James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) was born in Cambridge, the youngest of six children. His father, the Reverend Charles Lowell, a Harvard graduate, was pastor of the West Church in Boston, three miles away. Elmwood was an ample New England mansion with the literary atmosphere indoors that is generated by the presence of good books and good talk. The boy was one of a few day scholars at an excellent boarding school in town, from which he entered college in the class of 1838. Like many another man of later distinction in letters, he was more industrious than regular as a student, wasting little time in fact, but often neglecting his assigned work and sometimes lapsing into mild disorder to the extent of falling under college discipline. Toward the end of senior year he was actually “rusticated” for a combination of petty offenses. Under this form of punishment the boy, who was for a time suspended from college, was assigned to a clergyman in some country town and required to keep up in his studies until his reinstatement. It happened that Lowell was sent to Concord, and that here (while in charge of a clergyman with the ominous name of Barzillai Frost) he was fretting over the class poem, in which he commented with youthful cynicism on Carlyle, Emerson, the abolitionists, and the champions of total abstinence and of woman’s rights. It was an outburst on which he looked back with quiet amusement in later years:

And the proof that the boyish gibes were hardly more than a result of the impatience at his ungrateful weeks in Concord is contained in his record of the inspiration which he owed in student days to Emerson the lecturer (see p. 211).

In the first years out of college, from which he graduated in 1838, he passed through the oft-trod vale of troubled indecision as to what he should do with his life. He rejected at once his father’s profession of preaching and abandoned thoughts of the law after he had earned his LL.B. degree in 1840. And then, following a brief and frustrated romance, he entered upon an acquaintance which culminated in his marriage to Maria White and resulted in his becoming a soberer and a wiser man. She was already deeply interested in the social movements toward which his mind was maturing. His devotion to her took permanent form in his first volumes of poems, “A Year’s Life” (1841) and “Poems” (1843), and her influence on him is shown in his zeal for the very reforms which he had derided in his class poem three years earlier. He founded a new magazine, The Pioneer, which lived for three months in 1843; he contributed copiously to The Boston Miscellany, Graham’s Magazine, and Arcturus; and, what was much more momentous, he threw in his lot with the abolitionists by becoming a regular contributor to The Pennsylvania Freeman. In the meanwhile, also, in addition to his purely poetic work and to his reform enthusiasm, he took his first step toward scholastic achievement with his “Conversations on Some of the Old Poets,” which appeared in a volume of 1844. From now to the end of his life Lowell continued to distribute his energies among the fields of poetry, civics, and scholarship.

In 1845, 1846, and 1847 he wrote abundantly, widening his relations with the magazines of the day and apparently finding no trouble in marketing his wares. One piece of verse is preËminent in this period for both immediate and lasting appeal—“The Present Crisis.” It was Lowell’s way of protesting at the national policy in the war with Mexico and, in its contrast with Thoreau’s method (see p. 224), throws light on the reformer’s later strictures upon the recluse. It was repeated on every hand during the next twenty years and was given special emphasis through its frequent use by such orators as Wendell Phillips and Charles Sumner. It was in 1848, however, that he came to the fullness of his powers, contributing some forty articles to four Boston periodicals and publishing four books “Poems (Second Series),” “A Fable for Critics,” “The Biglow Papers,” and “The Vision of Sir Launfal.” He was only ten years out of college, and at that was only twenty-nine years old, but he showed secure taste, confident judgment, and a seasoned ease of humor which belong to middle life. In the first and last, the more literary volumes, there is perhaps more evidence of youth. It appears in the effusive grief on the loss of his little daughter, and in “Sir Launfal” Lowell seems to be working too clearly after the somewhat confused formula laid down in the introduction to The Pioneer. Americans were to attempt a natural rather than a national literature. They were to remember that “new occasions teach new duties.” “To be the exponent of a young spirit which shall aim at power through gentleness ... and in which freedom shall be attempered to love by a reverence for all beauty wherever it may exist, is our humble hope.” So in order not to be too aggressively national, he derived a theme from the literature of chivalry and adorned it with a democratic, nineteenth-century moral.

