[Footnote 15: An address delivered at the exercises held by the Cambridge
Historical Society in Sanders Theatre, Harvard University, Feb. 22, 1919,
to commemorate the centenary of Lowell's birth. By permission of Professor
Perry and of the editor of the _Harvard Graduates' Magazine_. Copyright,
1919, by _The Harvard Graduates' Magazine_.]
Two Harvard men, teachers of English in the University of North Carolina,
have recently published a new kind of textbook for undergraduates.
Abandoning the conventional survey of literary types and the examination of
literary history in the narrow sense of those words, they present a program
of ideas, the dominant ideas of successive epochs in the life of England
and America. They direct the attention of the young student, not so much to
canons of art as to noteworthy expressions of communal thought and feeling,
to the problems of self-government, of noble discipline, of ordered
liberty. The title of this book is _The Great Tradition_. The fundamental
idealism of the Anglo-Saxon race is illustrated by passages from Bacon and
Raleigh, Spenser and Shakespeare. But William Bradford, as well as Cromwell
and Milton, is chosen to represent the seventeenth-century struggle for
faith and freedom. In the eighteenth century, Washington and Jefferson and
Thomas Paine appear side by side with Burke and Burns and Wordsworth.
Shelley and Byron, Tennyson and Carlyle are here of course, but with them
are John Stuart Mill and John Bright and John Morley. There are passages
from Webster and Emerson, from Lowell and Walt Whitman and Lincoln, and
finally, from the eloquent lips of living men--from Lloyd George and Arthur
Balfour and Viscount Grey and President Wilson--there are pleas for
international honor and international justice and for a commonwealth of
free nations.
It is a magnificent story, this record of Anglo-Saxon idealism during four
hundred years. The six or seven hundred pages of the book which I have
mentioned are indeed rich in purely literary material; in the illustration
of the temper of historic periods; in the exhibition of changes in language
and in literary forms. The lover of sheer beauty in words, the analyzer of
literary types, the student of biography, find here ample material for
their special investigations. But the stress is laid, not so much upon the
quality of individual genius, as upon the political and moral instincts of
the English-speaking races, their long fight for liberty and democracy,
their endeavor to establish the terms upon which men may live together in
society. And precisely here, I take it, is the significance of the pages
which Professors Greenlaw and Hanford assign to James Russell Lowell. The
man whom we commemorate to-night played his part in the evolution which has
transformed the Elizabethan Englishman into the twentieth-century American.
Lowell was an inheritor and an enricher of the Great Tradition.
This does not mean that he did not know whether he was American or English.
He wrote in 1866 of certain Englishmen: "They seem to forget that more than
half the people of the North have roots, as I have, that run down more than
two hundred years deep into this new-world soil--that we have not a thought
nor a hope that is not American." In 1876, when his political independence
made him the target of criticism, he replied indignantly: "These fellows
have no notion what love of country means. It is in my very blood and
bones. If I am not an American, who ever was?"
It remains true, nevertheless, that Lowell's life and his best writing are
keyed to that instinct of personal discipline and civic responsibility
which characterized the seventeenth century emigrants from England. These
successors of Roger Ascham and Thomas Elyot and Philip Sidney were
Puritanic, moralistic, practical; and with their "faith in God, faith in
man and faith in work" they built an empire. Lowell's own mind, like
Franklin's, like Lincoln's, had a shrewd sense of what concerns the common
interests of all. The inscription beneath his bust on the exterior of
Massachusetts Hall runs as follows: "Patriot, scholar, orator, poet, public
servant." Those words begin and end upon that civic note which is heard in
all of Lowell's greater utterances. It has been the dominant note of much
of the American writing that has endured. And it is by virtue of this note,
touched so passionately, so nobly, throughout a long life, that Lowell
belongs to the elect company of public souls.
No doubt we have had in this country distinguished practitioners of
literature who have stood mainly or wholly outside the line of the Great
Tradition. They drew their inspiration elsewhere. Poe, for example, is not
of the company; Hawthorne in his lonelier moods is scarcely of the company.
In purely literary fame, these names may be held to outrank the name of
James Russell Lowell; as Emerson outranks him, of course, in range of
vision, Longfellow in craftsmanship, and Walt Whitman in sheer power of
emotion and of phrase. But it happens that Lowell stands with both Emerson
and Whitman in the very centre of that group of poets and prose-men who
have been inspired by the American idea. They were all, as we say proudly
nowadays, "in the service," and the particular rank they may have chanced
to win is a relatively insignificant question, except to critics and
historians.
