SOURCE: “‘The Only True Folk Songs We Have in English’: James Russell Lowell and the Politics of the Nation,” in Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 108, No. 428, Spring, 1995, pp. 131-55.

[In the following essay, Bell studies Lowell's ballad lectures as they outline a Romantic perception of American nationalism.]

I am going on with my work in an easy way. I can’t say that I care so much about it without J. R. L., who has done so much for me. He would have been so much pleased to have it all nicely finished up. He could talk the fine points in a ballad. They seem stale. I go back to the fine ones at times and sing them and cry over them like the old world.

—Francis James Child¹

Consider the puzzle offered by these words. Had James Russell Lowell lived to eulogize Francis James Child in this fashion, it might have made better sense. Close friends and colleagues for 50 years, Lowell would have appreciated Child's great service to literary studies in bringing the wealth of English and Scottish popular ballads into a single collection. And given Child's scholarly brilliance, Lowell would have been perfectly justified in feeling that Child's death made the ballads less enjoyable. But for Lowell's death to diminish Child's “care” for the ballads seems inexplicable. Who was Lowell to Child that his passing would bring the great collector to declare that his beloved ballads now “seem stale”?

The question is not an idle one. American intellectual history is quick to admit an intellectual link between the two men. They taught together for 25 years at Harvard, wrote an opera together to raise funds for Civil War Relief, and Lowell's assistance to Child's ballad collecting while he was minister to England is well documented (Duberman 1966:142-145; Howe and Cottrell 1952; Hustvedt 1930).² History even acknowledges Lowell's folklore concerns. Biographers have noted his deep interest in tradition, tracing it back to the fact that his mother sang folksongs to him as a child: critics have acknowledged that his writings are full of folk materials; even folklorists have avowed his one contribution to the Journal of American Folklore in 1891 (Bell 1988:300; Duberman 1966:11; Howard 1952:22-31; Scudder 1901:14-16; Zumwalt 1988:46). But no historian or folklorist claims that Lowell made any contribution to ballad study that might move Child to weep.

Even when a potential link is supplied, the bond between Child, Lowell, and the ballad remains a puzzle. In 1855, Lowell was invited to deliver a series of lectures at the Lowell Institute. Unbeknownst to him, the invitation had been extended in order that Harvard might consider him as a replacement for Longfellow, who had announced his intention to retire (Dubermann 1966:141; Hale 1899:110; Scudder 1901:300). Lowell's general subject was a history of English poetry, and, in his fourth lecture, he undertook to explicate the ballad. Child, in fact, was in the audience for the entire series, and he wrote to Charles Eliot Norton that he thought the lectures “hasty” but nonetheless “quite the best thing he had ever heard from the ‘perverse’ Lowell” (quoted in Duberman 1966:140).³

Perhaps, however, this lecture provides a place from which to approach Child's tears. It is doubtful that James Russell Lowell taught Child much about ballads. If he had, “stubby, honest” Child would have recorded it, or Charles Eliot Norton, Lowell's posthumous editor, would have felt compelled to honor Lowell. But it is possible that what Child heard that day makes all the rest—their 50-year friendship, the ballads they talked about and sang together, the banter between statesman and scholar, even the weeping—make sense. In addition, if Lowell's speech is typical of his life's work, then, just possibly, the lecture also holds a clue to issues of which the ballads were only one dimension. James Russell Lowell was everything that Francis James Child was not. One of the 19th century's most eminent public intellectuals, opponent of the Mexican War, abolitionist, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, ambassador to Spain, minister to England, scourge of Gilded Age politicians, he held the national stage for 50 years, defending or damning nearly every idea of his era. Thus, perhaps this lecture, if it plays on that same stage, might also move the ballad onto the uncommon ground of cultural politics.

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According to his biographers (Duberman 1966:140; Hale 1899:112), Lowell approached these—his first public lectures—with a mixture of diffidence and dread. He was a notorious procrastinator, and, with less than a month to go before his lectures at the Lowell Institute were to begin, he had finished only five of the twelve talks. As the final date drew closer and public anticipation surged, his anxiety grew. There had been a run on tickets when his course was announced, and, although the institute added an afternoon series, only one out of every five people who requested tickets received them (Duberman 1966:141; Hale 1899:114).⁴ Lowell's fears increased further when he realized who would hear him speak. Since 1839, Lowell Institute audiences had heard such lecturers as Asa Grey, Louis Agassiz, and Charles Lyell, and Lowell knew not only that expectations were high but that some of these former speakers would be in the audience. Lowell had a reputation as a poet and critic (it was not his loose family connections that had brought him the offer to speak), but he had never spoken in public before and he knew that, in this forum, wit alone would not do. Of course, none of this distress prevented him from writing to Charles Briggs that he had chosen to lecture on the English poets in order to retaliate “for the injuries received by one whom the public won’t allow among the living” (quoted in Duberman 1966:133).

Lowell joked, but he had a complicated retaliation in mind. For 50 years, English critics had ridiculed American writing. “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?” Sidney Smith wrote in the Edinburgh Review, in 1818 (quoted in Spiller 1929:6; see also Lease 1981:3-12). For those same years, American writers had raged against this onus, seeking to overcome English dismissal by inventing American substitutions for Britain's ancestral weight or by denying that history mattered (see Allen 1959; Anderson 1990; Buell 1973; Lease 1981; Ruland 1981; Spencer 1957; Weisbuch 1986). And Lowell, for all that the floated above the fray, content to turn a poet's gaze or a reviewer's eye on the battles, was fully engaged. As much as any American writer at midcentury, Lowell had struggled with Emerson's call for American scholars to walk on their own feet, to work with their own hands, and to speak with their own mouths. And he was resolved therefore to serve these English critics a very cold dish.

In so doing, however, Lowell intended neither to refuse his inheritance nor to exalt pale copies. Already, in his review of Longfellow's Kavanaugh: A Tale, entitled provocatively “Nationality in Literature,” he had rebuked “the martinets of nationality” on both sides of the Atlantic (1913[1849]:22). In his view, the United States could not inherit what it had helped to create and thus should not reject its English roots to satisfy a naive version of cultural independence (see Somkin 1967). It was foolish, he thought, to wonder who Americans were: “It is only geographically that we can call ourselves a new nation. … Intellectually we were full-grown at the start. Shakespeare had been dead five years, and Milton was eleven years old, when Mary Chilton leaped ashore on Plymouth Rock” (1913[1849]:15). It was even more foolish to wonder where American literature was. “As if we had been without one,” he wrote; “as if Shakespeare, sprung from the race and the class which colonized New England, had not been also ours! As if we had no share in the puritan and republican Milton, we who had cherished in secret for more than a century the idea of the great puritan effort, and at last embodied it in a living commonwealth!” (1913[1849]:18).