“A Fable for Critics” is less consciously ambitious and more mature. Just how remarkable a piece of discrimination it was can be seen from a comparison of the writers criticized in it with those in Poe’s “Literati” of two years earlier. Lowell’s subjects are familiar to the modern general reader; he omitted no man of permanent reputation and included almost no one who has been forgotten. Poe’s selections, on the other hand, are quaintly unfamiliar as a whole to all but the professed student of literary history. His judgments on them are mostly sound, but his judgment in choosing them for treatment is open to one of two criticisms: either that he could not recognize permanent values or that, for personal and editorial reasons, he preferred to ignore them. In the “Fable” Lowell for the first time put to public use his ready command of impromptu verse. His pen was a little erratic, but when it would work at all, it was likely to work with happy fluency. The jaunty treatment of his contemporaries was quite literally a series of running comments, trotting along in genial anapÆstic gait, stumbling sometimes on a pun, scampering with light foot across extended metaphors, and taking the barriers of double and triple rime without a sign of exertion. In point of method the “Fable” was a single exercise in writing the journalistic verse of which Lowell proved himself master in the two series of “Biglow Papers” (1846–1848 and 1862–1866). It was exactly deserving of Holmes’s friendly comment, “I think it is capital—crammed full and rammed down hard—powder (lots of it)—shot—slugs—very little wadding, and that is guncotton—all crowded into a rusty-looking sort of a blunderbuss barrel, as it were—capped with a percussion preface—and cocked with a title-page as apropos as a wink to a joke.” Different as it is from “The Literati” in scale, tone, individual subjects, and method of circulation, the two deserve mention together as antidotes both to Anglomania and to wholesale praise of everything American.

With “The Biglow Papers” Lowell returned to the attack which he had begun in “The Present Crisis.” He wrote in 1860:

He wrote the nine numbers of the series not only in the dialect of the countryside but from the viewpoint of a forthright, hard-headed, Puritan-tinged Yankee; and he put them out as the compositions of Hosea Biglow under the encouragement of Parson Wilbur, without the use of his own name. He was surprised by the cordial reception of the volume, fifteen hundred copies of which were sold in the first week. If he had put on the cap and bells to play fool to the public, he said, it was less to make the people laugh than to win a hearing for certain serious things which he had deeply at heart. “The Biglow Papers” were undoubtedly Lowell’s great popular success. They carried the fight into the enemies’ camp in the abolition struggle, they were resumed with new success with the outbreak of the Civil War, and they widened the reading public for his more sober political prose and for his more elevated verse.

However, Lowell was not satisfied to be only a fighter. In a letter of January, 1850, he wrote to a friend:

Out of such a mood as this came the natural decision to make his first and long-deferred trip to Europe, a sojourn of fifteen months in 1851–1852 with his wife and children. His wide reading of foreign literatures gave the keys to an understanding of the peoples among whom he traveled, and especially to an understanding of Roman culture. His comments from Rome furnish an interesting contrast with Emerson’s (“Written at Rome,” 1833). The reaction of the Concord philosopher had been wholly personal. Lowell’s was wholly national.

On his return to America he plunged eagerly into writing, but the springs of utterance were soon sealed by the death of his wife. Following on the losses of his mother and two of his children this was the fourth and most crushing bereavement within a very few years. His recovery of working powers was aided by the distraction that came from an invitation to deliver the distinguished Lowell Lecture Series in Boston in the winter of 1854–1855. These were to be twelve in number, on poetry in general and English poetry in particular. The task appealed to him as combining the beauty and truth to which he inclined to turn after his years of conflict. He threw himself whole-heartedly into the preparation and delivery of the lectures and succeeded admirably with his hearers; but the greater result was an indirect one. While they were in progress Longfellow offered his resignation of the Smith Professorship “of the French and Spanish Languages and Literatures ... and of Belles Lettres in Harvard College,” a post he had filled since 1836. Seven candidates of no mean ability presented themselves for the vacant position, but the appointment was offered to Lowell, who had not applied for it, in preference to them all. He spent another year abroad before undertaking the work in the autumn of 1856, and held the position actively until 1877 and as emeritus professor until his death in 1891. In this work he was a scholar and a critic rather than a teacher. He gave almost no elementary instruction in the languages, and his methods with his classes were casual to the neglect of the usual college traditions. What he did for his students was to share with them his own broad experience of life and letters and to show them how the study of foreign literatures was one with the study of history and philosophy.

Lowell’s course of life, however, could never be restricted to any single channel. If he had found in 1850 that reform could not take up the whole of him, he now discovered that scholarship was not all-absorbing. As early as 1853 the question of establishing a new Boston magazine had been in the air. When its chief promoter, Francis H. Underwood,[20] had made certain of its start, Lowell was secured as first editor and carried it through the most critical period, until in 1861 it passed into the publishing hands of Ticknor and Fields and under the editorship of the junior member of that firm, James T. Fields. In the editorial office, as at Cambridge, Lowell was relieved from the heaviest humdrum labor (especially of correspondence) and was enabled to give his best energies to creative planning, yet it is interesting to see how effective were some of the detail criticisms accepted by poets like Emerson and Whittier and how vigilant he was in his reading of manuscripts and proof sheets. Throughout it all he kept up a spring-flow of boyish jollity, no different in spirit from that in his letters of college days.