The centenary of the birth of a writer who reached three score and ten is
usually ill-timed for a proper perspective of his work. A generation has
elapsed since his death. Fashions have changed; writers, like bits of old
furniture, have had time to "go out" and not time enough to come in again.
George Eliot and Ruskin, for instance, whose centenaries fall in this year,
suffer the dark reproach of having been "Victorians." The centenaries of
Hawthorne and Longfellow and Whittier were celebrated at a period of
comparative indifference to their significance. But if the present moment
is still too near to Lowell's life-time to afford a desirable literary
perspective, a moral touchstone of his worth is close at hand. In this hour
of heightened national consciousness, when we are all absorbed with the
part which the English-speaking races are playing in the service of the
world, we may surely ask whether Lowell's mind kept faith with his blood
and with his citizenship, or whether, like many a creator of exotic, hybrid
beauty, he remained an alien in the spiritual commonwealth, a homeless,
masterless man.
No one needs to speak in Cambridge of Lowell's devotion to the community in
which he was born and in which he had the good fortune to die. In some of
his most delightful pages he has recorded his affection for it. Yonder in
the alcoves of Harvard Hall, then the College Library, he discovered many
an author unrepresented among his father's books at Elmwood. In University
Hall he attended chapel--occasionally. In the open space between Hollis and
Holden he read his "Commemoration Ode." He wrote to President Hill in 1863:
"Something ought to be done about the trees in the Yard." He loved the
place. It was here in Sanders Theatre that he pronounced his memorable
address at the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the
College--an address rich in historic background, and not without solicitude
for the future of his favorite humanistic studies--a solicitude, some will
think, only too well justified. "Cambridge at all times is full of ghosts,"
said Emerson. But no ghost from the past, flitting along the Old Road from
Elmwood to the Yard, and haunting the bleak lecture-rooms where it had
recited as a careless boy and taught wearily as a man, could wear a more
quizzical and friendly aspect than Lowell's. He commonly spoke of his life
as a professor with whimsical disparagement, as Henry Adams wrote of his
own teaching with a somewhat cynical disparagement. But the fact is that
both of these self-depreciating New Englanders were stimulating and
valuable teachers. From his happily idle boyhood to the close of his
fruitful career, Lowell's loyalty to Cambridge and Harvard was unalterable.
Other tastes changed after wider experience with the world. He even
preferred, at last, the English blackbird to the American bobolink, but the
Harvard Quinquennial Catalogue never lost its savor, and in the full tide
of his social success in London he still thought that the society he had
enjoyed at the Saturday Club was the best society in the world. To
deracinate Lowell was impossible, and it was for this very reason that he
became so serviceable an international personage. You knew where he stood.
It was not for nothing that his roots ran down two hundred years deep. He
was the incarnation of his native soil.
Lowell has recently been described, together with Whittier, Emerson, and
others, as an "English provincial poet--in the sense that America still was
a literary province of the mother country." To this amazing statement one
can only rejoin that if "The Biglow Papers," the "Harvard Commemoration
Ode," "Under the Old Elm," the "Fourth of July Ode," and the Agassiz elegy
are English provincial poetry, most of us need a new map and a new
vocabulary. Of both series of "Biglow Papers" we may surely exclaim, as did
Quintilian concerning early Roman satire, "This is wholly ours." It is true
that Lowell, like every young poet of his generation, had steeped himself
in Spenser and the other Elizabethans. They were his literary ancestors by
as indisputable an inheritance as a Masefield or a Kipling could claim. He
had been brought up to revere Pope. Then he surrendered to Wordsworth and
Keats and Shelley, and his earlier verses, like the early work of Tennyson,
are full of echoes of other men's music. It is also true that in spite of
his cleverness in versifying, or perhaps because of it, he usually showed
little inventiveness in shaping new poetic patterns. His tastes were
conservative. He lacked that restless technical curiosity which spurred Poe
and Whitman to experiment with new forms. But Lowell revealed early
extraordinary gifts of improvisation, retaining the old tunes of English
verse as the basis for his own strains of unpremeditated art. He wrote "A
Fable for Critics" faster than he could have written it in prose. "Sir
Launfal" was composed in two days, the "Commemoration Ode" in one.
