SOURCE: “The Creative Life,” in James Russell Lowell: Portrait of a Many-Sided Man, Oxford University Press, 1971, pp. 104-26.

Be sure and don’t leave anything out because it seems trifling, for it is out of these trifles only that it is possible to reconstruct character.

JRL, to James T. Fields, 1871

I

Though Lowell never confined his activities to writing poetry, he still thought of himself as essentially a poet. He chose this goal for himself early in life, even while his father still regarded it as a species of vagabondage, and he planned a course of study in the laws of English verse preparatory to it. In his law office days he wrote,

They tell me I must study law,
They say I have dreamed, and dreamed too long;
                    That I must rouse and seek for fame and gold;
That I must scorn this idle gift of song,
                    And mingle with the vain and proud and cold.
                              Is, then, this petty strife
                              The end and aim of life,
All that is worth the living for below?
O God! then call me hence, for I would gladly
go!

And George William Curtis quotes him at twenty-seven:

If I have any vocation it is the making of verse. When I take my pen in hand for that, the world opens itself ungrudgingly before me; everything seems clear and easy. … But when I do prose it is invita Minerva. I feel as if I were wasting time and keeping back my message. My true place is to serve the cause as a poet. Then my heart leaps before me into the conflict.

He never really changed his mind about all this, and in later life he thought of his other activities as a kind of infidelity. When Minot J. Savage regretted that he had not given all his time to poetry, Lowell replied, “You have given substantial expression to my own feeling. I have been haunted by the idea that it might have been better if I had devoted myself more exclusively to my literary work.” At other times, however, he was not so sure that what was good for the poet would also have been good for the man. Perhaps he was thinking of Goethe's statement that a talent was formed in isolation but a character in the stream of the world.¹

Lowell wrote rapidly, though often only after long brooding, nearly always on a pasteboard pad on his knee. He began comparatively late for a poet, essentially during his college years. He cherished spontaneity, sometimes even irregularity (“you must write easily,” he wrote Henry James, “for you are read with pleasure”), and his writing could be cathartic, for he said he could get rid of something which troubled him by shutting it within covers. His visual imagination was keen (“I always see what I describe while I am thinking of it”), and he wrote, in response to an “inner light,” what he “needed” to write, and when he “felt” like it.

He claimed to be able to write verse faster than prose, and in 1838 he told Longfellow he was not going on with poetry for the time being because he could not write slowly enough. The verses in Beatrice Müller's album were dashed off on the spur of the moment in response to her request for an autograph, and he once sent six letter-paper sides of verse to Charles Hazen Dorr, praising the cheese he had sent him.

Yet he could not write to order. For him Dr. Johnson's “setting doggedly about it” just did not work. Though emotional crises could sometimes stimulate him, he often had to wait upon moods and even weather before he could so much as complete an enterprise in hand. Trying to write while serving as ambassador in London was, he said, like trying to be a setting hen who should also have to answer the doorbell. Sometimes he would labor diligently at a composition and be obliged to give it up. Naturally, it was especially hard to try to be humorous to order, and in 1854 he tried to revive Biglow and failed. In 1889, having attempted a poem for Aldrich's Atlantic, he found that “cold molasses is swift as a weaver's shuttle compared with my wits.”²

As he grew older, the spontaneity was less and the craftsmanship more,³ but not even large offers could draw a poem out of him when the inner impulse was lacking. Even when he could write with as great enthusiasm as ever, he would print with less confidence. During forty years he only managed to bring out two collections of verses.

To be sure, happy accidents sometimes occurred. “The Courtin’,” certainly one of his finest poems, was originally a six-stanza space filler, of which he kept no copy. He added six more for a later edition of Biglow, and ultimately there were twenty-four.⁴ With poems like The Vision of Sir Launfal,“Agassiz, and the Commemoration Ode, it was more inspiration than improvisation, however; at least Lowell was, as it were, rapt clean out of himself, composing at high speed, and in a keen state of excitement which drained his energy and left him limp and doubting afterwards. (“Like a boy I mistook my excitement for inspiration, and here I am in the mud.”) He says “The Cathedral” absorbed him to such an extent that it made his wife jealous. To a lesser degree, he depended upon such excitement when he wrote prose also, and he thought his essay on Rousseau second-rate because it had not kept him awake at night. The fullest description of such an experience he achieved, however, in connection with the “Agassiz” Ode:

I had gone out of myself entirely. I was in the dining-room at Parker's, and when I came back to self-consciousness and solitude, it was in another world that I awoke, and I was puzzled to say which. It was a case of possession but not self-possession. I was cold, but my brain was full of warm light, and the passage came to me in its completeness without any seeming intervention of mine. I was delighted, I confess, with this renewal of imagination in me after so many blank years. … The only part I composed was the concluding verses which I suspect to be the weakest part.

And he adds: “I have a respect for things that are given me, as the greater part of this was.”

Occasionally Lowell cites a source for one of his poems, as Schoolcraft's Algic Researches for “A Chippewa Legend,” a Breton story of Souvestre's for “The Washers of the Shroud,” and Burns's “The Twa Brigs” for the Mason and Slidell piece in Biglow. In his early life at least, he considered echoing the old poets he had loved as a tribute he owed them. There is reason to believe that Samuel Worcester Rowse was the model for one of his best characters, Fitz Adam.⁵ Once at least he dreamed a poem, and though he says, justly on the whole, that he did not belong with those “that hawk their sorrows in the market-place,” he did use family griefs in such poems as “The First Snow-Fall” and “After the Burial.” On the whole, however, sources were much less important for him than they were for either Whittier or Longfellow. He understood, and stated felicitously, the conditions under which literary source material may be effectively used: “If a poet take his subject (or plot) from history (or in any other way ready made to his hand), just in proportion to the amount of matter furnished must be that which he supplies out of himself.”

