SOURCE: Reilly, Joseph J. “Lowell: The Critic and His Criticism.” In James Russell Lowell as a Critic, pp. 200-14. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1915.

[In the following excerpt, Reilly discusses the flaws of Lowell's critical essays, claiming that they were too impressionistic and subjective to meet a strict definition of scholarly criticism.]

Lowell's early critical works have already been discussed. They are worth bearing in mind as eminently characteristic of the mature Lowell. They are discursive, generally vague when the question at issue becomes abstruse, and abound in purple patches. The qualities of the poets discussed are set down without any endeavor to mark their inter-relation or to trace them back to any radical characteristic. Poems are regarded from the standpoint of their effect on the reader, and that effect is translated into figurative language. In his Lectures on the English Poets, Lowell followed the same method. He translated his impressions into simile and metaphor. He never got at the ultimate answer to a difficult question. In his first lecture he said: “The lecturer on science has only to show how much he knows—the lecturer on poetry can only be sure how much he feels.” Here is the secret of Lowell's critical method. However uncertain he might be about penetrating to ultimate principles, he was sure of the feelings which a poem aroused in him. His method in consequence was essentially subjective, because, after all, only a matter of impression. When he pointed out the various qualities of an author, he was still making use of his impressions, as in that clever jeu d'esprit, A Fable for Critics. Such a work as the Fable was peculiarly suitable to a man of Lowell's type of mind. For in it he was not restrained by that conservatism which was bound to accept a classic with deference, nor by those particulars with which it fagged him to deal, nor by the necessity of appealing to the principles of judgment in literature. He could give a brilliant exhibition of critical pyrotechnics, and he did. But critical pyrotechnics is not criticism. Lowell came to realize this and in his Lectures on the English Poets, he tried to be better than his creed. For he did not altogether content himself with his impressions about poets and their poetry. His attempts at penetrating to ultimate principles were hardly successful or satisfying,¹ but they showed a tendency in the right direction. Lowell was coming to realize that criticism, to possess vitality, must go deeper than the mere impressions of the critic.

By the time he came to maturity in his critical essays, he could write:

Unless we admit certain principles as fixed beyond question, we shall be able to render no adequate judgment, but only to record our impressions, which may be valuable or not, according to the greater or less ductility of the senses on which they are made.²

This need not lead one astray; Lowell remained an impressionist. He reads a work through, making marginal notes as he goes along, realizes a total impression and then sets to work. In his typical essays he presents this total impression, then the tale of his author's separate qualities, then his total impression again as a summary. This procedure explains in some degree the frequent inconsequence of his summary, which rarely is warranted in any strict sense by the array of qualities adduced. He is not blind to this himself. He reads Dryden, gets his total impression, which as usual seems broader than the aggregation of qualities would warrant, and confesses: “You feel that the whole of him was better than any random specimens, though of his best, seem to prove.”³ He tries hard to give warrant to his general impression, but finally contents himself with an emphatic reaffirmation of it. “It is hard,” he says in Gray, “to justify a general impression by conclusive examples. Two instances will serve to point my meaning, if not wholly to justify my generalization.”⁴ His attitude as an impressionist is evident in occasional statements of his own: He has “read through his (Thoreau's) six volumes in the order of their production.” He continues: “I shall try to give an adequate report of their impression upon me both as critic and as mere reader.”⁵ In his summary of Spenser he quotes three of the poet's striking lines, prefacing his selection by the statement that they “best characterize the feeling his poetry gives us.”⁶

Not being content merely with appreciation, Lowell, as has been suggested, made various endeavors to go deeper; it was when he attempted “to give a reason for the faith that was in him” that his failure was most marked. His inability to handle at all adequately difficult or abstract questions has already been referred to. They bear out the point that Lowell was a man of feeling rather than of thought. For they retreat from the definite and specific and concrete into the large and figurative and vague. Speaking of Shakespeare, to cite here but one new example, Lowell says: His “moral is the moral of worldly wisdom only heightened to the level of his wide-viewing mind, and made typical by the dramatic energy of his plastic nature.”⁷ One is tempted to say of this as De Quincey said of Pope: His “language does not realize the idea; it simply suggests or hints it.” The following passage, though rather lengthy, is worth quoting. It is typical and will repay analysis as indicative of several weaknesses in Lowell which have already been discussed. He has used the phrase “imaginative unity,” and now says:

