himself, with misgivings and vacillation, to the study of law. An
unfortunate love affair, the financial reverses of his father,
uncertainty about his own livelihood, and his seemingly thwarted
longing to become an author conspired to render him at times almost
desperate. It appears that he even meditated suicide. His humour
saved him. He continued his study of ancient and modern poets and
certain aspects of their art; through this study, as well as through
his mental sufferings, his knowledge of humanity was broadened and
enriched. He began to understand the position of the Abolitionists.
With his engagement to Miss Maria White, the horizon finally cleared.
He had taken his degree in law. Though he could not immediately be
married, the constant influence of Miss White, herself a poetess, and
his contact with the circle of young people in which she moved--“the
Band”--were from now on vital elements in his spiritual development.
His head was full of literary plans. He would write a life of Keats; he
would compose a “psycho-historical” tragedy. He became a contributor
of verse to _Graham’s Magazine_. In 1840 he brought out the volume of
poetry entitled “A Year’s Life,” labelled by reviewers as “humanitarian
and idealistic”; and in the next year or so he wrote for other
periodicals an assortment of sonnets, prose sketches, and literary
essays on the Elizabethan dramatists. By the close of 1842, he had
resolved to abandon the law, and associated himself with Robert Carter
in founding a magazine to be known as _The Pioneer_. The venture was
short-lived, owing to Lowell’s enforced removal to New York, where he
was under the care of an eye-specialist. The failure of his periodical
involved him in debt; however, he had gained valuable experience as an
editor, and had widened his acquaintance among men of letters. Settling
once more at Cambridge, he watched over the persons of his mother,
whose mind was now astray, and his eldest sister, who already began
to show signs of a similar malady. The fruit of two years of poetical
activity appeared at the end of 1843 in his first series of “Poems.”
He married Miss White on December 26, 1844. Immediately afterward,
he assumed for a brief space a position in Philadelphia on _The
Pennsylvania Freeman_, he and his wife eking out a slender income by
writing for The _Broadway Journal_ of New York. An ardent Abolitionist
now, Lowell, on his return to Cambridge, gave his attention during
the next four years mainly to articles for _The National Anti-Slavery
Standard_. From this point it is impossible in so short an account as
the present to record many details of his productivity as a writer.
In 1846 appeared the first of the “Biglow Papers,” published in _The
Boston Courier_; three more came out the next year. In 1848, besides
a large sheaf of articles, Lowell issued the second series of his
“Poems,” his “Fable for Critics”--in which he handled contemporary
American poets with levity but also with insight--and “The Vision of
Sir Launfal,” significant titles in any list of his works. His powers
were near their height. His humour was almost as sure as it ever
became; his criticism almost as pregnant, his imagination as vital,
his attitude toward national issues as uncompromising. The defects in
his style and treatment are such as we find even in his later work.
Until 1853 Lowell’s life was in the main happy, darkened indeed by the
death of several children, and by anxiety over the fading health of
his wife. From the grief and loneliness following her death, he sought
relief in the preparation of a course of lectures on the English poets,
to be delivered before the Lowell Institute in Boston. Their signal
success brought him a call to the chair left vacant at Harvard by
Longfellow. He gave a year or more to study abroad; returning in 1856,
he spent the next sixteen years of his life in the duties of a college
professor. He lectured on poetry and fine art, and offered courses in
German, Spanish, and Italian literature. He was at his best in teaching
Dante, where he could put in motion his belief “that the study of
imaginative literature tends to sanity of mind”; that it is “a study
of order, proportion, arrangement, of the highest and purest Reason,”
and shows “that chance has less to do with success than forethought,
will, and work.” Latterly he turned his attention to the literature of
Old French. For a man who has been taxed with hereditary indolence, his
industry was surprising. His connection with _The Atlantic Monthly_
from its launching, in 1857, until 1861, and with _The North American
Review_ from 1864 until 1872, is mentioned elsewhere. His private
reading was continuous and discursive. With the approach and outbreak
of the Civil War, his heart and pen were enlisted in the service of
the North. He wrote perhaps the most stirring political articles in
American literature; and his verse ran all the way from a new series
of “Biglow Papers” to the “Commemoration Ode” recited at the memorial
exercises, July 21, 1865, in honour of the Harvard graduates who had
given their lives for their country. After the war, _The North American
Review_ provided him with an outlet for many of his best known articles
in literary criticism, for example, his essays on Chaucer, Pope,
Spenser, and Dante. “The Cathedral,” his most notable poem after the
“Commemoration Ode,” appeared in 1870. In 1869, and again in 1870, he
delivered a number of lectures, on the poets, at Cornell University.