An unpremeditated bit in one of his letters shows how the mind of professor and literary editor reverted to the excitement of politics on the eve of the war. It is in a fragment of burlesque on the type of love story submitted to the Atlantic: “Meanwhile the elder of the two, a stern-featured man of some forty winters, played with the hilt of his dagger, half drawing and then sheathing again the Damascus blade thin as the eloquence of Everett and elastic as the conscience of Cass.” From 1858 to 1866 he printed some sixteen vigorous and substantial political articles, besides many shorter notes and reviews, and during the latter four years resumed the “Biglow Papers,” repeating and building upon his original success. The aggressive fighting spirit which he carried into the discussion of definite men and measures did not blind him to the permanent values of the matters in dispute. The consequence was that his political writings were limited to the Civil War only in the facts he cited, and that they apply to any war in the principles to which he appealed. There is no better illustration than “Mason and Slidell: a Yankee Idyll.” In this the Concord Bridge and Bunker Hill Monument bring the spirit of the Revolution to the discussion of a Civil War issue, and between them they utter almost all the basic contentions of the World War which broke out fifty years later. They anticipate the vital things that have recently been said for and against military preparedness, international jealousies, the changes made necessary in international law by the progress of invention, the appeals to national hatred and to a tribal or national God, the viciousness of an indeterminate peace, and the essential values of democracy.

From this ordeal by battle Lowell seems to have risen into a broader and nobler serenity. He balanced the prose essay on “The Rebellion: its Cause and Consequences” with the Harvard “Commemoration Ode”; the next prose volumes, “Among my Books” (1870 and 1876) and “My Study Windows” (1871), with the odes on “Agassiz” (1874) and “The Concord Centennial” (1875) and the “Three Memorial Poems” of 1877. In all the poems he looked to the past, the struggle being over, for some evidences of strength and beauty in American life and for some assurances for its future; and in the literary essays he looked beyond nationalism to the permanent and universal values in literature. His political writings had appeared mainly in the North American Review, which he had edited (1864–1872) in coÖperation with Charles Eliot Norton; and at this point younger admirers called him into public appearances as presiding officer, as committee chairman, as delegate to a Republican national convention, and as presidential elector. It even took some insistence to carry through his refusal to run for Congress. Finally, in 1877 he entered as foreign minister on eight years of the highest service to his country, the first two and a half at Madrid and the remainder at London. Few men in America could have equaled him in his qualifications for the Spanish mission. He had taught the language and the literature and was especially well-versed in the drama, and temperamentally there was much in him which responded to the national character. He wrote to Mr. Putnam, “I like the Spaniards very well as far as I know them, and have an instinctive sympathy with their want of aptitude for business”; and to Professor Child, “There is something oriental in my own nature which sympathizes with this ‘let her slide’ temper of the hidalgos.” Both of which statements should be taken as partly true to the letter and partly indicative of the adjustability which distinguishes the American from the Englishman.

The most compact tribute to his five and a half years at the court of St. James was the remark of a Londoner that he found all the Britons strangers and left them all cousins. Lowell was one of the two extreme types of American whom Victorian England chose to like and admire. One, of the Mark Twain and Joaquin Miller sort, was free and easy, smacking of the wild West, completely in contrast with the English gentleman; the other, in the persons of men like Lowell and Charles Eliot Norton, was the nearest American approach to cultivated John Bull. In diplomatic circles Lowell’s tact always mollified his firmness, even leading to criticism from some of his countrymen because he never defied nor blustered. And in his immensely important appearances as the representative of the United States at all manner of social occasions, he charmed his hosts by the grace and pertinence of his public speech.

In the years remaining to him after his return from London in 1885 he literally uttered much of the best that he wrote. He was no longer an eager producer, but he could be stimulated to speak by special invitations. So he delivered addresses out of the fullness of his experience at Birmingham University, at Westminster Abbey, at the celebration of Forefathers’ Day in Plymouth, at the 250th Anniversary of the founding of Harvard, before the reform leagues of Boston and New York, and at a convention of the Modern Language Association of America. These, with his last volume of verse, “Heartsease and Rue” (1888), became his valedictory. He died in 1891.