More directly, Lowell rejected the basic assumptions of American nationalism. National literatures were “not school exercises in composition to be handed in by a certain day,” no more than nationality was “a thing to be won by the sword” (1913[1849]:19, 20). Literatures were national, he believed, insofar as they were local, and the United States, which was only beginning to establish its natural landscape, “never had any proper youth as a nation, never had [a] mythic period either” (1913[1849]:20). Still, he continued, if the truth were told, “no race perishes without intellectual heir” (1913[1849]:24), and he might have added, none rises without ancestors. For Lowell, truly great literature survived precisely because it refused to be circumscribed by provincial boundaries. Echoing Longfellow's declaration in Kavanaugh that nationality was good but universality was better, Lowell argued that the “truth” of national literature was

neither more nor less than this, that authors should use their own eyes and ears, and not those of other people. We ask of them human nature as it appears in man, not in books; and scenery not at second hand from the canvas of painter or poet, but from that unmatched landscape painted by the Great Master on the retina of their own eyes. Let an American author make a living character, even if it be antediluvian, and nationality will take care of itself. [1913(1849):30-31]

Lowell's distrust of the formulas of nationalism went well beyond his resentment of English criticism or amusement with American nativism. Like most of his class, he believed that America had lost sight of the common good (Hietala 1985:95-131). Increasingly divided into high and low, the populace seemed, to his mind, no longer willing to distinguish individual self-interest from civic virtue. Moreover, in the absence of the once secure theological and revolutionary justifications for collective sacrifice, the people seemed to have opted for a coarser understanding of social obligation, in which progress was equated with the acquisition of private property and the satisfaction of individual desires. Of course, this general decline did not surprise Lowell at all. The California gold rush, with its lure of the lucky strike and its substitution of chance for hard work, the annexation of Texas, and the Mexican War, each of which had failed to expand liberty; New England's rapid industrialization, which was creating the first signs of strife between factory workers and owners; and, most of all, the North's accommodation to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, had all evidenced the possible disintegration of the republic.

Suddenly, however, that potential seemed frighteningly real. Mass immigration (over four million people entered the United States during the 1850s) was overwhelming the country's resources. The sudden addition of large numbers of German and Irish Catholics severely strained the nation's existing public services and seemed to threaten Protestant hegemony over education and republican government. By 1855, one in five Massachusetts residents was foreign-born, and the vast majority of these immigrants were Irish. Poor and unskilled, seen as harbingers of popish influence and as possible tools of the slavocracy, the majority of these newcomers remained at the bottom of the economic ladder with little hope that the Brahmin classes above were concerned for their lives or their welfare. In addition, recessions in 1851, 1854, and 1855 had produced widespread anxiety and resentment at all levels of the economy. Businessmen saw themselves unfairly manipulated by an emerging national market economy that no longer seemed responsive to local needs or under local control, while workers felt threatened by a factory system that increasingly treated them as commodities and not people. Massachusetts, as the nation's most densly populated urbanized and industrialized state, had been particularly vulnerable to these economic dislocations. Deteriorating conditions and high unemployment only exaggerated the distance between the state's Yankee aristocracy and its working class.

The enactment of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 had also instigated a furious debate over the political future of the republic. Its extension of slavery through the popular sovereignty provision (settlers, rather than Congress, would determine whether a territory would be slave or free) guaranteed that Kansas would become both the central symbol and actual battlefield of the conflict between the North and the South (Fellman 1979:287-307; Howard 1990:132-155). Abolitionists asserted that, if the act overturned the restriction of slavery to territories south of the 36°30′ parallel, as established by the Missouri Compromise, then it also invalidated the Fugitive Slave Act. And when authorities captured escaped slave Anthony Burns in May 1854 and ordered his forcible return to slavery, even the most conservative Massachusetts Brahmins were turned into “stark mad abolitionists” (C. F. Adams, as quoted in Mulkern 1990:78). It seemed certain that only violence could bring about the end of the slave power.

At the moment that Lowell lectured, the most recent local elections seemed to have made this descent into anarchy even more apparent. In 1854, the American (Know-Nothing) Party had carried scores of local elections in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states on an unlikely mix of xenophobia, opposition to slavery, and working-class rage (Beals 1960:227-252; Holt 1992:165-190; Mulkern 1990:61-113; Walters 1976:54-69). In Massachusetts, the Know-Nothings captured full control of the state legislature and were busily replacing the long-standing Whig establishment with a government committed to the expulsion of the Irish. In fact, on the very day that Lowell began his course of lectures, Governor Gardner, in his inaugural address, proposed a crusade to “Americanize America” and promised to institute a national cleansing that was destined to “rank with the great movements that originally found nations” (quoted in Mulkern 1990:78).

Lowell particularly feared this localized version of ultra-American nativism because of its potential to derail the cause of abolition. Several years earlier, in the Anti-Slavery Standard, Lowell wrote that the European revolutions of 1848 had been “thwarted in a great measure by foolish disputes about races and nationalities,” and he recognized the threat such debates posed to the antislavery cause. “We have no especial interest in these assertions of national nobility, except in as far as they have been the cause or the apology of national oppression. Men are very willing to excuse any unnatural feature of their social system by tracing it up to some inscrutable divine arrangement” (Lowell 1902[1849]:26). Now the Know-Nothing exploitation of the Irish question raised the possibility of an alliance that could easily postpone the end of slavery for decades. If the northern Know-Nothings and southern apologists for slavery succeeded in linking their racist ideologies, then they might so soil the ground of American identity with their intolerance that no diversity or dissent would be possible.

For Lowell, then, his lectures offered the opportunity to move beyond the irony and rage of A Fable for Critics and The Biglow Papers. American identity was no longer a topic of genteel discussion or a subject for dialect poetry. Suddenly, the linked causes of American Nationalism, abolition, and Irish imagination that he had so long argued for were at war on the plains of Kansas and the streets of Boston. If his audiences were to overcome the forces threatening their community values, they needed to know not only what a genuine national literature might look like but more so what they might do to create it. Here, in the process of unpacking the history of English literature, he could show his New England audiences how they might refashion existing American nationalism into an identity more compatible with Yankee New England's traditions and desires; and by displaying the nuts and bolts of England's own national literature, he could demonstrate the true character of American national identity.

In assuming this particular “quest for nationality,” Lowell stepped back onto familiar territory (Spencer 1957). No one who had followed his career could have had any doubt how little faith he had in the politics of commercialism and compromise that dominated post-Jacksonian America. Like most of New England's historians and critics, he had shown how disturbed he was by the apparent fragmentation of the public sphere and the consequent loss of spiritual identity which it presaged. And, like them, he had sought repeatedly to mediate between the desire of the age for an organically whole civic culture and the brute facts of national life (see Gordon 1942). Unlike the majority of those critics, however, he did not yet believe that the best hope of overcoming the contemporary cultural malaise lay in the struggle of the individual against the state (see Anderson 1990; Bercovitch 1975, 1978; Carafiol 1991; Ellison 1984; Hansen 1990; Martin 1991; Pease 1987; Spengemann 1989). At least in 1855, Lowell was unwilling to preach the aggrandizement of the self at the expense of the community. Rather, he was seeking to write a new idiom through which his fragmented society might renew itself. Accordingly, although he would make as full a use of Romantic epistemology as any Transcendentalist in order to construct his vision of genuine American nationalism, he would do so only to oppose the consequences of that epistemology for American cultural life (Riddel 1991:54-56).

Not surprisingly, then, Lowell preferred to ground his new idiom in the politics of the imagination. Poetry was mind made concrete; its origin was consciousness, and consciousness (no matter what the source of its materials) always moved from inside the poet to the external world of the poem. Lowell's actual language relied heavily on Thomas Coleridge's distinction between fancy and imagination (Howard 1952:341-342). Of the two, he declared in his first lecture, fancy was the “frailer quality which in combination with sentiment produces poetry, with experience, wit.” In either association fancy occupied itself with “what may be called scenery.” In contrast, imagination was a form of empathy. “Imagination,” he said, “would seem to be that breath of sympathy which can include the emotions of some other person within its own, and that energy which can then condense this emotion into a word or phrase so vivid that it shall reproduce the same emotion in the reader” (as quoted in Howard 1952:343). Still, although Lowell would argue for the imagination against tradition, he, nonetheless, would turn to the mythology of tradition to begin his discussion of national identity because, as he began his talks, the figure of the “nation” could only be voiced within that mythos (Riddel 1991:57; see also Linberg 1991:233-235).

