SOURCE: “James Russell Lowell,” in The Transcendentalists: A Review of Research and Criticism, edited by Joel Myerson, The Modern Language Association of America, 1984, pp. 336-42.

[In the following essay, Wortham considers Lowell's writings concerning the New England Transcendentalists.]

Time and place made James Russell Lowell in many respects one with the Transcendentalists: intellectual temperament—he called it a “Toryism of the nerves”—kept him apart, but the personal associations still weighed heavily. Lowell's respect and admiration for Ralph Waldo Emerson in particular increased over the years until his praise in “Emerson the Lecturer” took on messianic dimensions: “Emerson awakened us,” Lowell wrote in 1868; he “saved us from the body of this death.” Several years later, out of a sense of irreparable debt, Lowell dedicated to Emerson his most distinguished and enduring collection of literary essays, Among My Books: Second Series (1876). None of the other men and women associated with the Transcendentalist movement fared nearly so well in Lowell's estimation, but he knew them all, both professionally and sometimes even as friends. Personal affection could, in Lowell's judgment, redeem the intellectual excesses of his Harvard friend and original Transcendentalist, Charles Stearns Wheeler, just as later it would in his friendly relations with George William Curtis and John Sullivan Dwight, but toward the likes of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Moncure D. Conway, F. B. Sanborn, and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Lowell's cordiality was never untainted by an ill-disguised sense of amused superiority. With Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Ellery Channing, Lowell's lack of sympathy led him to misrepresent their work, ignore their lasting importance, and attack their character and motives. In short, Lowell's response to the Transcendentalists was as mixed and contradictory as were his attitudes towards most of the great issues and concerns of his times. Like other modern conservatives, he was forced to argue largely in terms of the enemy's formulations, and his ultimate defeat—as well as his intellectual stance—was not unlike that of the New Humanists, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, a generation after.

Lowell disliked the term “transcendental” when used to describe the philosophical climate in New England during the late 1830s and the 1840s, characterizing it as a “maid of all work for those who could not think.” The general index to the ten-volume standard “Riverside Edition” of Lowell's Writings (1890) shows how rarely he addressed the subject of “Transcendentalism” in his published works. Only two of his essays deal with the movement in detail, and both reflect the response of a mature Lowell no longer impressed, as he once had been, by the vitality of philosophical idealism and romantic mysticism. “Emerson the Lecturer” first appeared as “Mr. Emerson's New Course of Lectures” in the Nation (1868); enlarged by the addition of the greater part of Lowell's review of Emerson's The Conduct of Life (1861), it was reprinted in his collection of essays, My Study Windows, in 1871. “Thoreau,” also collected in My Study Windows, was written as a review of Thoreau's Letters to Various Persons (1865), but it is, in fact, Lowell's fullest discussion of the Transcendentalist movement. His earlier review of Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and his sympathetic essay on Sylvester Judd's poem, Philo: An Evangeliad (1850), Lowell's only other prose writings on the Transcendentalists, were never reprinted by him, but they have been edited by Graham H. Duncan in “James Russell Lowell's Reviews of American Belles-Lettres.”

Although Transcendentalist principles inspired many of the poems Lowell wrote during the decade following his graduation from Harvard in 1838, he is better remembered for his satiric attacks on the movement in his Class Poem (1838) and A Fable for Critics (1848). A more balanced but still unsympathetic poem on Margaret Fuller and Amos Bronson Alcott, “Studies for Two Heads,” was frequently reprinted by Lowell after its first appearance in Poems: Second Series in 1848. Except in his warm tribute to “Agassiz” (1874), Lowell left no poetic sketch of Emerson other than in his satiric verses. In an age that tended to memorialize itself in rhyme, this was a curious omission. Emerson, on his part, read some lines “To Lowell, on His Fortieth Birthday” in 1859 but deemed them unworthy of publication; Edward Waldo Emerson and Charles Eliot Norton did not share his misgivings and saw that they were printed (1893) after Emerson and Lowell died. One suspects—and Lowell's extant writings support the impression—that Lowell failed to grasp the fundamental meaning and the far-reaching significance of Emerson and the other Transcendentalists.

