In the winter of 1855, when Lowell was thirty-six years old, he gave a
course of twelve lectures before the Lowell Institute in Boston. His
subject was the English Poets, and the special topics of the successive
lectures were: 1, "Poetry, and the Poetic Sentiment," illustrating the
imaginative faculty; 2, "Piers Ploughman's Vision," as the first
characteristically English poem; 3, "The Metrical Romances," marking the
advent into our poetry of the sense of Beauty; 4, "The Ballads,"
especially as models of narrative diction; 5, Chaucer, as the poet of
real life--the poet outside of nature; 6, Spenser, as the representative
of the purely poetical; 7, Milton, as representing the imaginative; 8,
Butler, as the wit; 9, Pope, as the poet of artificial life; 10, "On
Poetic Diction"; 11, Wordsworth, as representing the egotistic
imaginative, or the poet feeling himself in nature; 12, "On the Function
and Prospects of Poetry."
These lectures were written rapidly, many of them during the period of
delivery of the course; they bore marks of hastiness of composition, but
they came from a full and rich mind, and they were the issues of
familiar studies and long reflection. No such criticism, at once
abundant in knowledge and in sympathetic insight, and distinguished by
breadth of view, as well as by fluency, grace, and power of style, had
been heard in America. They were listened to by large and enthusiastic
audiences, and they did much to establish Lowell's position as the
ablest of living critics of poetry, and, in many respects, as the
foremost of American men of letters.
In the same year he was made Professor of Belles-Lettres in Harvard
University, and after spending somewhat more than a year in Europe, in
special preparation, he entered in the autumn of 1856 upon the duties of
the chair, which he continued to occupy till 1877, when he was appointed
Minister of the United States to Spain.
During the years of his professorship he delivered numerous courses of
lectures to his classes. Few of them were written out, but they were
given more or less extemporaneously from full notes. The subject of
these courses was in general the "Study of Literature," treating in
different years of different special topics, from the literature of
Northern to that of Southern Europe, from the Kalevala and the
Niebelungen Lied to the Provençal poets; from Wolfram von Eschenbach to
Rousseau; from the cycle of romances of Charlemagne and his peers to
Dante and Shakespeare. Some of these lectures, or parts of them, were
afterward prepared for publication, with such changes as were required
to give them proper literary form; and the readers of Lowell's prose
works know what gifts of native power, what large and solid acquisitions
of learning, what wide and delightful survey of the field of life and of
letters, are to be found in his essays on Shakespeare, on Dante, on
Dryden, and on many another poet or prose writer. The abundance of his
resources as critic in the highest sense have never been surpassed, at
least in English literature.
But considerable portions of the earlier as well as of the later
lectures remain unprinted, partly, no doubt, because his points of view
changed with the growth of his learning, and the increasing depth as
well as breadth of his vision. There is but little in manuscript which
he would himself, I believe, have been inclined to print without
substantial change. Yet these unprinted remains contain so much that
seems to me to possess permanent value that, after some question and
hesitation, I have come to the conclusion that selections from them
should be published. The fragments must be read with the fact constantly
held in mind that they do not always represent Lowell's mature opinions;
that, in some instances, they give but the first form of thoughts
developed in other connections in one or other of his later essays; that
they have not received his last revision; that they have the form of
discourse addressed to the ear, rather than that of literary work
finished for the eye.
If so read, I trust that the reader, while he may find little in them to
increase Lowell's well-established reputation, may find much in them to
confirm a high estimate of his position as one of the rare masters of
English prose as well as one of the most capable of critics; much to
interest him alike in their intrinsic character, and in their
illustration of the life and thought of the writer; and much to make him
feel a keen regret that they are the final contributions of their author
to the treasures of English literature.
_Charles Eliot Norton_
* * * * *
Hippel, the German satirist, divides the life of man into five periods,
according to the ruling desires which successively displace each other
in the human soul. Our first longing, he says, is for trousers, the
second for a watch, the third for an angel in pink muslin, the fourth
for money, and the fifth for a "place" in the country. I think he has
overlooked one, which I should be inclined to place second in point of
time--the ambition to escape the gregarious nursery, and to be master of
a chamber to one's self.
How charming is the memory of that cloistered freedom, of that
independence, wide as desire, though, perhaps, only ten feet by twelve!
How much of future tastes and powers lay in embryo there in that small
chamber! It is the egg of the coming life. There the young sailor pores
over the "Narratives of Remarkable Shipwrecks," his longing heightened
as the storm roars on the roof, or blows its trumpet in the chimney.
