklyn (1850–51) he edited and published a paper called ‘The
Freeman,’ then for three or four years he built and sold small houses.
The first edition of the extraordinary and notorious _Leaves of Grass_
(for which Whitman himself helped to set the type) appeared in 1855,
and was described by Emerson to Carlyle as ‘a nondescript monster,
which yet had terrible eyes and buffalo strength, and was indisputably
American.’ An enlarged edition appeared in 1856, to be followed by yet
a third in 1860. The sales were slow and the reviews for the most part
hostile and often abusive.
There was some discussion in the Whitman family over the merits of
the book. The poet’s brother, George Whitman, said in after years: ‘I
remember mother comparing Hiawatha to Walt’s, and the one seemed to us
pretty much the same muddle as the other. Mother said if Hiawatha was
poetry, perhaps Walt’s was.’[69]
In 1862 George Whitman was wounded at the first battle of
Fredericksburg. Walt went immediately to the front to care for him.
His sympathies were enlisted by the sight of the misery on every hand
and he became a volunteer army nurse, serving for three years in the
hospitals in Washington. ‘He saved many lives’ was the testimony of a
surgeon who had observed Whitman at his work. But his powerful physique
broke under the strain, and a severe illness followed.
When he recovered, a clerkship was given him in the Department of the
Interior; he was presently removed on the charge (it is said) of having
written an indecent book.[70] A place was immediately found for him
in the Attorney General’s office, and this place he held until he was
stricken by partial paralysis early in 1873.
From 1873 until his death Whitman lived in Camden, New Jersey, at first
making his home with his soldier brother, George, later setting up an
establishment of his own at 328 Mickle Street. He never married, having
an ‘overmastering passion for entire freedom, unconstraint; I had an
instinct against forming ties that would bind me.’