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By the time that he reached the ballad lecture, Lowell was dispensing criticism with relish. Piers Plowman, he told his audience, might be good cultural history, but its substitution of allegory for imagination made it bad poetry. Likewise he insisted that the authors of the metrical romances were barely able to raise their work to the level of fancy. Given such remarks, the audience might have expected ballads to fare no better, and initially they did not, for Lowell began not with ballad poetry but with ballad politics. Citing first Macbeth's injunction against “Fools, minstrels and bards …,” he went on:

When Virgil said arms [sic] virumque cano, arms and the man I sing, he defined in the strictest manner the original office of the poet, and the object of the judicious Macbeth's ordinance was to prevent anyone from singing the wrong arms and the wrong man. For the poet was then what the political newspaper is now, and circulated from ear to ear with satire or panegyric. He it was who first made Public Opinion a power in the state by condensing it in a song.⁵

If this were not enough, Lowell concluded his opening remarks with a flourish: “The fluid sentiment dispersed in the atmosphere he gathered into a flash that could rive and burn. Good and evil fame were with him, the more powerful that they were invisible, for what tyrant could procure the assassination of an epithet or throw a couplet into a dungeon?”

Such explicit political claims are decidedly uncharacteristic in ballad scholarship. Ballad makers are rarely described as political forces to be feared, and ballad critics seldom talk politics when they talk ballads. Yet Lowell began by doing both. His ballad makers were genuine threats to the status quo. They arbitrated public opinion; they threatened or enhanced the power of the state. Moreover, their ballads literally caused their hearers to “rive and burn.” The description is overwrought, but Lowell was not. Like Spenser (whose portrayal of the political power of Irish bards he quotes approvingly), Lowell wanted the audience to know that, whatever else they might be, ballads were rhetoric in action and their authors were the reporters and editorial writers of that world where “the copies of a poem were so many living men, and all publication was to the accompaniment of music.”

This newspaper metaphor, moreover, allowed Lowell to avoid some of the more pernicious features of 19th-century ballad criticism. Admittedly, he was already turning ballad poets into their poems. Still, even with such reification, he posited no mysterious consciousness to explain the absence of authorial claims in balladry. Ballad poets did not call attention to themselves because disguise was simply the most sensible way of avoiding discovery. “[The ballad's] force was in its impersonality,” he said, “for Public Opinion is disenchanted the moment it is individualized, and is terrible only so long as it is the opinion of no one in particular.” Likewise, he did not treat orality as a degenerative feature. It was merely another natural consequence of the political context of ballad creation. “A Newspaper may be suppressed, and editor may be silenced, every copy of an obnoxious book may be destroyed in those old days when the minstrels were a power, … [but a] verse could wander safely from heart to heart and from hamlet to hamlet as unassailable as music and memory.”

Lowell did not intend for his audience to mistake the ballad for a modern poem, however. Foremost, ballads embodied popular memory. “It was on the wings of verse that the names of ancestral heroes could float down securely over broad tracts of desert time, and across the gulf of oblivion. And poets were sometimes made use of by sagacious rulers to make legends serve a political purpose.” Pomp aside, the traditional role of the ballad maker as community historian emerges. Popular poets cherished what the rest of the community only vaguely remembered, and their special abilities permitted them to shape what ordinary people knew and thought about their past. Yet such poets accomplished more. Citing the example of the great Persian poet, Firdausi, Lowell argued that “to make a people capable of great things, to multiply an army by two, you must make an alliance with their imaginations. A reinforcement of that will overbear great odds, and it is from the past only that it can be recruited. For this kind of thing any past will do, if you can only make men believe in it.”

Lowell's argument to this point has a certain panache. Ballad authors do not merely sing history; they make history. The best of them can literally “make any past do.” Moreover, the finest of them can imagine a history with the compliance of their audiences. “The human race,” he said, “lives to feel a past behind it, to have its rear guarded by an illustrious ancestry. It will have heroes even if it has only shadows to make them out of, and is obliged to wink a little to believe in them. For national character is cumulative. It is from the dead centuries that national impulses acquire force and direction, and it is from the silent peaks of the past that man's eye controls the great unknown ocean of the future” (emphasis added). For Lowell, national politics and national poetics were one. Both ballad makers and ballad audiences knew that a nation's very existence depended upon its ability to define itself, not philosophically by its special values, but materially by its special character. Nations, both knew, might be conceived in liberty, but they rose and fell in legend. And hence, both agreed that it was better to bend under the weight of fiction than to stand upright without a history.

Any doubts about why Lowell raised the imaginary quality of national character were quickly laid to rest. Continuing unabated, he asked his audience to consider the “peculiar” position of the English. Christianity and the importation of the French language had cut Saxon and Norman “wholly off from the past,” he asserted, and when the two finally began to become one, the severance was absolute. “The English properly so called were a people who hardly knew their grandfathers.” Every god, every hero, every tradition that connected them to their past was “as if they had never been.” Anglophiles throughout the audience must have blanched at these words, but Lowell persisted. “English writers,” he declared, “demand of us a national literature. But where for thirteen centuries was their own?” New Englanders, at least, he went on “brought a past with them to Plymouth” and could claim the laws, the language, the genius, and the triumphs of ancestral daring “wafted to heaven on the real wings of Martyr-fires” as their legitimate inheritance. The Normans, in contrast, were but “an extemporaneous hoard” as much cut off from the past as the army that arose “at the sowing of the gorgon's teeth.” And the Saxons they conquered, he continued, were little better. “For we must remember that though Britain was historically old, England was not, and it was as impossible to piece the histories of the two together to make a national record of, as it would be for us to persuade ourselves into a feeling of continental antiquity by adopting the Mexican Annals.”

James Russell Lowell never avoided hyperbole. His leaps from ballads to epics to national character are questionable. His anxiety is unmistakable. But his objective is clear. The English ridiculed American literary efforts. He returned their smugness with savagery. Anglo-America, at least, could lay claim to English tradition at its birth.⁶ That tradition might be barely 300 years old, but it was tradition nonetheless. More importantly, if English national culture was forged not in the Norman Conquest but in the Protestant Reformation, then America's English heirs could claim even more. Norman swords might have won a land, but Puritan “martyr-fires” forged a soul. No wonder, he continued, Norman poets wrote awful poems. They lacked a national consciousness. Hawthorne had once told him that he found it painful to live in an old house “for the shadows of former occupants that haunted it,” but, he continued, the Normans so desperately required a past that they raised up ghosts to haunt them. “To the Normans, England was such an old house and their poets, having no past of their own, raised the ghosts of Arthur and his knights to walk in it. But they were shadows only, and not names to conjure with like those at which the deepest fibre in the heart and brain, the sentiment of race and country, vibrates and tingles.”