At first, this failure was largely deliberate. Lowell's Harvard preceptors had grown increasingly alarmed at his disrespectful attitude towards them, and finally in exasperation they rusticated him to Concord during the glorious final weeks of spring term of his senior year. Ostensibly he went there to read John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and James Mackintosh's Review of Ethical Philosophy, neither in any way transcendental, but Lowell thought his time better spent in hating Concord and its country ways and working on his graduation poem. Lowell's tutor in exile was the Reverend Barzillai Frost, a man so witless and self-centered as to prove no match for the worldly-wise adolescent. Emerson's kindly overtures were another matter. Invited by the older man to accompany him on walks and into his household, Lowell remembered ever afterward “the exquisite suavity of his demeanor toward me—a boy of nineteen and very young for my age.” But the pride of the moment overcame this favorable impression, especially when Lowell detected an element of foolishness in Emerson's sayings and, worse, in those calling themselves disciples. Frequent reports went out to Cambridge of the curious amusements of Concord. Immediately after his introduction to Emerson's circle, Lowell wrote to his classmate Nathan Hale:

Emerson is a very pleasant man in private conversation but his “talk” did not increase my opinion of his powers. He seemed to try after effect &—fail. After all I’d heard of him, as an Eagle soaring in pride of place, I was surprised to see a poor little hawk stooping at flies or at best sparrows & groundlings. The “elect” would have pleased you, or I’ll lose my guess. There was E[dward]. A[ugustus]. R[enouf]. did naught but ogle. R[ufus]. E[llis]. sat wiping the perspiration off his visage which I came to the conclusion was heated by vicinity of nose. W[endell]. P[hillips]. M. P. scarce said a word, E[dward]. A. W[ashburn]. & G[eorge]. W[arren]. L[ippitt]. did all the talking. I was amused to see that none of the company saving E[merson] & myself made any direct assertion, it was all ?'s—as “Wouldn’t it?” & “Isn’t it?” &c. (8 July 1838)

Four days later Lowell reported having met Thoreau, and his first impression was never corrected: “It is exquisitely amusing to see how he imitates Emerson's tone & manner. With my eyes shut I shouldn’t kn[ow] them apart.”

It was during Lowell's unhappy rural retreat that Emerson went down to Cambridge to address the youth of the Divinity College. Lowell did not hear Emerson's attack on historical Christianity, and it would be some months before he could read the words in print, but on the authority of hearsay Lowell entered the theological “storm in a washbowl” intent on defending cloth and gown. Writing to Hale on 23 July 1834, he asked:

Did you hear R. W. E.'s sermon (if it be not a sin to call it when our Saviour's admirable discourse on the mount goes by the same name) … ? I hear that it was an abomination. Every divinity student that has crossed my path since have I fixed upon & questioned as to their opinion. … They have asked him to publish it—I hope he will, for if it excites any notice (which I very much doubt) it will put the man down—if not, why then—each of his disciples will be by 12[frac12] cents the poorer. … They say (I don’t know who, but they do say) that man sees himself in everything around him, if E. could see himself & it didn’t drive him crazy (if indeed in that respect he isn’t past mending) why—amen. I’ve talked more about the man than he deserves—but I never can help it.

Happily for Lowell the opportunity to set things right was at hand: his class poem would be printed that year because a public reading was prohibited. In halting pentameters Lowell took after most of the follies of the day—abolitionism, women's rights, temperance, and the new philosophy—but it was Emerson's recent Cambridge performance that elicited his particular disgust:

Alas! that Christian ministers
should dare
To preach the views of Gibbon and Voltaire!
Alas! that one whose life, and gentle ways,
E’en hate could find it in its heart to praise,
Whose intellect is equalled but by few,
Should strive for what he’d weep to find were true!