It was this facile, copious, enthusiastic poet, not yet thirty, who grew
hot over the Mexican War and poured forth his indignation in an
unforgettable political satire such as no English provincial poet could
possibly have written. What a weapon he had, and how it flashed in his
hand, gleaming with wit and humor and irony, edged with scorn, and weighted
with two hundred years of Puritan tradition concerning right and wrong! For
that, after all, was the secret of its success. Great satire must have a
standard; and Lowell revealed his in the very first number and in one line:
"'T aint your eppylets an' feathers
Make the thing a grain more right."
Some readers to-day dislike the Yankee dialect of these verses. Some think
Lowell struck too hard; but they forget Grant's characterization of the
Mexican War as "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a
weaker nation." There are critics who think the First Series of "Biglow
Papers" too sectional; an exhibition of New England's ancient tendency
towards nullification of the national will. No doubt Lowell underestimated
the real strength of the advocates of national expansion at any cost.
Parson Wilbur thought, you remember, that
"All this big talk of our destinies
Is half on it ign'ance an' t'other half rum."
Neither ignorance nor rum was responsible for the invasion of Belgium; but
at least one can say that the political philosophy which justifies forcible
annexation of territory is taught to-day in fewer universities than were
teaching it up to 1914. Poets are apt to have the last word, even in
politics.
The war with Mexico was only an episode in the expansion of the slave
power; the fundamental test of American institutions came in the War for
the Union. Here again Lowell touched the heart of the great issue. The
Second Series of "Biglow Papers" is more uneven than the First. There is
less humor and more of whimsicality. But the dialogue between "the Moniment
and the Bridge," "Jonathan to John," and above all, the tenth number, "Mr.
Hosea Biglow to the Editor of the Atlantic Monthly," show the full sweep of
Lowell's power. Here are pride of country, passion of personal sorrow,
tenderness, idyllic beauty, magic of word and phrase.
Never again, save in passages of the memorial odes written after the War,
was Lowell more completely the poet. For it is well known that his was a
divided nature, so variously endowed that complete integration was
difficult, and that the circumstances of his career prevented that steady
concentration of powers which poetry demands. She is proverbially the most
jealous of mistresses, and Lowell could not render a constant allegiance.
At thirty his friends thought of him, rightly enough, as primarily a poet:
but in the next fifteen years he had become a professor, had devoted long
periods to study in Europe, had published prose essays, had turned editor,
first of the _Atlantic_, then of the _North American Review_, and was
writing political articles that guided public opinion in the North. To use
a phrase then beginning to come into general use, he was now a "man of
letters." But during the Civil War, I believe he thought of himself as
simply a citizen of the Union. His general reputation, won in many fields,
gave weight to what he wrote as a publicist. His editorials were one more
evidence of the central pull of the Great Tradition; it steadied his
judgment, clarified his vision, kept his rudder true.
Lowell's political papers during this period, although now little read,
have been praised by Mr. James Ford Rhodes as an exact estimate of public
sentiment, as voicing in energetic diction the mass of the common people of
the North. Lincoln wrote to thank him for one of them, adding, "I fear I am
not quite worthy of all which is therein kindly said of me personally."
Luckily Lincoln never saw an earlier letter in which Lowell thought that
"an ounce of Frémont is worth a pound of long Abraham." The fact is that
Lowell, like most men of the "Brahmin caste," came slowly to a recognition
of Lincoln's true quality. Motley, watching events from Vienna, had a
better perspective than Boston then afforded. Even Mr. Norton, Lowell's
dear friend and associate upon the _North American Review_, thought in 1862
that the President was timid, vacillating, and secretive, and, what now
seems a queerer judgment still, that he wrote very poor English. But if the
editors of the _North American_ showed a typical Anglo-Saxon reluctance in
yielding to the spell of a new political leadership, Lowell made full
amends for it in that superb Lincoln strophe now inserted in the
"Commemoration Ode," afterthought though it was, and not read at the
celebration.
In this poem and in the various Centennial Odes composed ten years later,
Lowell found an instrument exactly suited to his temperament and his
technique. Loose in structure, copious in diction, swarming with imagery,
these Odes gave ample scope for Lowell's swift gush of patriotic fervor,
for the afflatus of the improviser, steadied by reverence for America's
historic past. To a generation beginning to lose its taste for
commemorative oratory, the Odes gave--and still give--the thrill of
patriotic eloquence which Everett and Webster had communicated in the
memorial epoch of 1826. The forms change, the function never dies.