Lowell himself said that he liked conceiving a poem but not working it up, and he told Mrs. Herrick that “my temper of mind is such that I never have the patience to read over again what I have once printed.” He was, however, much given to suggesting emendations between the acceptance of a poem and its publication. Once at least he revised to avoid the unfair appearance of plagiarism. Actually, revision does not seem to have been a very profitable business for him. When he attempted it conscientiously, as he did with “The Cathedral,” which he went over carefully as with a file, he was likely in the end to restore nearly all the original readings.⁶

II

For Lowell, poetry was “made up of Imagination, Experience, Indiscretion, and Art.” The first and the third were “the good fairy's gifts.” Experience came with years, Art with many years. By Indiscretion he meant “not want of judgment but the faculty of keeping green in despite of Experience.” Poetry differed from prose not merely in degree but in kind, and it should concern itself with matters of fact only as they were “embodied by imagination,” which was “the everlasting resurrection of the soul from the body.” To a prose writer the dictionary was a forest or a quarry, but the poet entered it “like Orpheus” and made “its wild inmates sing and dance and keep joyous time to every wavering fancy of his lyre.” And he who possessed an imagination had no need to sigh with Alexander for new worlds to conquer.⁷

Lowell was classical in his insistence upon universal appeal in literature of quality, and this caused him to condemn both the provinciality which is nationalism and the sentimentalism and subjectivism encouraged by Romanticism. As he saw it, the unity of a poem was not “a thing of manufacture like that of a brick” but one “of growth like the rooted and various and waving unity of a tree.”

Its shape, its law of growth, its limit, is irrevocably fore-ordained in the seed. There is nothing haphazard in the matter, from beginning to end. The germ once planted, everything then tends simply to the bringing about of one end,—perfection in its kind. The plot which it has to fill out is definite and rigid. The characters and incidents balance each other like the branches, and every part, from the minutest fibre of the root to the last leaf, conspires to nourishment and so to beauty.

Once he seems to be bringing himself within hailing distance of Poe by declaring that the Odyssey is the only long poem that will bear consecutive reading, but when he goes on to distinguish between poetic sense and poetic faculty, he parts company from him. In such poems as The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost, one recognizes in every verse, even if detached, a part of the whole, much as one may recognize a friend by his walk. “Perfect in themselves,” the parts also contribute to “totality of effect.” This evidences poetic faculty, or “the shaping spirit,” which is what Poe seems to have ignored in long poems. As for Poe's idea that man cannot create but can only combine previously existent materials, this Lowell dismisses as irrelevant nonsense:

Suppose by an exertion of my will I could create a black cat here on the desk, would it be less a creation because black cats were invented so long ago, and every boy has flung his boot at some Romeo of the tribe on a moonlight night? Now if I could by my will give every one of you the impression of one sitting here on the desk, how would you decide that it was not a real Grimalkin? This is the way in which the Imagination creates—by magnetising all the senses till they see, hear, taste, feel and smell only what it chooses.

Like Aristotle, Lowell knew that literature must give aesthetic pleasure. “The first duty of the Muse is to be delightful.” He praised Howells for having known from the beginning of his career how to be entertaining, for this, he thought, was generally one of the last things a writer learns, and “without it, a man may have all the cardinal virtues, but they are nothing to the purpose.”⁸ Moreover, a literary work must be judged as literature, not as a system of law or morality.

However much Lowell might be indebted to classical standards, he was not enslaved by them; neither did he neglect later writers when they had something to contribute to his purpose. He was impressed by Goethe's three questions: “What did the author propose to himself? Is what he proposes reasonable and comprehensible? and how far has he succeeded in carrying it out?” He also responded affirmatively to Milton's demand for poetry as simple, sensuous, and passionate.

It should be simple as being clear, not obvious, as dealing with primary emotions and not with metaphysical refinements upon them; it should be sensuous as not making its appeal to the intellect but to that finer sense to which language is still not the mere vehicle for conveying thought but is a part of it—its very flesh and blood; and it should be passionate not in any sense of wildness or waywardness but simply because [it] can saturate words with all the meaning of its own intenser mood.

Poetry for Lowell was not quite the “pure” thing to which Poe gave his allegiance. Many references scattered through his poems show what he conceived the poet's function to be. His eye is clearer than other men's. He can heal desolate hearts and cause men to hear the songs of the angels and catch golden glimpses of a more glorious future to be. In “The Shepherd of King Admetus” he serves God's Kingdom on earth even when he appears to be doing nothing. In “An Incident in a Railroad Car” he finds his message in the common heart of humanity, though its ultimate source is God.⁹ Humor in poetry, “which consists in a perception of the invincible contradiction between the Imagination and the understanding, between soul and sense,” is the result of qualifying Imagination “by the understanding instead of the sense of Beauty.” Fancy, which is inferior to the Imagination, combines with sentiment to produce poetry or with experience to produce wit.