Lowell characterized Emerson's confederates in cant as “misty rhapsodists” who

          having made a “universal soul,”
Forget their own in thinking of the whole;
Who, seeking nothing, wander on through space,
Flapping their half-fledged wings in Reason's face,
And if they chance the vestal flame to find,
That burns a beacon to the storm-tost mind,
Like senseless insects dish within the fire,
And sink forgotten in their funeral pyre.

During the following decade, however, Lowell repented of the reactionary heresies of his youth and penned on the cover of his Class Poem:

Behold the baby arrows of that wit
          Wherewith I dared assail the woundless Truth!
Love hath refilled the quiver, and with it
          The man shall win atonement for the youth

The abolition of slavery came to command Lowell's most ardent attention, but on other issues as well he chose the side of the true, good, and beautiful. No doubt Maria White, whom Lowell married in 1844, was a decisive force in his conversion. An earnest thinker and an adherent to Transcendentalism, White had been an early participant in Margaret Fuller's Boston Conversations, and her own poetry spoke to the Ideal in passionately familiar terms. After A Year's Life (1841), his first book of poems, Lowell's verse also reflected current fashion, both in its romantic phrasing and its idealistic outlook. “Prometheus” (1843), “A Glance behind the Curtain” (1843), “Columbus” (1848), and “The Present Crisis” (1845) are typical of the best of Lowell's committed verse of the 1840s, but the accent here is political, not transcendental. Even the several sonnets by Lowell that Emerson and Fuller printed in the Dial are, in the words of Leon Howard, “negatively anti-sensuous rather than positively transcendental, misty rather than visionary.”

Nobody bothers much nowadays with Lowell's “serious” poetry, understandably. His real achievement was the satire and humor of The Biglow Papers and A Fable for Critics, both published in 1848, and the public poetry that occasionally appeared after the Civil War. A Fable for Critics spoofs Emerson, Fuller, Alcott, Thoreau, Channing, and Theodore Parker, as well as other leading literary figures who were then striving to forge an American literature. Lowell's criticisms are harsh but usually just, at least as just as humorous caricature can allow. Only Fuller is treated unfairly. Called “Miranda” in the verses, she is lampooned by Lowell with the same lack of grace he claims to have found in her:

She’s been travelling now, and will be worse
          than ever;
One would think, though, a sharp-sighted noter
          she’d be
Of all that’s worth mentioning over the sea,
For a woman must surely see well, if she try,
The whole of whose being's a capital I:
She will take an old notion, and make it her own,
By saying it o’er in her Sibylline tone,
Or persuade you ’tis something tremendously deep,
By repeating it so as to put you to sleep;
And she well may defy any mortal to see through it,
When once she has mixed up her infinite me
          through it.
There is one thing she owns in her own single right,
It is native and genuine—namely, her spite;
Though, when acting as censor, she privately blows
A censer of vanity ’neath her own nose.

No doubt Lowell had remembered what Fuller wrote of him two years before in her essay “American Literature” (1846):

Lowell … is absolutely wanting in the true spirit and tone of poesy. His interest in the moral questions of the day has supplied the want of vitality in himself; his great facility at versification has enabled him to fill the ear with a copious stream of pleasant sound. But his verse is stereotyped; his thought sounds no depth, and posterity will not remember him.

All this was long past when the Atlantic Monthly was founded under Lowell's editorship in 1857. The “Newness” of the 1840s was by then historic and its proponents were published by Lowell on equal footing with those of other points of view. Thoreau objected to Lowell's unauthorized tampering with one of his essays and never afterward concerned himself with the journal, but the rest bravely bore Lowell's cavalier editing until he was succeeded by James T. Fields in 1861.

After that came time for recollection. Lowell's essays on “Thoreau” and “Emerson the Lecturer” are important historical documents, but in both he addresses himself to personal matters and not to ideas. Lowell had always fancied himself an idealist, but his idealism was based on the traditions of literature and history, not some transcendent and universal oversoul. He sought to turn the “penetrating ray” of the mind “upon what seemed the confused and wavering cloud-chaos of man's nature and man's experience, and find there the indication of a divine offer.” The world of the imagination was not “the world of abstraction and nonentity, as some conceive, but a world formed out of chaos by a sense of the beauty that is in man and the earth on which he dwells.” Emerson taught that man was divine; Lowell preferred to bring God down to the level of humanity. William Dean Howells, who came to Cambridge just after the Civil War, later remembered “a saying of Lowell's which he was fond of repeating at the menace of any form of the transcendental, and he liked to warn himself and others with his homely, ‘Remember the dinner-bell.’”