In 1872, unable to secure a leave of absence from Harvard, he resigned
his position there, in order to go abroad. After a stay of two years
in Europe, where he was the recipient of distinguished honours, he
resumed his post at Harvard, retaining it until 1877, when President
Hayes appointed him Minister to Spain (1877-80). In 1880 Garfield made
him Minister to England; here honours were showered upon him. “The
Queen is recorded to have said that during her long reign no ambassador
or minister had created so much interest and won so much regard as
Mr. Lowell.” Shortly after the death of his second wife, in 1885, he
was supplanted in his diplomatic post. For a time he lived with his
daughter at Southborough, Massachusetts. Among the later collections
of his poetry was “Heartsease and Rue,” published in 1887. The last
two years of his life were passed at Cambridge, devoted in part to an
edition of his works, in ten volumes. After a season of weakness and
pain, borne with fortitude and humour, he died, where he first saw the
light, at Elmwood, on August 12, 1891.
It is well-nigh impossible to characterise Lowell briefly. An attempt
to sum up a personality that chose so many avenues of expression,
and that at bottom was not thoroughly unified, can hardly do justice
to the component parts. The most striking thing about the man was
his fertility, if not in great constructive ideas, at all events in
separate thoughts. What he writes is full of meat. His redundancy is
not in the way of useless verbiage; he wants to use all the materials
that offer. A less obvious thing in Lowell is what we may term his lack
of complete spiritual organisation. He lived in an age of dissolving
beliefs and intellectual unrest. Though he was not tormented, as were
some others, by fierce internal doubts, he yet failed ever to be quite
clear with himself on fundamental questions of philosophy and religion.
He was never quite at one with himself. As a writer, his serious and
his humorous moods were continually interrupting each other. Partly on
this account, he did not possess an assured style. Partly, of course,
a kind of indifference, inherited or developed, was to blame; in his
formative stage, he did not have the patience--as he himself told
Longfellow--to write slowly enough. The result is, our enjoyment of his
poetry comes from separate passages, not from organically constituted,
harmonious wholes. In the occasional felicitous expression of an
individual thought, few can surpass him:
Coy Hebe flies from those that woo,
And shuns the hands would seize upon her;
Follow thy life, and she will sue
To pour for thee the cup of honour.
As a colourist in words, when he happens not to overdo the impression,
his art often seems masterly. Yet if we look closely, even in the much
lauded “Commemoration Ode,” his technique is seldom if ever inevitable.
His prose is stylistically more continuous than his verse, owing to his
experience as an editor. He healed others; himself he could heal at
least partially. But even as a prose writer, in spite of his studies
in the history of literature, he did not reach the point where science
and the understanding are seen to be in harmony with poetry and the
imagination. It appears that he did not succeed in distinguishing
between what was temporary and what was permanent in science, so that
he did not escape the danger of confusing the errors of scientists with
their ideals; and as he was not in full sympathy, as Dante was, with
minute literary research, so he was not willing to subject himself
to the last, exacting, and detailed labours of the poet or essayist
who determines to write verse or prose that shall endure. It follows
that most of his writing, both poetry and prose, lacks finality. Thus
in his article on Chaucer, though he met the approval of no less an
authority than Professor Child, he could not ultimately have satisfied
that great scholar and critic, since Lowell did not confine himself to
generalisations based upon exhaustive induction. He does not clearly
discriminate between “I think” and “I know.”
