The United States have produced authors not a few; among some names not
the most famous, perhaps, on the popular tongue, are two or three names
of their poets; but they have hardly given to the world more than one man
of letters--judicious, judicial, disinterested, patient, happy,
temperate, delighted. The colonial days, with the 'painful' divines who
brought the parish into the wilderness; the experimental period of
ambition and attempts at a literature that should be young as the soil
and much younger than the race; the civil-war years, with a literature
that matched the self-conscious and inexpert heroism of the army;--none
of these periods of the national life could fitly be represented by a man
of letters. And though James Russell Lowell was the contemporary of the
'transcendentalists,' and a man of middle age when the South seceded, and
though indeed his fame as a Yankee humourist is to be discerned through
the smoke and the dust, through the gravity and the burlesque, of the
war, clear upon the other side, yet he was virtually the child of
national leisure, of moderation and education, an American of the
seventies and onwards. He represented the little-recognised fact that in
ripeness, not in rawness, consists the excellence of Americans--an
excellence they must be content to share with contemporary nations,
however much it may cost them to abandon we know not what bounding
ambitions which they have never succeeded in definitely describing in
words. Mr. Lowell was a refutation of the fallacy that an American can
never be American enough. He ranked with the students and the critics
among all nations, and nothing marks his transatlantic conditions except,
perhaps, that his scholarliness is a little anxious and would not seem
so; he enriches his phrases busily, and yet would seem composed; he makes
his allusions tread closely one upon another, and there is an assumed
carelessness, and an ill-concealed vigilance, as to the effect their
number and their erudition will produce upon the reader. The American
sensitiveness takes with him that pleasantest of forms; his style
confesses more than he thinks of the loveable weakness of national
vanity, and asks of the stranger now and again, 'Well, what do you think
of my country?'
Declining, as I do, to separate style in expression from style in the
thought that informs it--for they who make such a separation can hardly
know that style should be in the very conception of a phrase, in its
antenatal history, else the word is neither choice nor authentic--I
recognise in Mr. Lowell, as a prose author, a sense of proportion and a
delicacy of selection not surpassed in the critical work of this critical
century. Those small volumes, _Among My Books_ and _My Study
Windows_, are all pure literature. A fault in criticism is the rarest
thing in them. I call none to mind except the strange judgment on Dr.
Johnson: 'Our present concern with the Saxons is chiefly a literary one.
. . Take Dr. Johnson as an instance. The Saxon, as it appears to me, has
never shown any capacity for art,' and so forth. One wonders how Lowell
read the passage on Iona, and the letter to Lord Chesterfield, and the
Preface to the Dictionary without conviction of the great English
writer's supreme art--art that declares itself and would not be hidden.
But take the essay on Pope, that on Chaucer, and that on one Percival, a
writer of American verse of whom English readers are not aware, and they
prove Lowell to have been as clear in judging as he was exquisite in
sentencing. His essay 'On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners' is
famous, but an equal fame is due to 'My Garden Acquaintance' and 'A Good
Word for Winter.' His talk about the weather is so full of wit that one
wonders how prattlers at a loss for a topic dare attempt one so rich. The
birds that nest in his syringas seem to be not his pensioners only, but
his parishioners, so charmingly local, so intent upon his chronicle does
he become when he is minded to play White of Selborne with a smile. And
all the while it is the word that he is intent upon. You may trace his
reading by some fine word that has not escaped him, but has been garnered
for use when his fan has been quick to purge away the chaff of
commonplace. He is thus fastidious and alert in many languages. You
wonder at the delicacy of the sense whereby he perceives a choice rhyme
in the Anglo-Norman of Marie de France or a clang of arms in the brief
verse of Peire de Bergerac, or touches sensitively a word whereby Dante
has transcended something sweet in Bernard de Ventadour, or Virgil
somewhat noble in Homer. In his own use, and within his own English, he
has the abstinence and the freshness of intention that keep every word
new for the day's work. He gave to the language, and did not take from
it; it gained by him, and lost not. There are writers of English now at
work who almost convince us of their greatness until we convict them on
that charge: they have succeeded at an unpardonable cost; they are
glorified, but they have beggared the phrases they leave behind them.
Nevertheless Lowell was no poet. To accept his verse as a poet's would
be to confess a lack of instinct, and there is no more grievous lack in a
lover of poetry. Reason, we grant, makes for the full acceptance of his
poems, and perhaps so judicial a mind as his may be forgiven for having
trusted to reason and to criticism. His trust was justified--if such
justification avails--by the admiration of fairly educated people who
apparently hold him to have been a poet first, a humourist in the second
place, and an essayist incidentally. It is hard to believe that he
failed in instinct about himself. More probably he was content to forego
it when he found the ode, the lyric, and the narrative verse all so
willing. They made no difficulty, and he made none; why then are we
reluctant to acknowledge the manifest stateliness of this verse and the
evident grace of that, and the fine thought finely worded? Such
reluctance justifies itself. Nor would I attempt to back it by the cheap
sanctions of prophecy. Nay, it is quite possible that Lowell's poems may
live; I have no commands for futurity. Enough that he enriched the
present with the example of a scholarly, linguistic, verbal love of
literature, with a studiousness full of heart.