To prove his assertions, Lowell set out to convict the English by describing true national literature. Such a literature, he began, cannot be imposed from above. “Uneducated people,” he told his audience, “will not stand half as much stuff as educated ones, because they have not so many facetious and artificial associations, the string of which is mistaken for that of the heart. (I think the school boy is right when he resents the greater part of Virgil as an impertinence.) To touch simple men and women your words must cut deep to something real and living—to the national sentiments and hereditary beliefs—to a human and not a class experience.” For Lowell, national poetry was poetry without cant or class. Attacking English snobbery once again, he declared that Dr. Adam Smith's rejection of the ballad of Chevy Chase because it was “plainly such as no gentlemen could have written” perfectly exemplified the failure of the British to recognize what made ballads immortal. “The ballads,” he asserted, “are the first truly national poetry in our language, and national poetry is not that either of the drawing room or the kitchen. It is the common mother earth of the universal sentiment that the foot of the poet must touch, through which shall steal up to the heart and the brain that fine virtue which puts him in sympathy not with his class but his kind.”

Informing an audience of New England gentry that ballad makers were no gentleman is hardly tactful; but telling them that roguery was the life blood of the ballad had nothing to do with untender motives. Rather, Lowell was setting forth what would become a recurring leitmotif. In his view, national poetry stood against the artificiality of caste and the power of material difference. It refused to separate the community into the few with much or the many with little or to claim that drawing rooms and kitchens were populated by different peoples merely because circumstance made them appear different. Instead, national poetry spoke to the whole people by exhalting the natural sympathy between the rich and poor, proving that the two classes might be joined together in spite of their differences if only poets would chronicle kindred desires. And it made its case for the nation by demonstrating that “common mother earth” was far more important than any artificial distinction in wealth, power, or locality.

Lowell's faith in the creativity of national poets was just as impassioned. Resonating the hopes and fears of their communities, such poets captured the immediacy of ordinary life. “Courage, devotion, constancy, the fears, the hopes, the successes, and the tragedies of life—whatever moves the heart and inspires the soul of man—these were themes good enough for the ballad makers and it never occurred to them that they were to be found only in the past, that they were the monopoly of the dead.” For Lowell, what moved women and men in the national moment were their common sympathies. Thus national poets were not interested in insight or self-display, and certainly took no pride in irony or disdain. They expressed a people's universal sentiments and collective hopes, and, at their best, discovered a community's true virtue. Most importantly, Lowell continued, such sentiments were not dead. “The present to him who knows how to listen to it is epical,” he concluded, “and he hears in it the tones of joy as clear and of wail as deep as ever thrilled him in history or poem. … Perhaps the ballads are most interesting as showing how full of poetry and beauty our daily life is, if it only be looked at poetically.”

Until this last claim Lowell's enthusiasms are familiar territory to folklorists. His distinction between Kunstpoesie and Volksdichtung is standard Romantic poetics, and his obscurantism only reinforces the Romantic temper of his arguments (Abrahams 1992; Abrams 1958[1953], 1971; Lovejoy 1924). But to assert that modern poets might make national poetry seems heroically optimistic. He had just finished locating ballad making in the classless, preliterate past, and even he would have acknowledged that a modern poet lived in neither state. Why then offer his contemporaries the hope that they might make national poetry when the possibility was fleeting at best? Serendipity aside, Lowell faced a trap of his own devising. By his own admission, national character demanded a long tradition. It was “cumulative,” formed from the “dead centuries” and directed from “the silent peaks of the past.” Poets might raise knolls into Alps and audiences might “wink” at their alchemy, but the knolls needed to exist. If the English lacked enough history to produce a national character, then America, with even less history, had no hope. But it is precisely this seeming dead end that makes his claim so liberating and American. Like Emerson, who in Nature reproved his contemporaries (“why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into a masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also” [Emerson 1981(1837):7]), Lowell held as an article of faith that an honest poet might shatter time's stranglehold on inspiration. Admittedly, a past made it easier for poets to listen to their communities, but no amount of past was enough if a nation's poets remained deaf to their songs.

To complete this overthrow of history, Lowell flawlessly narrated the Transcendental fantasy of poetic creativity (see Buell 1973:34-56; Hansen 1990:60-71; Kronick 1984:39-41; for the larger Romantic version, see Abrams 1958[1953], 1971). Ballad makers were not “encumbered with any useless information. They had not wit enough to lose their way.” Likewise ballad makers attended exclusively to the close and familiar. They succeeded because “they felt and thought and believed just as their hearers did, and because they never thought about it.” Ballads are pathetic, he continued, “because the poet did not try to make them so, and [they] are models of simple and nervous diction because the business of the poet was to tell his story, not to adorn it, and accordingly he went earnestly and straight forwardly to work, and let the rapid thought snatch the words as it ran, feeling quite secure of its getting the right one.” For Lowell, blinding energy, not craft, made the ballad possible, and in the end, such wild fire begat fury: “When a thought gets hold of a man it knows how to make him speak. The poet does not make the poem, it possesses him and he can no more tell how it was made out of him than the brown earth can guess how the snow drop that looks back at her could create itself out of her dusky bosom” (emphasis added).

Here is Romantic wizardry at its best. Great poets do not think; they are possessed by thought and poetry happens. Here also is the genius of the ballad. No matter that no poet, not even the author of Kubla Khan or of Lady Margaret, ever composed in this way. All that matters is that ballad poets somehow stand above even the greatest of modern poets. Modern poets must overcome their refinement. They have more than enough wit “to lose their way,” and that wit guarantees that only the very best among them will “fuse learning into one substance with their own thought and feeling, and so interpenetrate it with themselves that the acquired is as much as the native.” Fortunately, ballad poets were saved from such artifice. Lowell reserved some of his strongest anger for those writers who substituted language for feeling. “When in a matter that concerns emotion,” he said, “a man begins to contrive what he shall say and how he shall say it, he is going to utter something that is unfit for him to speak and for us to hear.” He wanted poetry to be free of the accursed consciousness that allowed individuals to act from motives. He wanted even more for poets to be released from the task of building poems. And in ballads he found all that he desired naturally expressed. “The ballads have this merit in common with the highest poetry that we cannot by any analysis detect the processes by which they were produced. We feel as wide a difference between what is manufactured and what is spontaneous as between the sparks ground out by the dozen from an electrical machine (which a sufficiently muscular professor can grind out by the dozen) and the wild fire of God that writes mene, mene, mene, on the crumbling palace walls of a midnight cloud.”

These contraries—the manufactured and the spontaneous, electrical sparks and divine fire, muscular professor and almighty God—take us well beyond the literary limits of the lecture. Lowell aspired to create as only a poet might, and even though he recognized that such creation was more properly the province of God, he could barely keep his disappointment hidden. He spurned his mechanized world in which the writing on the palace wall was more likely to produce a scientific explanation than to bring down an empire, and he envied the ballad makers their spontaneity. They were much better off than he and his contemporaries. They “had no books.” Their language was not seen but heard. “Language, when it speaks to the eye only, loses half its meaning. It is no longer live thinking and feeling, but the unimpassioned vehicle of these.” The metaphor is mixed, but the meaning is clear. Language works best when it is spoken: “For the eye is an outpost of the intellect, and fetches and carries messages for that. But the temperament, the deep human nature, the aboriginal emotions—these utter themselves in the voice.”