The true ideal is not opposed to the real, nor is it any artificial heightening thereof, but lies in it, and blessed are the eyes that find it! It is the mens divinior which hides within the actual, transfiguring matter-of-fact into matter-of-meaning for him who has the gift of second-sight. In this sense Hogarth is often more truly ideal than Raphael, Shakespeare often more truly so than the Greeks. I think it is a more or less conscious perception of this ideality, as it is a more or less well-grounded persuasion of it as respects the Greeks, that assures to him as to them, and with equal justice, a permanent supremacy over the minds of men. This gives to his characters their universality, to his thought its irradiating property, while the artistic purpose running through and combining the endless variety of scene and character will alone account for his power of dramatic effect.⁸

How far does all this penetrate through the mist of words into the realm of ideas? To use Matthew Arnold's words in another connection, they “carry us really not a step farther than the proposition which they would interpret.” It is not easy to bring oneself to examine such passages of Lowell from a coldly analytic point of view. He has such a generous flow of language that one is inclined to accept his words as surcharged with meaning. On submitting them to examination one seems to hear him say, “You see what I mean—or, at any rate, that I have a meaning, which is the main thing.” De Quincey's words on Pope come to mind again, “His language does not realize the idea.” This is but another phase of that weakness which runs through all Lowell's critical essays and which “keeps him amid symbolism and illusion and the fringes of things.” We face here the same question which constantly confronts us: What was this weakness? And always one answer remains.

In saying that Lowell was an impressionist, one need not deny that he had certain definite ideas about poetry. Three he adhered to: poetry must be interesting⁹; it must possess the power of imaginative appeal¹⁰; it must have finish of expression or verbal style.¹¹ So far as Lowell applied these criteria at all, it was with no certainty of method. Merope is impossible because dull.¹² Most of Wordsworth's poetry will perish because it lacks style.¹³ No poetry possesses true vitality which does not “leap throbbing at touch of that shaping faculty, the imagination.”¹⁴ For the most part, however, Lowell relies upon the soundness of his impression to assure him that a work is excellent. That impression he then casts about to justify. That this is his procedure is evident in general from a study of his essays and in particular from his tendency to shift his emphasis from one poetical quality to another. In his essay on Spenser, the “epicure of language,” he emphasizes diction to the point where he confesses that he lays himself open to the charge of over-stressing this single attribute.¹⁵ In his essay on Shakespeare whose “imagination is wonderful” he declares that the “power of expression is subsidiary, and goes only a little way toward the making of a great poet.”¹⁶ Calderon, he declares, is “one of the most marvellous of poets,”¹⁷ indeed “a greater poet than Goethe,”¹⁸ but yet he cannot decide whether the Spaniard's gift were imagination or fancy. But what did it matter? He considered Calderon a marvellous poet for all that. His taste told him so; the ultimate reason why did not matter. Whether a poet was great because his work was rich in style or imagination or interest was of only secondary importance to Lowell. The primary consideration with him was his impression; to this he clung, however inadequate or contradictory his reasons in its support.

Before saying the final word, it is worth while to take a glance at Lowell the critic from the viewpoints we have occupied in studying him. He had a wide knowledge, gained from school and college and legal studies, from the demands put upon him in sanctum and classroom, from foreign travel, intimate acquaintance with modern languages, enormous reading, and friendship with men of culture and learning. He was proficient in linguistics and held to illuminating principles regarding the vitality of language. In his knowledge of art and history, and in his sympathy for science and classic art, he was deficient. While towards literature his sympathy was broad enough to include almost all the greater classics of various languages, he was deficient in sympathy for the nineteenth century and regarded the fifteenth throughout Europe as almost a literary desert. His condemnation was evoked by sentimentalism, by the employment in poetry of Greek and medieval themes, by modern-day realism. His interest in the drama and the novel was of the slightest. Lowell seems honestly to have tried to preserve a judicial attitude towards the subjects of his critical essays. Towards the greater classics, especially Dante and Shakespeare, his attitude became one of frank encomium. He was subject to enthusiasms which often swept him into overstatements of both praise and blame. When his devotion to an author did not blind him to his defects, he struck a fair balance of justice, not so much by maintaining a coolly impartial attitude as by swinging pendulum-wise between praise and blame. Lowell could never keep the personal equation in subjection. So far as taste belongs to penetration by being that faculty which does not stamp as excellent a piece of literature which is poor, Lowell may be said to have possessed penetration. But his taste in recognizing an excellent piece of literature was not so sound. Considerations which should not have weighed with him made him at times ignore or deny the merit of certain works. In so far as penetration is insight into the mind of an author or his art and into the ultimate principles which stamp him as sui generis and explain him, Lowell was wanting. His taste was intuitive. He had to trust it to justify him without the aid of radical principles. Porro unum est necessarium. The final gift whose presence, even despite his deficiencies, would have made him a genuine critic of merit, stamps him by its absence as merely an impressionist. What principles he had, became more or less distorted when he endeavored to apply them; indeed they always had the air of being extemporized for the particular case under discussion. That penetration which goes deep in a moment's flash, Lowell displays on occasions. But the sudden rending of the veil seems as unexpected to him as to the reader. The knowledge which thus suddenly opens to his gaze is not used to illuminate the whole man or his work; the critic seems uncertain how to employ it and the benefit of that swift inner glimpse is lost. It is not unjust to say of Lowell that penetration with him was an occasional gift of such insight as comes at times to most men of imaginative temperament; it was not a quality of mind.