The outstanding feature of Lowell’s career is that he was a poet in action. His first and last volumes were lyrics. In the forty-seven years between their issues he was always the artist. He brought his emotional fervor and his sense of phrase to his essays, addresses, and occasional poems and to his pursuit of scholarship. His natural first interests were in the printed page and in the wielding of the pen; measured by weeks and months his life was largely lived in retirement, but the step from reading and writing to active citizenship was an easy one, and in the world of action he seemed to make few waste motions. What he did not only counted in itself but it enriched his mind as much as what he read. And back of all his activity were certain qualities that contributed to his effectiveness. He was a representative man, a fact acknowledged by his classmates who elected him their poet. He had the journalistic gift of saying excellently what others were on the verge of thinking. He did little thinking of his own that was original but much that was independent, and as a sane radical he was sure of the hearing he richly deserved. He was clever and charming, with a glint of errant unexpectedness, which was ingratiating even when it was far-fetched or even wantonly malapropos. His quips are like the gifts and favors of old-time children’s parties—hidden all over the house and just as likely to defy search as to turn up under a napkin or in the umbrella of a departing guest. And behind all, Lowell was prevailingly American, with the combined trust in democracy and fear for it that belonged to his group in his generation.

From 1820 on, Irving, Cooper, Bryant, and their followers had protested more and more frequently (see pp. 111–114) at the certain condescension in foreigners to which Lowell addressed himself in his essay of 1865. Yet all these men, and cultured America as a whole, played up to this condescension and encouraged it by evidently expecting it—stimulating it by the peevish feebleness of their protests. Lowell, though loyal, was always apologetic, always hoping to gain confidence in his countrymen. His intimate friend, Charles Eliot Norton, was deferent toward all things British or European, and, while working valiantly to establish sound canons of taste, felt a distress for the crudities of American life that was only a refinement upon the snobbishness of the Effinghams in Cooper’s “Homeward Bound” and “Home as Found.” The fact is that the refined American of the mid-nineteenth century was afraid to contemplate the incarnation of America. He knew that Uncle Sam was too mature for it; he feared that it was like Tom Sawyer; he did what he could to mold it into the image of Little Lord Fauntleroy; and he apologized for Whitman. When Mark Twain visited William Dean Howells in Cambridge in 1871 they were both young sojourners from what was to Cambridge an undiscriminated West. Young Mr. Clemens did not care at all, and young Mr. Howells did not care as far as he was concerned, though he cared a great deal in behalf of his friend, who was so incorrigibly Western. And in recording his anxiety he recorded a striking fact of that generation: that American culture was afraid even of the rough-and-ready Americans whom Europe was applauding. “I did not care,” said Mr. Howells of Mr. Clemens, “to expose him to the critical edge of that Cambridge acquaintance which might not have appreciated him at, say, his transatlantic value. In America his popularity was as instant as it was vast. But it must be acknowledged that for a much longer time here than in England polite learning hesitated his praise.... I went with him to see Longfellow, but I do not think Longfellow made much of him, and Lowell made less.”[22]

In habits of intellectual nicety, in manners, and in social inclination Lowell was an aristocrat; yet in spite of these tendencies, and quite evidently in spite of them, he was in principle a stanch democrat, and when put to the test that sort of democrat is the most reliable. The conflict is interestingly apparent throughout his writings. The address on “Democracy” of 1888 need not be gravely cited as proof of Lowell’s belief in government by the people; it is only the final iteration of what he had all his life been saying. Yet after his usual leisurely introduction he approached his subject with the smile of half apology which had become a habit to him: “I shall address myself to a single point only in the long list of offences of which we are more or less gravely accused, because that really includes all the rest.” It crops out in the Thoreau essay, apropos of Emerson: “If it was ever questionable whether democracy could develop a gentleman, the problem has been affirmatively solved at last”; and in the Lincoln essay: “Mr. Lincoln has also been reproached with Americanism by some not unfriendly British critics; but, with all deference, we cannot say that we like him any the worse for it.” In the ode on Agassiz he heaved a sigh of relief that the great naturalist was willing to put up with New England conditions; and even in the Harvard “Commemoration Ode” he broke out suddenly with:

The point is not in the least that Lowell did not believe in democracy; every deprecating remark of this sort was prefatory to a fresh defense of it. The point is that, as with a quarrel, it takes two to make a condescension and that Lowell did his part. It is difficult to imagine the young foreigner of “German-silver aristocracy” condescending with success to Lincoln or Emerson or to Mark Twain or Whitman.