Theoretically Lowell realized that a very good case might be made for the thesis that a poet should concern himself only with beauty, but in times like those in which he lived, he believed that in actual practice the poet must also be “a Schoolmaster,” a “John the Baptist, a voice crying in the wilderness, preparing for the simply Beautiful, for Art in its highest sense, a wider and more universal reception in a future age.” After he himself had served his apprenticeship at making bricks without straw, he wrote Mrs. Horace Mann, he hoped also “to be led to the promised land of Song, and to have my Sinais and my waters from the rock by the way.” This was the more important because in the evolution—or devolution—of society, the poet, though not claiming “immediate inspiration,” had so largely taken the place of the prophet, “by force of seeing the heart of those mysteries whose shell only is visible to others.”¹⁰ The poet, therefore, had become forerunner and prophet “of changes in the moral world.” To behold only the “body” of his thought and its “outward grace” was to miss half. Even his lightest fantasies had two meanings—“one of the flesh and of the spirit one.” In Lowell's poem about him, Columbus “believed” the poets and thought they spoke for God. Moreover prophetism was one with humanitarianism. “I have made it radical,” Lowell writes Charles Briggs of “Prometheus,” “and I believe that no poet in this age can write much that is good unless he give himself up to this tendency.” In Conversations he makes Philip say, “You forget that I believe the poetical sentiment and what we call the sentiment of natural religion to be identical. Both of them are life-members of the New England Anti-Slavery Society.” He might not have put it quite that way in later years, but his essential point of view never substantially changed.

Lowell judged writers both absolutely, by reference to his own formulated and unchanging standards of what constituted excellence in literature, and relatively, considering the writer's position in the literary history of his country and the special conditions affecting the creation of literature in his generation. Neglect the second criterion, and you will not understand the factors which conditioned his talent nor judge him fairly, but if you neglect the first, you will find it impossible to choose between, say, Milton and Samuel Butler, since both were highly representative figures. A critic must know what he believes and bring his writers to the bar of his own standards, but if he is too rigid and inflexible about this, he will cut himself off from the relish and fair evaluation of many kinds of excellence.

Lowell also insisted that writers must be accepted for what they are. “Because continuity is a merit in some kinds of writing, shall we refuse ourselves to the authentic charm of Montaigne's want of it?” Surely this would be a “schoolboy blunder,” for “there never has been a great work of art which did not in some particular transcend the old rules and establish new ones of its own.”

A true scholar should be able to value Wordsworth for his depth of sympathy with nature, without therefore losing all power to enjoy the sparkling shallowness of Pope; he should be able to feel the beauty of Herbert's puritanism, the naked picturesqueness of his style, and yet not refuse to be delighted with the sensuous paganism of Herrick.

He adds that “‘In my father's house are many mansions' conveys a lesson of criticism no less than of charity.” Even form, which might almost be said to make literature, is not absolutely indispensable, for “there have been men of genius, like Emerson, richly seminative for other minds; like Browning, full of wholesome ferment for other minds, though wholly destitute of any proper sense of form.”

With such an emphasis as this, the richly sympathetic Lowell inevitably made criticism in large measure a matter of appreciation; as he saw it, the critic's highest function was to think the poet's thoughts after him and not merely to point out where he had failed to express them adequately. Philip of the Conversations admitted that “for whatever I love, my delight mounts to an extravagance. There are verses which I cannot read without tears of exultation, which to others are merely indifferent,” and he doubted that any really convincing reason for such a passion could be communicated to a mind not already predisposed to share it. Lowell himself disliked disenchantment as a critical function. The critic must not “make war on men's little loves and faiths, but endeavor to show how far, and in what sense, they are justifiable. When disenchantment was necessary, it must always be performed “with a kindly tenderness,” for “life is too sad and too serious for one to wish to undeceive those who are so lucky as to be happy by mistake.”

He also insisted that there was room in the world for much besides great art.

We cannot breathe the thin air of that Pepysian self-denial, that Himalayan selectness, which, content with one bookcase, would have no tomes in it but porphyrogeniti, books of the bluest blood, making room for choicer newcomers by a continuous ostracism to the garret of present incumbents.

If man cannot live by bread alone, he cannot live by spices and stimulants alone either, nor yet by nectar and ambrosia. He must not be told that it is wrong to enjoy Gray or Cowper or Scott because they are not Wordsworth or Shelley. A definition of poetry too narrow to embrace Horace and Crabbe “and whoever else prefers the familiar scenery of life and the habitual to the exceptional motives of happiness and misery would not do.” There is a great deal in literature which must be accepted as Mercutio accepted his death-wound: “No, ’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door; but ’tis enough, ’twill serve.”

There is far more generous and liberal humanism in these pronouncements that can be found in the official “line” followed by any “school” of criticism nowadays, or, for that matter, illustrated in the practices of many art museums. Yet they have often been attacked as illustrating Lowell's vagueness and uncertainty, his tendency to find his standards in the subject of his essay rather than bringing them to it. This is not altogether unjust. Lowell understood as Keats did—and Keats helped him to learn it—that the poet can become that of which he writes, and there are even times when he seems disposed to extend this privilege to the critic. It is hardly unfair to say that he wrote of the Puritans in “New England Two Centuries Ago” not as an historian but as an apologist, and the very title of “A Good Word for Winter” is characteristic of both his method and his type of mind. His criteria for choosing “The Five Indispensable Authors”¹¹ have some arbitrariness and inconsistency about them, and he is quite capable of today hitting over-subtlety in criticism and the searching out of hidden motives, so that the critic may be glorified by demonstrating that he has been able to perceive something nobody else has ever seen,¹² yet tomorrow he might tolerate those who read their own ideas (if one can call them that) into a book instead of getting the author's out of it, and of thus (to take an extreme example), encouraging the lunatics who find Napoleon, the Kaiser, or Mussolini, or whoever happens to be the current villain of the moment, in the Book of Daniel and The Revelation of St. John.¹³ When he writes about Spenser he praises him for his stylistic lavishness (“in poetry enough is not only not so good as a feast, but is a beggarly parsimony”), but it never occurs to him that, when he writes of Dante, he must not feel quite free to praise him for having discovered “the secret of that magical word too few, which not only distinguishes his verse from all other, but so strikingly from his own prose.”