Lowell was too much the showman to leave his audience breathing the rare air of theory any longer than necessary. Besides, he had finished only 15 of his 51 handwritten pages, and he had a great deal left to say. Still, although he would comment on 15 folk and literary ballads in some depth, his remarks on individual ballads were always intended to establish the declension of modern times. Given, however, the psychology he had outlined thus far, few other themes were possible. Contemporary poets sought to moralize at their worst or to educate at their best; and as edifying as those goals might be, neither produced the ingredients of national poetry. Wordsworth was the greatest modern English poet, Lowell would tell his audience, but “Wordsworth has not in him even a suspicion of the dramatic imagination—he has too much individual character—and when he puts himself beside the older poet he seems not only tame but downright barnyard.”

The problem, again, was not in Wordsworth but in Wordsworth's imagination. Modern poets were condemned to preach, he said, and preaching always caused them to think instead of to picture. “I think,” he said, “we all have a feeling that what we call the mother-tongue is something which underlies the language of books and writing, and makes the dialect of life as distinguished from that of thought. In English, especially as a composite tongue, it is not hard to draw the line between heart-words and brain-words. The first have come from the people, and the last from the governing class.” Again Lowell works by contraries, befitting his nascent jeremiad. Mother tongue opposes writing, life opposes thought, heart opposes brain, the people oppose their rulers. And it is not hard to see these oppositions for the struggle that they are. Speech, here, is alive in its cadences, its shadings, its very words, and because it is, it does not permit nonsense the way writing does. Addressing the veneration of the language of thought by critics, he said: “It is this that has given rise to what has now become the cant about Anglosaxon—which has gone so far that I have read a harangue in favor of that language, in which every word but the conjunctions and prepositions was of Latin origin” (emphasis in original).⁷

Hidden within the humor is a serious debate about the nature of English (one that Lowell would take up again several times in his life), and cant is a marvelously economical word for his disgust with the zealousness of the schoolmasters. For Lowell, English had no ancient form. It was a “composite tongue,” and its only problem was that educated critics were too busy “striving to keep expression blockaded (or block-headed) within certain trenches of usage or authority” to notice that language was best kept alive by those who trusted themselves. Look to Shakespeare, he challenged the audience. “[He] never thought of getting the tower-stamp on his phrases.” Or if Shakespeare was too lofty, then they should look to their own children. “They make action verbs wherever they want them,” he said, “because their thoughts are action. Your son tells you that he has greened his white trousers, or black and blued his knee, and neither he nor you are pained by want of precedent.” The unarguable truth for Lowell was that language and, by implication, identity prospered only because people spoke from the heart. To be sure consideration and “precedent” were absolutely essential to careful expression. But both were paid for with freshness and warmth. “The words of a backwoodsman are sometimes as keen and sure of their mark as his axe. They have never had the life squeezed out of them by the printing press, nor lost their color by imprisonment in books.”

Moreover, when the modern imagination did not preach, it inflated. Ballad singers, he said, “plunge into deep water at once. The[ir] transitions are abrupt. … The[ir] passions speak out savagely and without any delicacies of circumlocution.” As such, ballad events remained urgent and alive. Real people lived, died, knew joy or sorrow in the ballad world. In contrast, modern life appeared in the newspapers. In another burst of oratorical fervor, Lowell proclaimed: “Our age of steam seems to be like an express train on the railway and we rattle from one piece of news to another so swiftly that we have no time to feel anything deeply and livingly. The scenery of life rushes by us blended into an unmeaning ribbon in which particulars are not to be distinguished.” The threat, according to Lowell, was not simply that readers preferred bad writing to good or sensation to sense, though he did tell the audience that “the state should furnish every child born in it with a pistol to blow out its brains at once, as with this subtle means of getting rid of them by degrees.” Rather it was the “inevitable dilution of mind, of thought, of feeling, and of language … in a country like ours, where the only reading of the mass of the people is the newspapers.” In their rush to be novel, newspapers painted every story with the same emotional brush, leaving their readers with no way to distinguish melodrama from tragedy or either from farce. No wonder the modern world was in disarray. What else could be expected, he declared, when words were more valued for their length than for their impact. “We have now no longer any fire but disastrous conflagrations; nobody dies but deceases; men do not fall from houses but are precipitated from mansions or edifices; a convict is not hanged, but suffers the extreme penalty of the offended laws of his country.”

All that was left was valediction. Sir Walter Scott was wrong, Lowell said, to apologize for the ballad. “Ballads are the only true folk songs that we have in English,” and they needed no defense. No other poetry, he went on, addressed its audience so simply and directly. No other poets clung so certainly to what was grand and permanent. No other poetry opposed so unerringly the metaphysical with the ordinary. No other poets opened themselves so directly to the harmonies of the world. For the ballad makers, their own emotions were enough for any poem, and what they lacked in emotion the world supplied. Indeed, Lowell said, ballads were “the pure poetry of the world.” Their deaths deal only in dying; their ghosts do not preach immortality, and their dead carry with them only those terrors with which ordinary citizens face the unknown. Moreover, the ballads were winnowed as no other poetry would ever be. Ballad poets read their reviews in “the faces of [their] ring of hearers,” and if a ballad did not touch the people, then it was forgotten or replaced by “new editions … struck off by mothers crooning their children to sleep, or by wandering minstrels who went about sowing the seed of courtesy and valor in the cottage and on the hillside.” Still, even faced by their critics, ballad singers had the advantage. They lived and worked under “the Arch of Heaven,” and they were burdened with no library “but clouds, streams, mountains, woods, and men.” They did not create in overheated rooms with “indoor inspiration,” or write poetry to sing “the virtues of the fireside [or] teach the ethics of home.” Their poetry fed on sunshine, and it gave “color and bloom to the brain as well as to the apple and plum.” And therein lay the greatest charm of the ballads, “nobody made them,” Lowell concluded. “They seem to have come up like violets and we have only to thank God for them.”

.....

To no one's surprise, except perhaps his own, James Russell Lowell got the job (Duberman 1966:142).⁸ Scott did a better job of defending the minstrel. Coleridge wrote more eloquently on the imagination. Emerson described the “low and familiar” with greater poetry. But Lowell's pastiche of these represented precisely the comforting blend of common sense and romance that the Harvard overseers had in mind for their students. Moreover, although his language soared to unnatural heights and his ballad theory was outdated, his lecture was precisely the blend of poetics and politics that he intended it to be. Lowell's subject may have been English folksong, but his ballad criticism reached directly to the heart of the war for the American imagination.

At the risk of monotony, Lowell justified his claims on classically Romantic grounds. National identity was founded on language as at once the reflection of material things, the bridge between mind and things, and the product of the mind in response to things. But like his Romantic contemporaries, he recognized that the truthfulness of language simply could not be guaranteed. Language slipped its boundaries too easily, and its uneasy mediation of imagined life in speech and literature made even its most subtle Romantic users suspicious. The ordinary Romantic solution was at once ingenious and elegant. Language, alone, could not be trusted. Tie language to consciousness. Consciousness bound to language might prove false. Tie both to history. History produced by both might be fiction. Anchor all three to nature, and when nature proved too awesome to comprehend and indifferent to human desires, enfold this cobbled trio within a metaphor of individual development. As infancy gives way to youth and adolescence to adulthood in an individual's passage to maturity, so too, it asserted, did savagery give way to tribalism, tribes to nations, and nations to civilizations as the races of the world passed from barbarism to culture.