The ultimate secret of Lowell's weakness did not lie, it is reasonable to maintain, in his own power to remedy. It belonged to his type of mind. That precision in detail which a classical training might be supposed to foster and whose importance would be emphasized by the demands upon him as editor and professor, is for the most part wanting. That disregard of the unessential, that closeness of reasoning, that penetration to ultimate principles, all of which a course of legal training would inculcate in a mind receptive to such influence, left no perceptible traces on Lowell. His course in law seems to have fulfilled no purpose except that of equipping him with legal phrases for figurative use. Porro unum est necessarium. Lowell lacked philosophical depth of mind, the one thing so necessary that without it the total of his other endowments was inadequate.

One difficulty remains: if this contention is true, how are we to account for Lowell's high place as a critic? Without going into a history of American criticism, it is fair to say that, with the exception of Lowell, only three critics among his predecessors or contemporaries demand consideration, Poe, Reed, and Whipple. Reed's life ended while he was still a young man. Though his work indeed shows poise and thoughtfulness, he betrays a tendency to value literature for its moral rather than for its æsthetic value. He lacks the buoyancy which went so far to make Lowell readable. Whipple is inclined to be heavy-footed; there is no sparkle in his pages. He has a certainty of tone, born doubtless of his success on the platform, which is not justified by the precariousness of his judgments. Poe deserves a study by himself. He had many of the essential gifts of an excellent critic, but was unfortunate enough to become involved in literary bickerings, and to “give up to party what was meant for mankind.” Much of his work was ephemera critica; it perished with the writings which evoked it. Lowell entered the field, and with the prestige which belonged to him as a poet and as the academic successor of Ticknor and Longfellow, wrote of the masters of literature. Something of the buoyancy and verve of the man clung to his work. Here were a wealth of allusion, a heightened rhetoric, a pregnant homeliness of illustration, and yet withal something of the air of the Edinburgh and the Quarterly domesticated in America. These critiques seemed to join the literary traditions of polished old England on the one hand to the eager yearning for culture of crude New England on the other. Here was a critic, it was thought, and a poet and professor as well, who might match lances with the critics over-seas. New England itself, Boston, was the centre of literary America in Lowell's time, and the leaders in its literary ascendancy were his friends. Who was there to undertake the ungracious business of pointing out weaknesses in his critical work?¹⁹ Men who came in direct contact with him seem to have found him brilliant and charming in his mood. It is not hard to believe that the sparkling cleverness of Lowell and the range of allusion made possible by his enormous reading and retentive memory, astonished as well as delighted the men with whom he came closely in contact; that their admiration led them not only to attribute to him a depth of mind which he did not possess, but also perhaps to believe they found evidences of it in his critical essays. To doubt it indeed might well seem heresy. Men of a younger generation, no less than of his own, came to know Lowell on familiar terms and to their writings regarding him rather than to those of his immediate contemporaries, is due the maintenance of the Lowell tradition.