It would be stupid not to perceive these things, but it is even more stupid to make more of them that they deserve. Lowell has a way of being right in both places, as Shakespeare was right when he ran contradictory time-schemes through Othello and The Merchant of Venice, for this is a much less logical world—the humanist's world at any rate—than the partisans of most critical systems are willing to allow. As a matter of fact, Lowell is much more likely to get into trouble when he does not take his tone from his subject, for then he can be as imperceptive as he was about Thoreau or as cruel as he was when flogging a dead horse in his essay on Percival. He applied both historical knowledge and a formulated set of standards to his subjects; only a fool could call him an impressionist. But he would be a considerably bigger fool who should leave his readers with the impression that Lowell's being an impressionist would have left his critical writings worthless. For until criticism comes to be written by machines (and a number of experiments seem to be under way in this area), the impressionistic element must remain the life-giving element in the work of any critic, no matter what he may be called. Of course he must have standards; otherwise he will have no frame of reference, and his sun may well rise in the west and set in the north. But unless he manages, even within the bounds of his “system,” to express something which is himself and no other human being, how on earth can he expect us to continue to read him instead of turning for our fodder to newer and better machines?

III

Much too much has been made of Lowell's alleged dislike of realism in literature. Insofar as this existed, it was based upon sound aesthetic, as well as moral, grounds; he did not believe that the literal reproduction of nature or of fact was possible in a work of art, and he disliked lingering upon physical detail for its own sake as a distraction from the theme under consideration and, ultimately, a confession of unreality.¹⁴ Few of us today could be expected to agree with his classification of Trollope's novels, along with the sculpture of John Rogers, as matter-of-fact rather than real, but we ought not to forget his advice to Harriet Beecher Stowe to “stick to Nature and avoid what people commonly call the ideal,” his encouragement, as editor of the Atlantic, of a whole host of local color writers who did just this, or the admiration which such writers as Edward Eggleston and Joel Chandler Harris felt for him.

Higginson notes that in Lowell's youth Cambridge families employed hired men from the country, to whom the boys liked to talk. Their conversation was “usually harmless, often profitable, sometimes racy; and every trait of Hosea, or even of Bidofredum Sawin could be matched in them.” Lowell hated allegory and literary metaphysics, disliked the melodramatic, overblown, dishonestly glorified heroes and heroines of Bulwer and Disraeli, and tried to consider chivalric graces in the metrical romances from the lamb's point of view. He forgave Gammer Gurton's Needle its coarseness and earthiness because the author was “at least a man among men, and not a humbug among humbugs.” The hackneyed, “refined,” conventionalized poetic diction of poets like Thomas Young he found quite destitute of force and vitality, but Chaucer's Pegasus “ambles along, preferring the sunny vales to the thunder-daunting cliffs,” and Shakespeare uses a “low” word whenever he needs it. “His pen ennobled them all, and we feel as if they had been knighted for good service in the field.”

What Lowell rejected, in other words, was that same surface realism to which, in their own way, expressionists and other aesthetic revolutionaries were later to take exception. He was sure that “all great poetry must smack of the soil, for it must be rooted in it, must suck life and substance from it.” But it must grow out of, not in, the soil, like a pine rather than a potato. Otherwise, it will lack idealism (which is a moral objection), but it will also be parochial (which is an aesthetic objection). Truth to nature is not truth to fact, and “the facts of life” must be distinguished from “the accidental and transitory phenomena of life.” Only “art's absolution” can “purge” the “polluting” stain of life and grasp “ideal grace.” When Lowell compares the reading of cheap fiction to opium eating, or permits one of the speakers in Conversations to declare that “nothing that God has not thought it beneath him to make” can be considered unworthy of a writer's attention, he is using almost exactly the same language that William Dean Howells was to use. Lowell found the kind of realism he believed in in Howells,¹⁵ but not only there. He found it also in James, Fredrika Bremer, Hawthorne, Sylvester Judd, even J. G. Holland, but for his supreme examples of it, he, not unsurprisingly, went to Shakespeare and Cervantes:

Give me the writers who take me for a while out of myself and … away from my neighbors! I do not ask that characters should be real; I need but go into the street to find such abundance. I ask only that they should be possible, that they should be typical, because these I find in myself, and with these I can sympathize. Hector and Achilles, Clytemnestra and Antigone, Roland and Oliver, Macbeth and Lear, move about, if not in worlds not realized, at least in worlds not realized to any eye but that of the imagination. … Don Quixote and his Squire are inhabitants of this world, in spite of the prosaic and often vulgar stage on which their tragi-comedy is acted, because they are symbolical, because they represent the two great factors of human character and springs of human action—the Imagination and the Understanding.

The writer must use the materials which lie ready to his hand, but he must treat them so as to bring out their universal qualities. “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!” Not “something out of and beyond Nature,” it is rather “Nature as seen through the eye of the Artist,” but its visibility depends upon the presence of that eye.

IV

Though Lowell may sometimes have indulged in direct moralizing in literature, he did not approve of it, any more than Howells did. Indeed he praised Howells's Hazard of New Fortunes precisely because Howells had avoided it. He urged Mrs. Stowe to deal with theology in her New England fictions only where it came naturally to the surface in the life she described, and he warned himself that, having grown up in a New England that was “all meeting-house,” he would never be a real poet until he got out of the pulpit.