Such rigid traditionalism, however, could not work for the United States. As Lowell had declared, America lacked the history to establish its national individuality and what little history it had foregrounded precisely the dependence on England and Europe that his criticism was intended to overcome. His originality in this lecture (and this lecture, as will be seen, is crucial to that originality) was to promise America a national identity that was at once rooted in language, founded on real history, and yet unburdened by the past. He did so by arguing the priority of will over history. On every page of the ballad lecture, Lowell stressed that the active mind of the poet mattered above all else. It was the first cause and the transforming agent. And it alone had the power to make singers into nation makers. Countries came and went in the ordinary way of things: but countries were not nations, and no evolution or revolution in itself was enough to make a nation no matter what new borders it established. Nations arose only when their people actively sought to be one in beliefs and values, and only when their poets actively worked to give direction to those impulses.

Nowhere are these claims more explicit than in the lecture's linkage of the ballad poet and national character. As much as anyone ever, Lowell enjoyed attacking contemporary poetic sensibilities, but he was not content to play either the shadow Emerson exhorting his audience to surrender to nature or the shadow Whitman trumpeting the apotheosis of the self. From the opening sentence of the lecture—from that first appearance of the ballad maker who threatens the state with a song, to the Persian poets who create a national poetry from whole cloth, to the Norman poets whose lack of community guaranteed a lack of voice, to the English poets who made both genuine folksongs and an English nation—Lowell challenged his audience to recognize that national poetry and national character were man-made and man-makeable. Unfortunately, locating that creative power in the ballad maker evoked an unavoidable, almost sacramental reverence for the past. In the choice of such poets as analytic subjects, therefore, Lowell risked producing not the forward looking inspiration that he desired but the mournful nostalgia that he feared. Since a Romanticism without nostalgia is no Romanticism at all (see Kammen 1991:40-61; Lears 1981) and since Lowell was determined to be Romantic, nostalgia must be saved from its inevitable backward glances.

Lowell inscribed his revised nostalgia onto American character as a substitution of genuineness for genealogy. In his hands, the analysis of balladry was always concerned with motives and seldom with origins. He was not interested in sources. For Lowell, the substance of a ballad was found in the subjective mental state of its producer. If a speaker, or singer, or poet, or an audience member reached within themselves, and if, like Shakespeare or their own children, their “thoughts [we]re action,” then they produced a true article. If anyone, however, paused to check themselves against an external authority or surrendered their immediate passion to future considerations, then they were false to themselves and to their common lives. Honest poets, honest speakers, and honest citizens did not imitate and did not defer, because if they did, their good intentions produced bad poetry, insipid talk, and ineffective government. Importantly, Lowell never demanded transcendence or effacement as the price of authenticity. He did not expect his modern audience to suspend judgment or long to return to a simpler past, and he did not demand a rejection of the present. Rather, he called upon his audience to recognize that, although the production of genuine ballads was not possible, the production of genuine poetry was. The key lay in looking inward and not backward. And it was available, now and in the future, to anyone with the strength of character to choose.

A Romanticism that favored choice was unusual; a Romanticism based on choice was exceptional, but an antebellum American Romanticism founded on choice was hazardous as well. Traditional nationalist models were intentionally undemocratic. Designed to oppose Enlightenment political theories of civil government and revolution by consent, Romantic nationalism asserted communal sovereignty as an unconscious inheritance outside the ken of politics. But as Lowell had made eminently clear throughout his analysis, choice was the only choice for the United States. Unconscious solidarity went against the American grain, if for no other reason than because Englishmen had had to think themselves into becoming Americans. Accordingly, having committed himself to choice, Lowell needed a way to give himself and his audience control over their decisions while at the same time closing the door to choices of the sort that he wished them to avoid. Slaveowners simply could not be allowed to imagine that they might dissolve their participation in the American system of government just because they chose to do so. But neither could Americans be offered a false mythology as the price for preventing disunion.

Ironically, then, but not accidentally, the most Romantic and least American of genres, the ballad, became central to the new American idiom that Lowell so artfully constructed in the ballad lecture. For Lowell, the ballad genre formed the precise, concrete linkage between the spiritual and the material which he needed in order to imagine the practical activity inherent in true nationalism. On the one hand, they were marvelously constructed, so well made in fact that they could not be imitated even by the greatest poets of the modern age. On the other, they were wholly without manufacture, “coming up like violets.” A Newtonian impossibility, they occupied the space “between metaphor and metaphysics” absolutely essential to the Transcendentalist idea of poetic creativity (Abrams 1958[1953]:262-297; Buell 1973:15). It did not matter which contemporary dichotomy one chose, past and present, poet and nature, individual self and social world, local interest and universal truth, imagination and reality, ballads were capable of containing both in the same space at the same time and thus of restoring the unity that had been lost as a consequence of what Emerson described as the “key” to modern times: “the mind has become aware of its self” (as quoted in Yoder 1978:xiii).

Even better, ballad makers suffered no ill consequences for their trespass on the ground of divine creation. Contemporary poetics required authors to annihilate the self in their quest to occupy this orphic space (Hartman 1970[1962]:50-51; Wilson 1982:27-50; Yoder 1978:3-30); yet in doing so, they risked falling into solipsism. In Lowell's hands, however, the ballad had become the perfect escape from the trap of self-absorption. Romantic/Transcendentalist ideology sought to enact the “poem as hetrocosm” (Abrams 1958[1953]:263), that is, as the creative space in which the act of writing poetry and that of God creating the universe became isomorphic. Because the ballad, according to Lowell, was poetry without consciousness or craft, ballad makers had none of the contemporary poet's need to transcend the self through the self to experience original creation (Hartman 1970[1962]). Hence, in the ballad, they were able to assume their roles as prophets/poets/seers, as completely public selves, receiving and then communicating their simultaneously national and universal message. In ballad making, they became Emerson's ideal poet who “is made great by means of the predominance of the universal nature: he has only to open his mouth, and it speaks; he has only to be forced to act, and it acts” (as quoted in Wilson 1982:22).⁹

Accordingly, their very improbability made ballads central to the development of an American character. “The present is epical to him who hears it,” Lowell challenged his audience and the ballad now gave life to the spirit from which such American hearing might arise. Of course, no contemporary American would make ballads. In fact, Lowell told them it was both futile and vulgar to try. Neither would they make American poetry if they sought their muses in models. Rather, Lowell said, if they wished to make national poetry, American poets must learn to make that poetry the way ballad makers made ballads. Like their ballad counterparts, American poets must learn to make poems that emptied themselves of “thinking” at the very moment that they filled with “the popular heart and memory.” Such activity, of course, would necessarily follow the traditional Romantic path. As Geoffrey Hartman has noted, American poets suffered from inescapable modernity, and they would have to overcome the “death-in-life” of consciousness and heroically trace their own road through “a purgatory so to speak, [to] gain access to a cosmic consciousness which brings true union with all mankind” (Hartman 1970[1962]:50). But by studying the ballad, by learning the features of real pathos and genuine sentiment, by learning to separate base language from true speech, and by hearing and seeing and rejecting imitation, American poets might lessen their purgatory and learn how to make without making.