The fact is that he wrote mainly for his own time, and was bound to
have but a temporary reward. This is not saying that the reward was
not worth while. His interpretations of Spenser, of Dante, of Milton,
of the elder dramatists, sent to those poets many a reader who would
not otherwise have gone; for America, he opened the road in the study
of Chaucer; and his own “Vision of Sir Launfal” has unlocked many a
hard heart to divine influences. When he wrote in dialect, as in the
“Biglow Papers,” he was manifestly writing for a time; but in their
time the second series did more to justify the Northern cause than
almost any other publication that could be mentioned, Whittier’s
poems not excepted. It may be thought that his wonderful command of
dialect, contrasted with a less perfect and less instinctive success
in any higher medium, marks him as above all else a satiric poet.
When he was once sitting for his portrait, he so denominated himself,
speaking generally--“a bored satiric poet.” Yet were we to name
Lowell the greatest of all American satirists, his urgent poems of
patriotism--“The Washers of the Shroud,” the “Commemoration Ode”--his
“Vision of Sir Launfal,” and “The Cathedral” would immediately proclaim
him something greater than any satiric poet could be. Last of all,
nobler than the sum of his writings was the work which he effected in
bringing together his native land and the mother country, England, in a
bond of sympathy unknown since their separation.
_Ralph Waldo Emerson._--Emerson usually passes for a philosophical
mystic and lay preacher. He deemed himself more of a poet than anything
else, for he always hoped to attain perfect utterance in rhythmical
language. Yet the fact that he wrote much more prose, however
imaginative, than verse, has relegated the main treatment of him to
another section of this volume. Such an arrangement, of course, is
grounded in uncritical custom, not in reason.
Arbitrarily limiting ourselves here to his compositions in metre, we
find that throughout his life (1803-82), or throughout the years in
which he was productive, Emerson was responsible for much more poetry,
in the narrower sense, than most of his readers are aware of, and that
his poems are as well worth attention as his essays. In his verse,
which was written for himself, he is, to be sure, less at home so far
as concerns the form, but being less hampered by any regard for an
audience, he is more spontaneous in his thought. At the same time, his
stock of fundamental ideas and sentiments, however vivid and pure, was
pretty much exhausted in his prose, so that, to a considerable extent,
he repeated himself when he changed his medium of expression. Moreover,
as the hierophant of intellectual independence, he did not come to a
practical realisation of the way in which the opulence of the greatest
poets and thinkers is related to the wealth and continuity of their
reading. Emerson, indeed, read multifariously if not thoroughly; and
it is true that his essays are liberal in the use of borrowed matter;
the production of an essay on Montaigne might appear to mean little
more than throwing together an anthology of excerpts, cemented with
Emerson’s own marginal notes. He rarely mastered any single author
entire. His insight went by leaps and bounds, and he appropriated what
he found congenial, not being pliant enough to enter steadily and long
into the thought of another. His prose in general lacks plan. Some
of his poems, on the contrary, are more unified, having an organic
wholeness which is absent from his longer essays. In an essay, mere
continuity of sentiment and preservation of individual style do not
constitute an adequate link between the parts. In a lyric poem, such
consistency may suffice. Virtually, all of Emerson’s poetry is lyrical
and meditative. The technique is seldom smooth, not for want of pains,
since it was laboured and continually retouched, but for want of
capacity in the artist. The style is apt to be brittle, the cadence
is not maintained through passages of any length, and the separate
sentences are easily detached from their context. Even so, they are not
always clear, but may need commentary and parallel from the “Essays” to
explain them. Emerson’s poetry is largely autobiographical and, in no
harsh sense, egoistic, a picture of the successive and recurrent states
of his own soul. His vision of the universe in each of its parts, his
belief in the immanence of God and the educational potency of solitude,
and his confidence in the ability of Nature to prepare and suddenly to
produce ideal or “representative” men, are ever near the surface. In
his descriptions of the external world he is faithful to detail; but as
he discovers in each individual thing an intrinsic value transcending
the value of its dependence on the whole, he is likely to see the
parts without being ready to seize the perspective. Among details his
selection, if he makes any, seems altogether an affair of his mood, not
of logic. His power of choice is nevertheless stronger than Whitman’s.
He has a more than Wordsworthian distaste for analytic science:
But these young scholars, who invade our hills,
Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,
And travelling often in the cut he makes,
Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,
And all their botany is Latin names.