The relationship between the quality of a work of art and the character of the man that produced it gave him considerable difficulty. He was unwilling to claim any immunities for poets, and he found it hard to believe that a man could create anything greater than his own soul. But he knew too that aesthetic creativity was more complicated than human logic, perhaps even more complicated than man's moral codes. So he calls Rousseau “a quack of genius” and declares that “whatever he was or did, somehow or other God let him be worthy to write this, and that is enough for us.” He is not entirely consistent in these matters; he shows Rousseau much more charity than is accorded either Petrarch or Victor Hugo. He believed that if the moral sense predominated in a man over the aesthetic, he became a reformer or a fanatic rather than an artist, and his imagination expressed itself in his life (Bunyan would never have written The Pilgrim's Progress without being shut up in jail and cut off from his usual activities). Yet, even though it was the writer's function to stimulate thinking in his readers rather than to do their thinking for them, creativity itself withered without faith, moral and aesthetic faults and virtues were much more closely associated than most people realized, and if an ideal world did not exist, then all the greater was the need that the poet should create one. Nevertheless, beauty involves and embraces its moral; it does not need to be “stuck on,” and “poetry is a criticism of life only in the sense that it furnishes us with the standard of a more ideal felicity, of calmer Beauty.” “No verse, the chief end of which is not the representation of the beautiful, and whose moral is not included in that, can be called poetry in the true sense of the word.”

At times, in fact, Lowell seems willing to accept only the Shakespearean type of imagination, which he makes almost mediumistic. Shakespeare is only a voice, and “we seek in vain in his plays for any traces of his personal character or history.” He is not expressing himself but rather giving voice “to the myriad forms of nature, which, wanting him, were dumb.”

In proportion as the poetical sense is abundant in a man or in other words in proportion as it is the law of his nature to surrender himself to the possession of his sensuous impressions—will he be without what we call character. The more poet, the less character. I cannot find that Shakespeare had any at all.¹⁶

At least, the artist must have the privilege of treating both good and evil—

Yet let us think, that, as there’s naught above
          The all-embracing atmosphere of Art,
So also there is naught that falls below
Her generous reach, though grimed with guilt
          and woe—(17)

and sometimes, again with such dazzling talents as Shakespeare's, the two may almost be said, aesthetically speaking, to have coalesced:

Only Shakespeare had that true sense of humor which, like the universal solvent sought by the alchemists, so fuses together all the elements of a character (as in Falstaff), that any question of good or evil, of dignified or ridiculous, is silenced by the apprehension of its thorough humanity.

V

I know of no other writer of comparable fame who is quite so modest about his achievements as Lowell. He claimed that he always lost interest in a book as soon as it was published. When his 1848 collection appeared, he forgot to possess himself of a copy of it, and in 1885 he told Curtis Guild he could not answer any questions concerning the publishers of his early books as he had no copies on hand. The modest dedication of Conversations to his father¹⁸ is charming, but he is nearly as diffident about My Study Windows many years later.¹⁹

He had a worse opinion of himself than of most authors, considering himself a third-rater compared with the masters. He “hated” his books and would rather be valued for his personal qualities than for them,²⁰ yet he declared inconsistently that the best of himself went into his books. He often lamented that he had done so little and wasted so much, and once, when a young Englishman was gauche enough to tell him that he had read none of his writings, he replied that he did not regard them as necessary to a liberal education.²¹ He did not think he would have cared much for his poems if they had been written by somebody else, and he told Fields he could be mistaken for a lion only by persons not well acquainted with that animal. Making his selections for Under the Willows he thought what he had to choose from on a level with ordinary newspaper verse. After expression for expression's sake had lost its appeal for him, he had more faith in his insight than his expression. Once he said he thought he had “too many thoughts and too little thought.” In later years, when authors' readings came into vogue, his natural dislike of public speaking was reinforced by the fact that he could never find a poem he thought worth reading.

But why, then, did he write at all? Obviously, because he had to and wanted to. In the beginning he desired fame (“it’s in me and it shall come out!”)—

                    I too am a Maker and Poet;
Through my whole soul I feel it and know it!
My veins are fired with ecstasy!
                              All-mother Earth
                              Did ne’er give birth
To one who shall be matched with me;
The lustre of my coronal
Shall cast a dimness over all.

But even then the reaction was swift:

Alas! alas! what have I spoken?
My strong, my eagle wings are broken,
And back again to earth I fall!(22)

Perhaps he continued to desire fame, but the number of now meaningless names in Allibone's Dictionary of Authors reminded him how heavy the odds were against any particular man's being remembered. “Formerly, a man who wished to withdraw himself from the notice of the world retired into a convent. The simpler modern method is, to publish a volume of poems.” And when Beatrice Müller asked him for an autograph, he wrote in her album—

O’er the wet sands an insect crept
Ages ere man on earth was known—
And patient Time, while Nature slept,
The slender tracing turned to stone.
’Twas the first autograph: and ours?
Prithee, how much of prose or song,
In league with the Creative powers,
Shall ’scape Oblivion's broom so long?(23)

By this time, fame had become less a motive than the mere desire to do good work, but alas! this was the most difficult thing of all. How close exaltation lay to discouragement in his mind may be gauged by what he wrote Sydney Gay about the Fable. In a single paragraph he declared both that “there are not above half a dozen persons who know how good it is” and that “it seems bald and poor enough now, the Lord knows.”