The dozen years following the Civil War were also the period of Lowell's
greatest productiveness in prose. Tethered as he was to the duties of his
professorship, and growling humorously over them, he managed nevertheless
to put together volume after volume of essays that added greatly to his
reputation, both here and in England. For it should be remembered that the
honorary degrees of D.C.L. from Oxford and LL.D. from Cambridge were
bestowed upon Lowell in 1873 and 1874; long before any one had thought of
him as Minister to England, and only a little more than ten years after he
had printed his indignant lines about
"The old J. B.
A-crowdin' you and me."
J. B. seemed to like them! A part of Lowell's full harvest of prose sprang
from that habit of enormous reading which he had indulged since boyhood. He
liked to think of himself as "one of the last of the great readers"; and
though he was not that, of course, there was nevertheless something of the
seventeenth century tradition in his gluttony of books. The very sight and
touch and smell of them were one of his pieties. He had written from
Elmwood in 1861: "I am back again in the place I love best. I am sitting in
my old garret, at my old desk, smoking my old pipe and loving my old
friends." That is the way book-lovers still picture Lowell--the Lowell of
the "Letters"--and though it is only a half-length portrait of him, it is
not a false one. He drew upon his ripe stock of reading for his college
lectures, and from the lectures, in turn, came many of the essays. Wide as
the reading was in various languages, it was mainly in the field of
"belles-lettres." Lowell had little or no interest in science or
philosophy. Upon one side of his complex nature he was simply a book-man
like Charles Lamb, and like Lamb he was tempted to think that books about
subjects that did not interest him were not really books at all.
Recent critics have seemed somewhat disturbed over Lowell's scholarship. He
once said of Longfellow: "Mr. Longfellow is not a scholar in the German
sense of the word--that is to say, he is no pedant, but he certainly is a
scholar in another and perhaps a higher sense. I mean in range of
acquirement and the flavor that comes with it." Those words might have been
written of himself. It is sixty-five years since Lowell was appointed to
his professorship at Harvard, and during this long period erudition has not
been idle here. It is quite possible that the University possesses to-day a
better Dante scholar than Lowell, a better scholar in Old French, a better
Chaucer scholar, a better Shakespeare scholar. But it is certain that if
our Division of Modern Languages were called upon to produce a volume of
essays matching in human interest one of Lowell's volumes drawn from these
various fields, we should be obliged, first, to organize a syndicate, and,
second, to accept defeat with as good grace as possible.
Contemporary critics have also betrayed a certain concern for some aspects
of Lowell's criticism. Is it always penetrating, they ask? Did he think his
critical problems through? Did he have a body of doctrine, a general thesis
to maintain? Did he always keep to the business in hand? Candor compels the
admission that he often had no theses to maintain: he invented them as he
went along. Sometimes he was a mere guesser, not a clairvoyant. We have had
only one Coleridge. Lowell's essay on Wordsworth is not as illuminating as
Walter Pater's. The essay on Gray is not as well ordered as Arnold's. The
essay on Thoreau is quite as unsatisfactory as Stevenson's. It is true that
the famous longer essays on Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Dryden,
Milton, are full of irrelevant matter, of facile delightful talk which
often leads nowhere in particular. It is true, finally, that a deeper
interest in philosophy and science might have made Lowell's criticism more
fruitful; that he blazed no new paths in critical method; that he
overlooked many of the significant literary movements of his own time in
his own country.
But when one has said all this, even as brilliantly as Mr. Brownell has
phrased it, one has failed to answer the pertinent question: "Why, in spite
of these defects, were Lowell's essays read with such pleasure by so many
intelligent persons on both sides of the Atlantic, and why are they read
still?" The answer is to be found in the whole tradition of the English
bookish essay, from the first appearance of Florio's translation of
Montaigne down to the present hour. That tradition has always welcomed
copious, well-informed, enthusiastic, disorderly, and affectionate talk
about books. It demands gusto rather than strict method, discursiveness
rather than concision, abundance of matter rather than mere neatness of
design. "Here is God's plenty!" cried Dryden in his old age, as he opened
once more his beloved Chaucer; and in Lowell's essays there is surely
"God's plenty" for a book-lover. Every one praises "My Garden
Acquaintance," "A Good Word for Winter," "On a Certain Condescension in
Foreigners" as perfect types of the English familiar essay. But all of
Lowell's essays are discursive and familiar. They are to be measured, not
by the standards of modern French criticism--which is admittedly more deft,
more delicate, more logical than ours--but by the unchartered freedom which
the English-speaking races have desired in their conversations about old
authors for three hundred years. After all,
"There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays
And every single one of them is right."