Lowell's several biographers have all portrayed his association with the Transcendentalists, but few have considered the movement's powerful attraction on him during his youth. Horace Elisha Scudder writes with the authority of familiar acquaintance in his James Russell Lowell, a book that still contains much material of primary importance. Another “intimate” account of value is Edward Everett Hale, James Russell Lowell and His Friends. Of the more recent biographical studies, only Leon Howard, Victorian Knight-Errant, penetrates the attractive surface of Lowell's life to the complexities of mind and temperament that interest us today. Howard's assessment of Emerson's influence on Lowell is especially commendable, the best statement on the subject we shall probably ever have. Martin Duberman had access to a greater number of unpublished manuscripts and letters, but his reading of them in James Russell Lowell, though competent on Lowell's relations with the Transcendentalists, pales in comparison with Howard's earlier study. Austin Warren, “Lowell on Thoreau,” is informed and judicious, though Warren confuses references to Channing and Thoreau in A Fable for Critics. E. J. Nichols is also uncertain about the “Identification of Characters in Lowell's A Fable for Critics.” Fortunately, Lowell's holograph for this section of A Fable has been preserved (in the Henry E. Huntington Library), and it indicates that it is Ellery Channing who treads “in Emerson's tracks with legs painfully short” and Thoreau who “has picked up all the windfalls” from Emerson's orchards. Howard calls attention to this manuscript in a note to Victorian Knight-Errant, but it passed the notice of some: see Toward the Making of Thoreau's Modern Reputation, ed. Fritz Oehlschlaeger and George Hendrick, which mislocates the names.

Lowell's early venture in periodical literature, the Pioneer, briefly competed with Emerson's Dial, and for more than just readers, as Sculley Bradley points out in “Lowell, Emerson, and the Pioneer.” In 1947 a facsimile reprint of Lowell's 1843 magazine was published, with a brief introduction by Bradley. Lowell's brief association with the Dial is told in interesting detail in Joel Myerson, The New England Transcendentalists and the Dial. Lowell's contribution to the Harbinger, an organ of the Brook Farm phalanx, provoked a response from John Sullivan Dwight (13 Aug. 1845), a letter ineptly edited by R. Baird Shuman.

Lowell's own letters are the great untapped resource for an understanding of his career and his times. Charles Eliot Norton's edition of the Letters of James Russell Lowell (1894) is limited by Norton's decorous hesitations. M. A. DeWolfe Howe's edition of New Letters of James Russell Lowell (1932) is limited by Howe's restricted access to the letters. The need for a much fuller and more faithfully edited volume of Lowell's correspondence is evidenced by the many recent articles that publish selected letters, two of which bear on his relations with the Transcendentalists. Joel Myerson, “Eight Lowell Letters from Concord in 1838,” a series of highly amusing and revealing letters Lowell wrote to his Harvard classmate George B. Loring, is nicely complemented by Philip Graham, “Some Lowell Letters,” which include letters Lowell wrote at the same time to Nathan Hale. Graham's omission of one of the best of the letters to Hale is corrected in Myerson, “Lowell on Emerson.” “The Letters of James Russell Lowell to Robert Carter 1842-1876,” replete with important references to various Transcendentalists and especially those who contributed to the Pioneer, were the subject of a worthy master's thesis by Quentin G. Johnson. Privately owned at the time of Johnson's work, the forty-seven letters are now in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. The valuable correspondence of Lowell's first wife is also more accessible than it was when Hope Jillson Vernon presented The Poems of Maria Lowell with Unpublished Letters and a Biography. It is to this area of primary documentation that scholarly attention now needs be turned.