The thing to do, he knew, was to strive for a sane, balanced, and objective view of one's own work and one's relationship to it, avoiding the melodramatism of both self-vaunting and self-abasement. You could value your natural gifts even while you disparaged your performance, knowing that you were “better at a spurt than a steady pull,” and that you had fought as good a fight as many who had claimed more. You could know that you had achieved a great strain now and then, that you were “the first poet who has endeavored to express the American Idea,” and that sooner or later this must be recognized, even though you might have to die first. You could be sure that Biglow II was better than Biglow I, though it lacked something of the verve of its predecessor, because it was less the work of an improviser and more that of an artist, and when you sent Launfal to Briggs, you could rather “guess” it was good, though you still planned to write something “gooder and newer.” At times you could even stubbornly continue to believe in work of such inferior quality as “Our Own.” You could, on occasion, deny yourself genius, yet somehow manage to make a merit of the lack. (“A genius has the gift of falling in love with the side-face of truth, going mad for it, sacrificing all for it. But I must see the full face, and then the two sides have such different expressions that I begin to doubt which is the sincere and cannot surrender myself.”) In later years, Lowell was capable, in the course of a single letter of giving himself a vote of no confidence as a poet and at the same time half resolving to relinquish all his other activities on the ground that this might help him to become a better poet. But even when he was an old man, he could keep his hopes pinned to the future, always being conscious of greater power than he had yet shown.

Lowell professed to believe that “criticism can at best teach writers without genius what is to be avoided or imitated.” Moreover, genius or not, “one can’t do his best for a theater that has more than one person in it, and that one himself.” Claiming “a self-sustaining nature,” he did not need encouragement from others. “I am teres atque rotundus, a microcosm in myself, my own author, public, critic, and posterity, and care for no other.” Praise might make him doubt himself, but in the long run praise and blame were equally immaterial, since no matter what critics said, a writer of quality must ultimately find his proper place.

Even if you are prepared to grant these premises, however, they will not get you far, for the question still remains: When you cannot secure your own approval, what do you do then? And this, as we have seen, was Lowell's condition an uncomfortably large number of times. But he himself made the perfect comment on his own declaration of independence when he wrote, “I never saw a man who did not think himself indifferent to praise, nor one who did not like it.”

Actually, his own self-doubts made him more dependent upon the praise of others than he would otherwise have been. Howells sensed that any criticism hurt him, especially from those whose opinions he valued, though he never knew him to alter anything he had written merely because of disapproval expressed, and Mrs. Fields records several instances of his sensitiveness. When Emerson once remarked that his humorous poetry was best, he muttered “The Washers of the Shroud” and walked away.

When E. P. Whipple, editing the Boston Notion, praised him in 1841, Lowell wrote him warmly, not even knowing his name:

It was very grateful to me as I took up your paper in a public room, where there was but one face among many that I knew, and saw some kind words about myself, to think that, perchance, the writer was now in the room and that among these strangers I had yet a friend.²⁴

The friendship which developed between Lowell and Mrs. S. B. Herrick of Baltimore grew out of a “fan letter” she had written him, and he told Charles Eliot Norton that “what I have done has been due to your partiality more than anything else, for you have given me a kind of faith in it.” Sometimes he was even willing to reconsider the claims of a poem he had disparaged because somebody else had liked it. “I need every sort of petting on the back,” he told Mrs. Wirt Dexter, “for I myself am never pleased with what I do.”

This much remained, however, of his professed indifference to criticism—that he would never argue about anything that mattered to him or about which he had made up his mind. Nothing, I am sure, could have bored him more than what are now called “panel discussions.” “I seldom care to discuss anything.” He was “contemptuously indifferent about arguing matters that had once become convictions.” “A man who is in the right can never reason. He can only affirm.” “It fags me to deal with particulars.” And again:

I don’t very often look into my books but when I do I seem to find a certain vivacity and suggestiveness that are worth something. My impatience of mind is my bane as a critical essayist. I expect everybody to understand à demi mot. Perhaps an enemy would call it indolence and perhaps he would be right.

Different as he was from Emerson in many respects, Lowell resembled him in that both possessed essentially deductive minds. They perceived truth, made a priori assumptions, and, like the prophets of Israel, proclaimed the will of the Lord. A more prosaic or inductive type of mind feels this tendency as working for weakness in his critical essays, and Lowell himself was very well aware of this reaction.²⁵ But he knew too that both he and Emerson were essentially poets, almost as much so when they wrote prose as when they were writing verse. “What a true poet says always proves itself to our minds, and we cannot dodge it or get away from it.”

VI

Obviously all this must be taken into account and allowed for by anyone who would understand the poet Lowell. But though Lowell may have been essentially a poet, he was not all poet. He was a man, with a man's emotional needs and hungers. He lived in a community and in the larger community which is the world, coming in contact with his fellows in many different ways, and affecting and being affected by them even when there were no personal ties. Finally, he was a human soul, living, as we all do, under the necessity of achieving, or failing to achieve, harmony with the universe itself. All these aspects of this experience must be explored before we can take our leave of him, and these quests will fill up the rest of this book.

Notes

1. The essentially poetic quality of L's mind shows clearly in the style of his prose. Jeremy Taylor is “a kind of Spenser in a cassock.” Carlyle is forever “calling down fire from Heaven whenever he cannot readily lay his hand on the matchbox.” Wordsworth's mind “had not that reach and elemental movement of Milton's which, like the trade wind, gathered to itself thoughts and images like stately fleets from every quarter; some deep with silks and spicery, some brooding over the silent thunders of their battailous armaments, but all swept forward in their destined track, over the long billows of his verse, every inch of canvas strained by the unifying breath of their common epic origin.” Except for Areopagitica, “Milton's tracts are wearisome reading, and going through them is like a long sea-voyage whose monotony is more than compensated for the moment by a stripe of phosphorescence heaping before you in a drift of star-sown snow, coiling away behind in winking discs of silver, as if the conscious element were giving out all the moonlight it had garnered in its loyal depths since first it gazed upon its pallid regent.” It is interesting that this last sentence should be followed by “Which, being interpreted,” and an explication in the usual manner of prose.