Lowell, like the rest of us, is to be tested by what he had, not by what he
lacked.
His reputation as a talker about books and men was greatly enhanced by the
addresses delivered during his service as Minister to England. Henry James
once described Lowell's career in London as a tribute to the dominion of
style. It was even more a triumph of character, but the style of these
addresses is undeniable. Upon countless public occasions the American
Minister was called upon to say the fitting word; and he deserves the
quaint praise which Thomas Benton bestowed upon Chief Justice Marshall, as
"a gentleman of finished breeding, of winning and prepossessing talk, and
just as much mind as the occasion required him to show." I cannot think
that Lowell spoke any better when unveiling a bust in Westminster Abbey
than he did at the Academy dinners in Ashfield, Massachusetts, where he had
Mr. Curtis and Mr. Norton to set the pace; he was always adequate, always
witty and wise; and some of the addresses in England, notably the one on
"Democracy" given in Birmingham in 1884, may fairly be called epoch-making
in their good fortune of explaining America to Europe. Lowell had his
annoyances like all ambassadors; there were dull dinners as well as
pleasant ones, there were professional Irishmen to be placated, solemn
despatches to be sent to Washington. Yet, like Mr. Phelps and Mr. Bayard
and Mr. Choate and the lamented Walter Page in later years, this gentleman,
untrained in professional diplomacy, accomplished an enduring work. Without
a trace of the conventional "hand across the sea" banality, without either
subservience or jingoism, he helped teach the two nations mutual respect
and confidence, and thirty years later, when England and America essayed a
common task in safeguarding civilization, that old anchor held.
This cumulative quality of Lowell's achievement is impressive, as one
reviews his career. His most thoughtful, though not his most eloquent
verse, his richest vein of letter-writing, his most influential addresses
to the public, came toward the close of his life. Precocious as was his
gift for expression, and versatile and brilliant as had been his
productiveness in the 1848 era, he was true to his Anglo-Saxon stock in
being more effective at seventy than he had been at thirty. He was one of
the men who die learning and who therefore are scarcely thought of as dying
at all. I am not sure that we may not say of him to-day, as Thoreau said of
John Brown, "He is more alive than ever he was." Certainly the type of
Americanism which Lowell represented has grown steadily more interesting to
the European world, and has revealed itself increasingly as a factor to be
reckoned with in the world of the future. Always responsive to his
environment, always ready to advance, he faced the new political issues at
the close of the century with the same courage and sagacity that had marked
his conduct in the eighteen-forties. You remember his answer to Guizot's
question: "How long do you think the American Republic will endure?" "So
long," replied Lowell, "as the ideas of its founders continue to be
dominant"; and he added that by "ideas" he meant "the traditions of their
race in government and morals." Yet the conservatism revealed in this reply
was blended with audacity--the inherited audacity of the pioneer. No line
of Lowell's has been more often quoted in this hall than the line about the
futility of attempting to open the "Future's portal with the Past's
blood-rusted key." Those words were written in 1844. And here, in a
sentence written forty-two years afterward, is a description of organized
human society which voices the precise hope of forward-looking minds in
Europe and America at this very hour: "The basis of all society is the
putting of the force of all at the disposal of all, by means of some
arrangement assented to by all, for the protection of all, and this under
certain prescribed forms." Like Jefferson, like Lincoln, like Theodore
Roosevelt at his noblest, Lowell dared to use the word "all."
Such men are not forgotten. As long as June days come and the bobolink's
song "runs down, a brook of laughter, through the air"; as long as a few
scholars are content to sit in the old garret with the old books, and close
the books, at times, to think of old friends; as long as the memory of
brave boys makes the "eyes cloud up for rain"; as long as Americans still
cry in their hearts "O beautiful, my country!" the name of James Russell
Lowell will be remembered as the inheritor and enricher of a great
tradition.