More importantly what held for national poetry held for the nation as well. Lowell had spent a great deal of energy analyzing ballad poetry, but his subject remained nation building. If poets could find a space wherein to create this contemporary national poetics, then their example and, more importantly, the power of their work might lead American democracy itself to realize its potential to develop a new public morality to replace the morality that had been eroded by sectional crisis and ethnic strife. Interestingly, Lowell's valediction of choice gave him exactly the weapon he needed to construct such a morality. English critics delighted in the supposed backwardness of American life because it secured their priority and their superiority, but it was no accident that Coleridge and Wordsworth, for example, plotted England's escape into authentic nationalism by promoting the fantasy of passive surrender to unselfconsciousness rather than submit to the German-inspired Teutonic myth of an ancient tribal past. Like their American counterparts half a century later, these English poets realized that their own spotted history offered small hope of independence and that the Scots to their northern flank threatened their claim to much of British traditional poetry. They promoted transcendent reverie (complete with the proverbial man from Porlock who spoiled it all with a knock at the door) and shared common cause with Lowell's substitution of choice for necessity.

However, as Lowell was at pains to demonstrate, common cause cut the English more deeply than it did the Americans. English claims to a nationhood born in the age of the epic depended on the Anglo-Norman poets' rendering of Arthurian myth. But if the Norman invasion delayed the birth of an English nation, as Lowell argued, so that the ballads were the first “true folk songs” in English, then English national character could as easily be derived from New England as New England's character could be said to spring from Elizabethan Britain. For all his identification of the ballad as medieval in tone, Lowell just as adamantly counted its age from the times of Shakespeare, through the conquest and settlement of North America, through the Glorious Revolution, properly ending only in the French and Indian War. If these years, especially the last 200, were England's true national moment, then such an England was much too young to crow loudly and her America was just old enough to join the chorus.

More crucially, this wonderfully savage twist of the British lion's tail gave Lowell the ammunition that he needed to secure his New England version of American nationalism. At its simplest, it allowed him to defend himself from English attack by making choice essential not only to genuine American character but to genuine English character as well.¹⁰ Lowell's not-so-oblique citation of martyr fires wrote the history of modern England from Henry VIII's “half Popish and half Protestant” church to the Glorious Revolution as a providential narrative in which high and low ceased to be divided, faith overcame politics and class, and English culture was purified and made whole. More importantly, it reminded his audience that Puritan New England had as much to do with the holy war against Charles I and Archbishop Laud as any member of the New Model Army and, hence, was as much responsible for the making of English character as were the English. In fact, Lowell went so far as to imply that American unwillingness to retreat from popular theocracy to restored monarchy marked the difference between true national character and false consciousness. New England, he said, chose differently at a time when that choice was as much about the sharpening of English national character as it was about rulers and religion. And because its “living commonwealth” husbanded what Britain abandoned, English character produced not simply two different Protestantisms with two different politics but two different national characters—one grounded on one side of the ocean in hardships of religion and the other on the other side of the ocean in the comforts of monarchy.

Most crucially, this particular ancestral election justified Lowell's covenant of choice as the heart of a democratic Romantic nationalism. Choice, the covenant says, is the only way to an American community. Yet it says with greater force that just choosing is not sufficient. According to Lowell, it was not enough to substitute an active, internalized American character for the externalized, passive desires of European Romanticism. What mattered was that character choose correctly. For Lowell, the freedom to choose was maintained only because its exercise was circumscribed by the morality of those who did the choosing. It is here also that his choice of the ballad as his defining genre takes on its greatest force. Ballads are “the only true folk songs we have in English,” not only because they are authentically national but also because their creators were steadfast to the values of the community and to the desires of the whole. Once more, in the realms of poetry, no one can know what America's true folksongs will be. They will not be ballads, and, although sad, that is fine. But whatever they are, they will nor occur unless America's poets are committed to the virtues that promote true nationalism.

By implication, it is the same in politics, almost. Here also, we cannot know what the final shape of America's true national character will be. That character, and the nation it represents, is still unsung, is still awaiting Americans in the future to realize its potential and to compose (no doubt with a wink) the “only true folk songs” of America. But here we can identify the path most likely to bring Americans to their truest national future. Simply put, for Lowell, true American character would follow the New England way. As much as anyone, Lowell said, New Englanders had helped to make Englishmen into Englishmen. Accordingly, that section's past was a perfect prologue for America's future. By revering New England for its unity and by emulating its steadfast morality, the rest of the nation would discover that its true heritage could only be made by a people who preached harmony instead of selfishness and who valued human dignity over profit. True American nationalism, like true New England piety, would value the morality of kind and not the desires of class or the appetites of section.¹¹

.....

We are led back to Child's tears and to the question of why he wept. He cried, I would argue, not simply because it was a proper Victorian act for the proper Victorian gentleman he was but rather because with the death of James Russell Lowell he lost touch with the hope of his youth. If it is anything, James Russell Lowell's ballad lecture is a dream of the American future, and it delights in that promised land as only a lecture spoken to a generation that did not know that the Civil War was inevitable could. James Russell Lowell was Francis James Child's best reminder of those young American dreams unencumbered either by the scholar's reticence or the scientist's gaze. Moreover, Lowell gave a distinctly American cast to what would be, for Child, a lifelong but decidedly un-American activity. Child's American searches elicited only a few ballads and his one mature critical essay (published in 1874) left little room for Americans to create the kind of poetry that Lowell promised them was within their power. But no less than Lowell, Child wrote the conditions of American character, and if his search was less innocent, it was only because history had taught his generation painfully that Lowell's vision cost more than they were willing to pay. Child weeps, then, for his friend, but more, I suggest, for the passing of his friend's version of the American dream.

This is not to suggest that James Russell Lowell's American dream ought to stand as a rediscovered foundation for American ballad scholarship. His faults loom too large for that honor. His Romanticism, his class anxiety, his narrow politics, and his parochialism are all reminders that his writing of New England onto American national character was merely a politely phrased, Anglo-Saxon racism, at once much too comforting and much too useful to the power brokers of the 19th and 20th centuries. His vision of New England as the true beginning of American civic culture provided a model of social class in which everything of value moved in orderly fashion from above simply because those at the top were the most enlightened. And we cannot claim that Lowell's values were merely ancillary to the progress of American folk studies. True, he never pretended to be a folklorist, but his vision is clearly woven into our theory and practice. His models of high and low, his opposition of the backwoodsman and the sophisticated elite, his attempt to reconcile nationalism with a democratic ethos by valorizing the ballad—all reflect the contradictions between history and desire that reside at the heart of American folk studies' persisting appetite for nostalgia without memory.

Still, even so, we owe him a great debt. Had Lowell not lectured, American folklorists might continue to imagine themselves as stateless. Because he spoke, they are reminded that the American study of the ballad was an American response spoken in American terms to an American audience in the hopes of satisfying American needs. James Russell Lowell lectured his audience on the ballad because that was what any Romantic would do to reconstruct the essence of national identity. He preached individualism because that was what any American Romantic would do to convince an audience that a democratic nationalism was possible. He said what he said because he believed that the world of his fellow New Englanders held the best hope for a genuinely American self. Contemporary folklorists need not purchase his false historical consciousness. We need not believe in his ideas, and we must not defend his politics; but we cannot afford to deny either, for both connect us to a history that we have forgotten is ours. Without his lecture, American ballad scholars might think themselves strangers in their own land. With it, they may find themselves, albeit uncomfortably, at home.

Notes

1. Francis James Child to Emily Tuckerman, 23 August 1891, as quoted in Home and Cottrell 1952:830.

2. Lowell provided invaluable aid to Child in his pursuit of ballad manuscripts, as a jocular request from Child indicates: “As Rector of St. Andrews, thou art naturally Lord of all Scotland. Let thy first decree be that every ballad known to any lady, maidservant, fishwife, dairymaid or nurse be given up under penalties of misprision & praemunire to all that shall be art & part in the withholding of the same” (Howe and Cottrell 1952:68).