2. These troubles were not wholly confined to poetry. L would not write a critical essay without reading the subject's whole oeuvre, but he put the actual writing off as long as possible. In 1855 he began delivering a course of Lowell lectures with only the manuscript of one in hand. For his excellent advice about writing, see George Bainton, ed., The Art of Authorship … (Appleton, 1890), pp. 29-30.

3. See Howard, Victorian Knight-Errant, pp. 329-30, and the illustrations following, especially on pp. 334, 338-39, 354-55.

4. See also John C. Broderick's demonstration, “L's ‘Sunthin’ in the Pastoral Line,’” American Literature, XXXI (1959-60), 163-72, that this piece is a “made” poem. “Moreover, that part of the poem which has seemed the most spontaneous—the descriptive introduction—emerges as the most contrived.”

5. F. DeWolfe Miller, “An Artist Sits for L,” BPLQ, II (1950), 378-79.

6. For a detailed study, see G. Thomas Tanselle, “The Craftsmanship of L: Revisions in The Cathedral,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library, LXX (1966), 60-63. See also Arthur W. M. Voss, “L's ‘A Legend of Brittany,’” Modern Language Notes, LXI (1946), 343-45, which shows that in revising this poem for the 1849 edition, L omitted much moralizing which had been criticized by Poe and Felton. This “indicates that for once, at least, he was capable of exercising a self-criticism hardly to be expected of a young poet so filled with the urge to preach to mankind.”

7. A comprehensive critical examination of L's poetic theory and practice is not called for here, where our interest is in painting a character portrait. The most elaborate attempt to formulate L's critical credo was Norman Foerster's, in his American Criticism (1928), reprinted in Clark and Foerster, JRL: Representative Selections. This has often been attacked as too schematic, but all its elements are present in L's own writings; see “The Function of the Poet” and “The Imagination,” both reprinted in The Function of the Poet …, and especially the manuscript of his first Lowell lecture, preserved in HL—bMS Am765 (899). (This MS, not in L's hand, is marked “being in large part a rewriting of the first Lecture of the Lowell Institute course.”) See also Alexis F. Lange, “JRL as a Critic,” University [of California] Chronicle, VIII (1906), 352-64; E. S. Parsons, “L's Conception of Poetry,” Colorado College Publication, General Series, No. 37, Language Series, II (1908), 67-84; Harry Hayden Clark, “L's Criticism of Romantic Literature,” PMLA, XLI (1926), 209-28; J. P. Pritchard, “Aristotle's Poetics and Certain American Literary Critics, III: JRL and Aristotle's Poetics,”Classical Weekly, XXVII (1933-34), 89-93. Austin Warren, “L on Thoreau,” Studies in Philology, XXVII (1930), 442-62, finds L a humanist, allied in spirit to Arnold, Santayana, and Babbitt, citing in his support not only the paper on Thoreau but also those on Lessing, Carlyle, Percival, and Rousseau. “All of these studies imply the same critical background: humanism versus romanticism.” Richard D. Altick asks, “Was L an Historical Critic?” America Literature, XIV (1942-43), 250-59, and answers in the affirmative. More interesting still are two older articles by J. M. Robertson, “L as a Critic,” North American Review, CCIX (1919), 246-62, and “Criticism and Science,” pp. 690-96. Robertson begins by considering Reilly's charges against L, many of which he sustains (he is excellent on L's inconsistencies and contradictions), but if L is not a critic, he wonders who is. At its best, his criticism “is the response of a very fine receptive faculty to a great many forms of literary appeal.… Few critics put so much material … in their readers' way; and surely no English critic has explored quite so much ground with such vivacity and variety of craftsmanlike observation.” He was one of the pathbreakers for a more scientific criticism than his own, and there was no generic gap between his product and that of his successors. Percy H. Boynton, “L in his Times,” New Republic, XVIII (1919), 113-14, remarks interestingly that L “did little thinking that was original, but much that was independent.”

8. Review of No Love Lost, North American Review, CVIII (1869), 326.

9. The low doggerel of most so-called religious poetry distressed L deeply. “When we think what religion is and what poetry is, and what their marriage ought to be, a great part of what is published as religious poetry seems to us a scandalous mockery.” NAR, C (1865), 303-304.

10. Review of Fitz-Greene Halleck's Alnwick Castle, Broadway Journal, I (1845), 281-83.

11. See The Function of the Poet. …

12. L gave Peter Bell credit for perceiving that the primrose was a primrose, not a theophany, and I am sure he would also have accounted it to Peter's credit that he knew it was not a hyacinth nor a tulip.

13. “He reads most wisely who thinks everything into a book that it is capable of holding, and it is the stamp and token of a great book so to incorporate itself with our own being, so to quicken our insight and stimulate our thought, as to make us feel as if we helped to create it while we read. Whatever we can find in a book that aids us in the conduct of life, or to a truer interpretation of it, or to a franker reconcilement with it, we may with a good conscience believe is not there by accident, but that the author meant that we should find it there.”—“Don Quixote,” Literary and Political Essays.