The frequent expression of this self-defensive mood is an illustration of another leading trait in Lowell—his spontaneity. Since he felt as he did there would have been no virtue in concealing the fact, and Lowell seldom concealed anything. He wrote readily and fully, often beyond the verge of prolixity. He gave his ideas free rein as they filed or crowded or raced into his mind, not only welcoming those that came but often seeming to invite those that were tentatively approaching. Only in a few of his lyrics did he compact his utterance. Most of the introductions to essays and longer poems proceed in the manner of the “musing organist” of the first stanza in “Sir Launfal,” “beginning doubtfully and far away,” and what follows is in most cases somewhat lavishly discursive. The consequences of this manner of expression of a richly furnished mind are not altogether fortunate. Much of his writing could have been more quickly started and more compactly stated, and practically all of it could have been more firmly constructed. Emerson’s essays lack firm structure because they were not written to a program, but were aggregations of paragraphs already set down in his journals. Lowell’s essays, although deliberately composed, were equally without design. His method was to fill himself with his subject of the moment and then to write eagerly and rapidly, letting “his fingers wander as they list.” His productions were consequently poured out rather than built up. They have the character of most excellent conversation which circles about a single theme, allows frequent digression, admits occasional brilliant sallies, includes various “good things,” and finally stops without any definitive conclusion. In this respect, while Lowell was by no means artless in the sense of being unsophisticated, he was also by no means artful in the sense of calculating his effects upon the reader. The only reader of whom he seems to have been distinctly conscious was the bookish circle of his own associates. He would fling out recondite allusions as though in challenge, and he wrote in a flowing, polysyllabic diction which was nicely exact but which rarely would concede the simpler word.

This same surging spontaneity was both the strength and weakness of his poetry. He inclined too much to foster the theory of inspiration. “’Tis only while we are forming our opinions,” he once wrote, “that we are very anxious to propagate them”; and as he indited most of his poems while he was in this state of “anxiety” they became effusions rather than compositions. His first drafts, in fact, were fulfillments of Bryant’s injunction in “The Poet”:

But in his revisions he was unable to follow the instructions to the end:

As a consequence his poems when published were as invertebrate as when he first wrote them, and of the revisions in detail many were shifted back to their original form. The degree to which he tempered the wind of self-criticism to his own poetical lambs is the more noteworthy on account of the acumen with which he commented as editor on the work of his fellow-poets.

On the other hand, his easy command of versification, his gift of phrasing, and his rich poetic imagination resulted in very many passages of beauty and feeling, particularly in the later odes like the Commemoration and Agassiz poems, into which he poured the fine fervor of his patriotism. In these his sincerity, his intellectual solidity, his idealism, and his nature-feeling combined with “the incontrollable poetic impulse which is the authentic mark of a new poem” and which Emerson ascribed to him in a journal entry of 1868.

BOOK LIST

Individual Author

James Russell Lowell. Works. Riverside Edition. 1890. 11 vols. Elmwood Edition. 1904. 16 vols. (Contains one more volume of literary essays, one more of poetry, and the three volumes of letters. C. E. Norton, editor. 1904.) These appeared in book form originally as follows: Class Poem, 1838; A Year’s Life, 1841; Poems, 1844; Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, 1845; Poems, Second Series, 1848; A Fable for Critics, 1848; The Biglow Papers, 1848; The Vision of Sir Launfal, 1848; Fireside Travels, 1864; The Biglow Papers, Second Series, 1867; Under the Willows and Other Poems, 1869; The Cathedral, 1870; Among my Books, 1870; My Study Windows, 1871; Among my Books, Second Series, 1876; Three Memorial Poems, 1877; Democracy and Other Addresses, 1887; Political Essays, 1888; Heartsease and Rue, 1888; Latest Literary Essays and Addresses, 1891; The Old English Dramatists, 1892; Last Poems, 1895; Impressions of Spain, 1899.

Bibliography

A volume compiled by George Willis Cooke. 1906. Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. II, pp. 544–550.

Biography and Criticism

TOPICS AND PROBLEMS

Read “The Present Crisis” as determining the temper in which Lowell wrote his essay on Thoreau in view of their different reactions to the same national situation.

Read what Poe, Longfellow, and Lowell had to say concerning overemphasis on the American quality of American literature as noted on pages 177, 272, and 284. Is there any clear reason for this common dissent?

Compare the people discussed in Lowell’s “Fable for Critics” and in Poe’s “Literati,” published within two years of each other.

Read the connecting prose passages between the “Biglow Papers” for interesting evidence of Lowell’s attention to and knowledge of linguistic detail. Read “Mason and Slidell: a Yankee Idyll” in “Biglow Papers,” Second Series, as a commentary on the Great European War.

Analyze the structure of a selected long poem and of a literary essay with a view to studying its firmness or looseness.

Read any one of Lowell’s five great odes and note the rhetorical fitness of meter and subject as contrasted with the artificiality of Lanier’s later poems.

Read “The Shepherd of King Admetus,” “Invita Minerva,” “The Origin of Didactic Poetry,” and the passages on Lowell and his fellow-poets for his comments on poetry and poetic art.