3. Child was not the only one of Lowell's contemporaries to be moved by the lectures. Scudder notes that Longfellow wrote in his diary that Lowell's first lecture was an “admirable performance,” and that the lecture “on the old English ballads, one of the best of the course.” He also mentions that Charles Sumner wrote to Longfellow that “Lowell's lecture on Milton lifted me for a whole day. It was the utterance of genius in honor of genius” (1901:301). Edward Everett Hale echoed these compliments at the end of the century: “It is no wonder that the lectures were so popular. They are of the best reading to this day, full of fun, full of the most serious thought as well. And you find in them at every page, I may say, seeds which he has planted elsewhere for other blossoms and fruit” (1899:114-115).

4. Those unable to attended the lectures were not completely excluded. Robert Carter, Lowell's friend, undertook to transcribe Lowell's words for publication in the Boston Daily Advertiser. Carter's transcripts were later privately printed by The Rowfant Club of Cleveland (Lowell 1897).

5. This is from James Russell Lowell's lecture “The Ballads.” All quotations, unless otherwise cited, are from the handwritten version of this essay which may be found in the James Russell Lowell Papers, Houghton Library MS, Am 183.33, Harvard University (published by permission of the Houghton Library).

6. Lowell's sensitivity to the issue of American literary independence spanned his entire career. Writing at the end of 1848 to C. F. Briggs, possibly in reference to his “Fable for Critics,” published in October of that year, he declared, “I am the first poet who has endeavored to express the American Idea, and I shall be popular by and by” (Lowell to C. F. Briggs, 14 December 1848, in Lowell 1893:104). And in 1869 he reiterated his rejection of England: “We are worth nothing except so far as we have disinfected ourselves of Anglicisms” (Lowell 1870:272). Still, his greatest commentary on the subject can be found in the aforementioned “Fable.” “You steal Englishman's books and think Englishmen's thoughts, / With their salt on her tail your wild eagle is caught; / Your literature suits its each whisper and motion / To what will be thought of it over the ocean; / The cast clothes of Europe your statesmanship tries / And mumbles again the old blarney and lies;— / Forget Europe wholly, your veins throb with blood, / To which the dull current in hers is but mud; / Let her sneer, let her say your experiment fails, / In her voice there’s a tremble e’en now while she rails, / And your shore will soon be in the nature of things / Covered thick with the gilt driftwood of runaway kings” (Lowell 1978[1848]:136).

7. An interesting continuation of Lowell's arguments against linguistic zealots can be found in his introduction to the second series of The Biglow Papers, where he wrote, “In choosing the Yankee dialect, I did not act without forethought. It had long seemed to me that the great vice of American writing and speaking was a studied want of simplicity, that we were in danger of coming to look on our mother-tongue as a dead language, to be sought in the grammar and dictionary rather than in the heart and that our only chance of escape was by seeking it at its living sources among those who were, as Scottowe says of Major-General Gibbons, ‘divinely illiterate’” (Lowell 1978[1867]:442). Still, although this valorization of the common people appears remarkably democratic, Lowell's intentions are less beneficent. It is one thing to attack the critics with evidence of their idolatry; it is quite another to burden the common people with unsolicited and dangerous gifts. Lowell may have believed sincerely, as he told his audience in the ballad lecture, both that “the nearer you come to the primitive, natural man, the more full of pith is the speech” and that “it is because men of genius have the great gift of being natural that they have the power to speak livingly,” but saying so does more harm than good. Not all backwoodsmen ennoble speech, and not all of Shakespeare is natural. More to the point, Shakespeare will still command the respect of the governing class even if only some of his creations are judged works of genius. But a “natural” man whose speech is dull commands no respect. Like Crevecour's frontiersmen or Huck's Pap, a natural man who does not live up to Romantic expectations may find himself named a barbarian. Accordingly, much of what Lowell argues throughout his talk suffers from what Renato Rosaldo defines as “imperialist nostalgia” wherein, “when the so-called civilizing process destabilizes forms of life, the agents of change experience transformations of other cultures as if they were personal losses” (1989:70).

8. According to Duberman, Lowell was delighted to receive the offer “the place has sought me, not I, it” (Duberman 1966:141). His only hesitation was that he did not feel that he was competent for the post, and his response to the offer was to accept and then to request a leave of absence for a year to go abroad to master Spanish and German.

9. This quality of transparency and the threat that it poses to the solidity of nature and the coherence of the social world is overcome in Emerson, as I have argued it is in Lowell and later American folk-song scholarship, through attention to the arena of folklore, and particularly, to the fable (see Ellison 1984:208-227). Quoting first from Emerson's Journals: “Why must … the philosopher mince his words & fatigue us with explanation? He speaks from the Reason & being of course contradicted word for word by the Understanding he stops like a cogwheel at every notch to explain. Let him say, I idealize, & let that be once for all: or I sensualize, & then the Rationalist may stop his ears. … Fable avoids the difficulty, is at once exoteric and esoteric, & is clapped by both sides …” (Emerson 1965:31, quoted in Ellison 1984:225); she asserts further that fable for Emerson “occupies a special ontological realm where it can evade the strict either/or categorization fostered by the bad Romantic habit of applying the Reason/Understanding dichotomy too strictly. It is both ideal and sensual, ‘exoteric’ and ‘esoteric,’ [and] … reiterates Coleridge's query, ‘Though not fact, must it needs be false?’” (Emerson 1966:329, as quoted in Ellison 1984:225).

10. It is worth remembering that Longfellow, whose professorship was his to lose, had written the following dialogue in Kavanaugh: “Then you think our literature is never to be any thing but an imitation of the English? Not at all. It is not an imitation, but, as someone has said, a continuation. It seems to me that you take a very narrow view of the subject. On the contrary, a very broad one. No literature is complete until the language in which it is written is dead. We may well be proud of our task and of our position. Let us see if we can build in any way worthy of our forefathers. But I insist upon originality. Yes, but without spasms and convulsions. Authors must not, like Chinese soldiers, expect to win victories by turning somersets in the air. Well, really, the prospect from your point of view is not very brilliant. Pray, what do you think of our national literature? Simply, that a national literature is not the growth of a day. Centuries must contribute their dew and sunshine to it. Our own is growing slowly but surely, striking its roots downward, and its branches upward, as is natural; and I do not wish, for the sake of what some people call originality, to invert it, and try to make it grow with its roots in the air. And as for having it so savage and wild as you want it, I have only to say, that all literature, as well as all art, is the result of culture and intellectual refinement” (Longfellow 1965[1850]:86-87).

11. In foregrounding the morality of choice, Lowell once again linked himself to a central element of Romantic ideology. Consider Hölderlin's rendering of the same belief: “Yet, fellow poets, us it behoves to stand / Bareheaded beneath God's thunderstorms, / To grasp the Father's ray, no less, with our own two hands / And, wrapping in song the beautiful gift / To offer it to the people. / For only if we are pure in heart, / Like children, and our hands are guiltless, / The father's ray, the pure, will not seer our hearts” (Hölderlin 1961, as quoted in Wilson 1982:23).

I would like to thank Roger D. Abrahams, Regina Bendix, Thomas Hietala, Jerrold Hirsch, and Donald Irving for their critical responses to this essay.

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