14. In his “Rhymed Lecture” on “The Power of Sound,” L wrote:

    And what is Art? ’tis Nature reproduced
    In forms ideal, from the actual loosed;—
    Nature sublimed in life's more gracious hours
    By high Imagination's plastic powers. …

    In a North American Review review of 1866 (CII, 633-34), he wrote: “Whenever a novelist speaks of the pretty boots, or the white hands, or the ‘golden-beaded purple silk purses’ of his heroes and heroines, or describes the silver and fruit on their dinner-tables, or the abundance of their breakfasts, that moment he shows either that his characters are not accustomed to such things, and therefore are disproportionately regardful of them, or else that he himself, in so carefully observing them, is wasting his force on non-essential particulars.” J. P. Pritchard is right when he points out (Return to the Fountains, p. 103) that L's insistence on the superiority of poetry to history is thoroughly Aristotelian. But it is also thoroughly idealistic, and it must be admitted that when it came to autobiography, L showed a somewhat divided mind. On the one hand, he thought that reserved autobiography was useless: “But what do we want of a hospitality that makes strangers of us, or of confidences that keep us at arm's-length?” But when one of his authors does write of himself without reserve, he is hardly pleased. “We think there is getting to be altogether too much unreserve in the world. We doubt if any man have the right to take mankind by the button and tell all about himself, unless, like Dante, he can symbolize his experience. Even Goethe we only half thank, especially when he kisses and tells, and prefer Shakespeare's indifference to the intimacy of the German.”—Atlantic Monthly, IV (1859), 770-73. In a review of Julia Ward Howe's A Trip to Cuba—Atlantic Monthly, IV (1860), 510—he says: “Here and there it seems to us a little too personal, and the public is made the confidant of matters in which it has properly no concern.” Yet he knew that the only travelers worth reading were those who told what they saw, not what they went to see—see Atlantic Monthly, V (1860), 629.

15. In North American Review, CXII (1871), 236-37, he gave Suburban Sketches a “rave” review: “Yes, truly, these are poems, if the supreme gift of the poet be to rim the trivial things of our ordinary and prosaic experience with an ideal light. Here is something of the gracious ease of Chaucer, which cost him so much pains. … Let us make the most of Mr. Howells, for in the midst of our vulgar self-conceits and crudenesses, and noisy contempt of those conventions which are the safeguards of letters, and the best legacy of culture, we have got a gentleman and artist worthy to be ranked with Hawthorne in sensitiveness of observation, with Longfellow in perfection of style.” Howard M. Munford, “The Disciple Proves Independent: Howells and L,” PMLA, LXXIV (1959), 484-87, points out that Howells gives The Biglow Papers part of the credit for helping him realize the importance of the commonplace, but I cannot agree when he cites L on The Lady of the Aroostook as an example of L's desire to have Howells avoid the colloquial even in dialogue: “No Bostonian ever said, ‘Was his wife along?’ … Change it in a new edition—of which there will be lots.” L objected to “Was his wife along” not because it was colloquial but only because it was not a New England colloquialism. And surely “of which there will be lots” should have been sufficient to warn Mr. Munford that L had no objection to colloquialism as such.

16. In bMS Am 765 (899)—HL—lines are drawn through this passage, possibly indicating that L thought he had gone too far. But he expresses essentially the same point of view, though less emphatically, elsewhere.

17. “A Legend of Brittany.”

18. “whom if I had not the higher privilege of revering as a parent, I should still have honored as a man and loved as a friend, this volume containing many opinions from which he will wholly, yet with the large charity of a Christian heart, dissent, is inscribed, by his youngest child.”

19. “My former volume of Essays has been so kindly received that I am emboldened to make another and more miscellaneous collection.” He was shutting them up between covers so that they should haunt him no more and free his mind for new enterprises. “I should have preferred a simpler title, but publishers nowadays are inexorable on this point, and I was too much occupied for happiness of choice.” The dedication was to Francis James Child, reminding him that he had liked the essay on Chaucer, “about whom you know so much more than I.”

20. Ferris Greenslet's suggestion (James Russell Lowell: His Life and Work, p. 272) that L's letters “contain perhaps the very best” of him expresses, I think, a not indefensible point of view.

21. Once when L had written Child that nothing was ever quite so good as it should be “except a rose now and then,” Child replied:

    Nothing is good as it should be—
    ’Cept now and then a rose”—
    And now and then your poetry—
    And now and then your prose.

22. “Bellerophon,” in A Year's Life.

23. Max Müller, Auld Lang Syne, pp. 180-81.

24. Lilian Whiting, Boston Days (LB, 1902), p. 83.

25. The failures of craftsmanship involved in certain structural deficiencies in both writers connect here. In Conversations the statement is made: “If some of the topics introduced seem foreign to the subject, I can only say, that they are not so to my mind, and that an author's object in writing criticisms is not only to bring to light the beauties of the works he is considering, but also to express his own opinions upon those and other matters.” This is not a fault in Conversations, the scheme of the work being what it is, but he would be a bold man who should say that L never did the same thing elsewhere. Van Wyck Brooks (The Flowering of New England, Dutton, 1936) found “general ideas” in only two of L's essays, and Reilly declares that “his essays lack a unity which comes from the presence of a dominant idea, a thesis to be supported, or a point of view steadily maintained.” But L was not interested in “general ideas” in the Van Wyck Brooks sense, and Reilly's illustrations leave the impression that he was not greatly concerned about the validity or the idea or thesis maintained. Comparing L's comments on Gray with Matthew Arnold's, he remarks, “Whether or not one agree with Arnold's conclusion one comes to realize that there is a difference between that penetration which stops short and that other which seeks to pierce to the heart of things.” Seeking is no doubt an excellent thing. But is it as good as finding?