None the less have science and scientific terms invaded his poetry; nor
is it simply the larger and the elemental aspects of modern discovery
that claim his regard. With his individualistic turn of mind, he can
not choose but have an eye for the precise and specific:
Ah! well I mind the calendar,
Faithful through a thousand years,
Of the painted race of flowers,
Exact to days, exact to hours.
* * * * *
I know the trusty almanac
Of the punctual coming-back,
On their due days, of the birds.
He understands his own interest in such matters; not being very
objective, he cannot understand the impulse of the young botanist.
Lacking the dramatic and historical impulse, he wrote no long poems.
“May-Day” is his longest and most sustained, although he never quite
succeeded in ordering its parts. It “was probably written in snatches
in the woods on his afternoon walks, through many years.” The volume to
which it gave its name (1867) marked a distinct advance in fluency over
the collection of his poems that had appeared twenty years earlier. But
even considering his own final selection (1876) or considering the now
standard text of all his poetry (published in 1904), we can scarcely
affirm that the longing he expressed in 1839 was ever fully satisfied:
“I am naturally keenly susceptible to the pleasures of rhythm, and
cannot believe but one day I shall attain to that splendid dialect,
so ardent is my wish; and these wishes, I suppose, are ever only the
buds of power; but up to this hour I have never had a true success in
such attempts.” It is probable that in spite of his New England good
sense, his inherent esteem for propriety, his insight into the subtler
workings of nature, he did not have the initial impulse of a Bryant and
a Longfellow toward what he most needed in his education. Nature works
also through the scientist and the pedagogue. Emerson doubts it:
Can rules or tutors educate
The semigod whom we await?
He must be musical,
Tremulous, impressional,
Alive to gentle influence
Of landscape and of sky,
And tender to the spirit-touch
Of man’s or maiden’s eye;
But, to his native centre fast,
Shall into Future fuse the Past,
And the world’s flowing fates in his own mould recast.
_Henry David Thoreau._--Emerson had the originality that enables a seer
to pierce beneath the surface, and to find a likeness in things where
passive minds detect no brotherhood; he did not have the originality by
virtue of which amply creative minds gather a multitude of elements,
properly subordinated one to another, into new, harmonious, and
embracing wholes. His is a crucial defect in American poetry, a defect
in the constructive imagination. This defect is intimately associated
with an unscholarly dread of minute research. Emerson’s attitude of
distrust toward science was shared by his friend and disciple Thoreau
(1817-62), in whom the creed of individualism ran almost to the point
of caricature. In his youth and prime, Thoreau wrote a great deal of
verse, only a little of which has been preserved. The conception of
Prometheus, suffering and isolated friend of humanity, tenacious in
the assertion of his own will, was to Thoreau’s taste; hence his rough
but stirring translation from the tragedy by Æschylus. He had the
Emersonian fondness for gnomic sentences and verses, such as he found
scattered through the “Odes” of Pindar. His versions of Pindaric gnomes
show that he was not afraid of difficult Greek; still, he hovered
between belief and disbelief in scholarship. His ear was better than
Emerson’s. It is unfortunate that his unrivalled gift of observation
did not more frequently leave a record of itself in lines like those
“To a Stray Fowl.” His mind was not without the New England love of the
startling and paradoxical. Yet his search for hidden analogies borders
oftener on true imagination than was the case with Holmes.
_Oliver Wendell Holmes._--“The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table” has
already given evidence that it will outlast “Elsie Venner” and “The
Guardian Angel”; yet if the miscellanies of Dr. Holmes (1809-94)
possess more vitality than his novels, this is in some measure
due to the “Autocrat’s” occasional employment of verse. In the
“Breakfast-Table” series appeared “The Chambered Nautilus” and “The
Wonderful ‘One-Hoss Shay,’” which, with his youthful “Old Ironsides,”
and “The Broomstick Train,” have retained the firmest hold on the
popular memory. Holmes was pleased to trace his ancestry back to Anne
Bradstreet, the first American poetess. His own poetry commenced with
a schoolboy rendering into heroic couplets from Virgil, and hardly
ended with his tribute to the memory of Whittier in 1892. In the
standard edition of his works his poems occupy three volumes. Many
of them, corresponding to his turn for the novel, are narrative; for
story-telling he had a knack amounting to a high degree of talent. His
sense of order and proportion is stronger than that of other members
of the New England school, and he has a command of at least formal
structure. One may not unreasonably attribute this command in part to
his studies in human anatomy. At the same time Holmes is beset with the
temptation to value manner and brilliancy rather than substance, and he
will go out of his way for a fanciful conceit or a striking expression.