There the unfledged naturalist gathers his menagerie, and empties his
pockets of bugs and turtles that awaken the ignorant animosity of the
housemaid. There the commencing chemist rehearses the experiment of
Schwarz, and singes off those eyebrows which shall some day feel the
cool shadow of the discoverer's laurel. There the antiquary begins his
collections with a bullet from Bunker Hill, as genuine as the epistles
of Phalaris, or a button from the coat-tail of Columbus, late the
property of a neighboring scarecrow, and sold to him by a schoolmate,
who thus lays the foundation of that colossal fortune which is to make
his children the ornaments of society. There the potential Dibdin or
Dowse gathers his library on a single pendulous shelf--more fair to him
than the hanging gardens of Babylon. There stand "Robinson Crusoe," and
"Gulliver," perhaps "Gil Blas," Goldsmith's Histories of Greece and
Rome, "Original Poems for Infant Minds," the "Parent's Assistant," and
(for Sundays) the "Shepherd of Salisbury Plain," with other narratives
of the excellent Mrs. Hannah More too much neglected in maturer life.
With these are admitted also "Viri Romae," Nepos, Florus, Phaedrus, and
even the Latin grammar, because they _count_, playing here upon these
mimic boards the silent but awful part of second and third conspirators,
a rôle in after years assumed by statelier and more celebrated
volumes--the "books without which no gentleman's library can be
complete."
I remember (for I must call my memory back from this garrulous rookery
of the past to some perch nearer the matter in hand) that when I was
first installed lord of such a manor, and found myself the Crusoe of
that remote attic-island, which for near thirty years was to be my
unmolested hermitage, I cast about for works of art with which to adorn
it. The garret, that El Dorado of boys, supplied me with some prints
which had once been the chief ornament of my great-grandfather's study,
but which the growth of taste or luxury had banished from story to story
till they had arrived where malice could pursue them no farther. These
were heads of ancient worthies[1]--Plato, Pythagoras, Socrates, Seneca,
and Cicero, whom, from a prejudice acquired at school, I shortly
banished again with a _quousque tandem!_ Besides those I have mentioned,
there were Democritus and Heraclitus, which last, in those days less the
slave of tradition, I called Heraclĭtus--an error which my excellent
schoolmaster (I thank him for it) would have expelled from my head by
the judicious application of a counter-irritant; for he regarded the
birth as a kind of usher to the laurel, as indeed the true tree of
knowledge, whose advantages could Adam have enjoyed during early life,
he had known better than to have yielded to the temptation of any other.
[Footnote 1: Some readers may recall the reference to these "heads of
ancient wise men" in "An Interview with Miles Standish."--C.E.N.]
Well, over my chimney hung those two antithetical philosophers--the one
showing his teeth in an eternal laugh, while the tears on the cheek of
the other forever ran, and yet, like the leaves on Keats's Grecian urn,
could never be shed. I used to wonder at them sometimes, believing, as I
did firmly, that to weep and laugh had been respectively the sole
business of their lives. I was puzzled to think which had the harder
time of it, and whether it were more painful to be under contract for
the delivery of so many tears _per diem_, or to compel that [Greek:
anêrithmon gelasma][1] I confess, I pitied them both; for if it be
difficult to produce on demand what Laura Matilda would call the "tender
dew of sympathy," he is also deserving of compassion who is expected to
be funny whether he will or no. As I grew older, and learned to look on
the two heads as types, they gave rise to many reflections, raising a
question perhaps impossible to solve: whether the vices and follies of
men were to be washed away, or exploded by a broadside of honest
laughter. I believe it is Southwell who says that Mary Magdalene went to
Heaven by water, and it is certain that the tears that people shed for
themselves are apt to be sincere; but I doubt whether we are to be saved
by any amount of vicarious salt water, and, though the philosophers
should weep us into another Noah's flood, yet commonly men have lumber
enough of self-conceit to build a raft of, and can subsist a good while
on that beautiful charity for their own weaknesses in which the nerves
of conscience are embedded and cushioned, as in similar physical straits
they can upon their fat.
[Footnote 1: Countless--_i.e._, perpetual--smile.]
On the other hand, man has a wholesome dread of laughter, as he is the
only animal capable of that phenomenon--for the laugh of the hyena is
pronounced by those who have heard it to be no joke, and to be classed
with those [Greek: gelasmata agelasta] which are said to come from the
other side of the mouth. Whether, as Shaftesbury will have it, ridicule
be absolutely the test of truth or no, we may admit it to be relatively
so, inasmuch as by the _reductio ad absurdum_ it often shows that
abstract truth may become falsehood, if applied to the practical affairs
of life, because its relation to other truths equally important, or to
human nature, has been overlooked. For men approach truth from the
circumference, and, acquiring a knowledge at most of one or two points
of that circle of which God is the centre, are apt to assume that the
fixed point from which it is described is that where they stand.
Moreover, "Ridentem dicere verum, quid vetat?"