It has been said already that it is not easy to probe into the weaknesses of a critic who has achieved so many quotable phrases. Remembering them one is almost disarmed. But this quotability, what of it? To read the more recent works in which reference is made to Lowell, makes one fact striking: Lowell's dicta are introduced, not because they are surcharged with a pregnancy which makes them an open sesame to an author's mind or art; not because they contain a luminous definition which makes the elusive more nearly tangible, or crystallizes what lurks too often in the realm of feeling; not, in a word, for any intrinsic merit they possess as criticism in a high degree, but mainly for their quotability.²⁰ Quotability does not prove Lowell a great critic any more than it proves Pope a great poet. If it were taken as a test, Lowell might sit next to Coleridge, and Pope to Shakespeare.

Can Lowell grapple with principles like Coleridge? Or interpret with steady lucidity and consistence like Hazlitt? Or give one that peculiar flash of insight by which Lamb illumined an author not for a moment but abidingly? Can he penetrate a problem in the psychology of literature, like De Quincey in Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth, or achieve a pregnant distinction, like that between the literature of knowledge and the literature of power? Can he apply a wide-reaching principle of human significance like Carlyle, who by fitting the Johnson-Boswell relation to hero-worship, revolutionized forever the world's opinion of Boswell? Has he given us criteria broad enough for general application, like Arnold in his description of the grand style and his definition of poetry? Has he a command of principles like Hutton, whose ethical and æsthetic notions were not constantly at the grapple? Has he, in a word, given us principles of wide application, which may be applied consistently and which stimulate the reader to expand and to modify them, thus eventually arriving at permanent criteria for himself?

It may be objected that such comparisons and such demands are unfair to Lowell; that one ought to accept him for what he is. It is the purpose of this study to endeavor to appraise him for what he is and candidly to inquire whether he belongs to the ranks of critics. No conclusions which aim to state the real truth about Lowell are unfair. He has been regarded as a critic; in such a light he seems seriously to have regarded himself. But to assign him such a rank is to do him the injustice of over-estimation. If he would claim kinship with Ulysses, let him prove his metal by bending the hero's bow.

If Lowell is to survive, it must be frankly as an impressionist. For so far as criticism approaches a science, so far as it depends to any serious extent on ultimate principles, so far, in a word, as it is something more fundamental and abiding than the ipse dixit of an appreciator, Lowell is not a critic.

Notes

1. E.g., chap. i., called Definitions.

2. Works, iii., 29, written in 1868.

3. Ibid., iii., 103. The italics are mine.

4. Latest Literary Essays, p. 4.

5. Works, i., 369. The italics are mine.

6. Ibid., iv., 352. The italics are mine. Cf. “In gathering up the impressions made upon us by Mr. Masson's work,” etc. (Works, iv., 86); also “I find a confirmation of this feeling about Dryden,” etc. (Works, iii., 123).

7. Works, iii., 324.

8. Ibid., iii., 66. Cf. also ibid., ii., 79, 99; iv., 284; iii., 92, etc.

9. Works, ii., 142. Cf. also ibid., ii., 134; Old English Dramatists, pp. 19 and 20.

10. Cf. Ibid., iii., 31, 32, 35; iv., 267.

11. Cf. Ibid., iii., 15, 46, 335; iv., 308; vi., 107; Old English Dramatists, p. 106.

12. Works, ii., 134.

13. Ibid., iii., 35.

14. Ibid., iv., 267.

15. Ibid., iv., 308. Cf. also iii., 335; vi., 107; Old English Dramatists, p. 106.

16. Works, iii., 31.

17. Letters, ii., 149. “I find a striking similarity between Faust, and this drama (Magico Prodigioso), and if I were to acknowledge Coleridge's distinction, should say Goethe was the greatest philosopher and Calderon the greatest poet.” Letter of Shelley to John Gisborne, April 10, 1822.

18. Works, vi., 108.

19. Severely critical articles appeared in Scribner's Monthly, iv., 75, 227, 339, and in Lippincott's for June, 1871.

20. “Mere vividness of expression, such as makes quotable passages, comes of the complete surrender of self to the impression, whether spiritual or sensual, of the moment.” Lowell's Works, iii., 31.

Bibliography

Lowell, J. R. Latest Literary Essays, Boston and New York, 1892.

———Lectures on the English Poets, Cleveland, 1897.

———Letters, 2 vols., New York, 1894.

———Old English Dramatists, Boston and New York, 1892.

———Prose Works, 6 vols., Boston and New York, 1896.