In the use of odds and ends of recondite lore his cleverness is
amazing. He had a tenacious memory and a habit of rapid association,
so that as a punster he is almost without a match. However, his glance
is not deeply penetrating; he sees fantastic resemblances between
things that are really far removed from one another, not so often the
fundamental similarities in things whether near or apart. One may in
vain search through Holmes for anything so truly poetic as Thoreau’s
comparison of sex in human beings and flowers. Accordingly, his mind
may be classed as fanciful rather than imaginative. It ought not to
be misunderstood, and will not be unduly detracting from his great
excellence, if we say that the poetry of Holmes does not always evince
the highest moral seriousness--a lack that is not fully supplied when
he attempts moral subjects, as in “The Chambered Nautilus,” where,
though the comparison of the growing mollusk with the expanding human
soul is beautiful, the preaching is a little trite.
As regards the form of his poetry, Holmes is a survival of the
eighteenth century. In his boyhood, he was a devoted admirer of Pope,
but instead of abandoning the style of the Augustans, as Bryant and
Lowell abandoned or outgrew it, he chose rather to perfect himself in
it; until, somewhat more plastic than it was in his models, somewhat
modernised and provincial, that style became his normal accent. Having
Holmes’ purpose in view, one may add that no poet in America has
acquired a surer control over his medium. Within this medium he was
able to unite sparkle, humour, clearness, good sense, and oratorical
emphasis. It is the opinion of several very able critics that no one
in his century can vie with him in the art of writing verses for an
occasion. Here is the source not only of his strength but also of
his weakness. A large proportion of his verse is of mainly local or
temporary interest. The poems which he offered year by year at the
exercises of the Harvard Commencement will year by year engender less
enthusiasm. A constructive criticism, however, will lay stress, not on
his inheritance of New England provincialism or his slight tendency
to be flippant, but on his kindliness, his inexhaustible good humour,
his quick and darting intellectual curiosity, and on the appeal which
his sprightly moralising makes to the young. It is not a little
thing to say of a wit and a power of epigram like his that they were
ever genial, and ever on the side of something better than a merely
conventional morality.
_John Greenleaf Whittier._--In so brief a section, it has seemed
impossible to offer more than a few scattered remarks on the poetry
that arose in both the North and the South in connection with slavery
and the Civil War. Something has been said of Confederate writers,
including Timrod and Lanier; more might be added on the patriotic
verse of Lowell and Longfellow, Emerson and Holmes, and a throng of
lesser men, who sang to the North of courage and consolation, or
attacked those whom they considered the foes of the Republic at home or
abroad. One poetess, yet living, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe (born in 1819),
immortalised herself in 1862 by her “Battle-Hymn of the Republic,” a
piece breathing the very essence of righteousness and love of country,
and having a value out of all proportion to the rest of her work.
Something similar must be said of Thomas B. Read (1822-72) and his
popular “Sheridan’s Ride” (1865). The true bard of the battle-field
and bivouac, of course, was Walt Whitman, who, as a nurse in the Union
army, had actual experience of war. If, however, any one person is to
be singled out from his century as the proclaimer of American freedom,
this must be Whittier; and that too, it might almost be said, in spite
of his heredity, his early hopes, and his natural bent. At least,
his Quaker blood and his love for the peaceful ways of nature would
not designate him for the office of poet militant. Furthermore, if
Whittier’s art and sentiment in the progress of years elicit more and
more admiration from qualified arbiters, such admiration will be mainly
bestowed, not on his war lyrics or his denunciations of slavery, but on
his hymns, his legends of New England, and his rustic idyls--above all,
on “Snow Bound.”