Modern American Prose Selections Part 6

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL[15]

BLISS PERRY

[Footnote 15: An address delivered at the exercises held by the Cambridge Historical Society in Sanders Theatre, Harvard University, Feb. 22, 1919, to commemorate the centenary of Lowell's birth. By permission of Professor Perry and of the editor of the _Harvard Graduates' Magazine_. Copyright, 1919, by _The Harvard Graduates' Magazine_.]

Two Harvard men, teachers of English in the University of North Carolina, have recently published a new kind of textbook for undergraduates.

Abandoning the conventional survey of literary types and the examination of literary history in the narrow sense of those words, they present a program of ideas, the dominant ideas of successive epochs in the life of England and America. They direct the attention of the young student, not so much to canons of art as to noteworthy expressions of communal thought and feeling, to the problems of self-government, of n.o.ble discipline, of ordered liberty. The t.i.tle of this book is _The Great Tradition_. The fundamental idealism of the Anglo-Saxon race is ill.u.s.trated by pa.s.sages from Bacon and Raleigh, Spenser and Shakespeare. But William Bradford, as well as Cromwell and Milton, is chosen to represent the seventeenth-century struggle for faith and freedom. In the eighteenth century, Was.h.i.+ngton and Jefferson and Thomas Paine appear side by side with Burke and Burns and Wordsworth.

Sh.e.l.ley and Byron, Tennyson and Carlyle are here of course, but with them are John Stuart Mill and John Bright and John Morley. There are pa.s.sages from Webster and Emerson, from Lowell and Walt Whitman and Lincoln, and finally, from the eloquent lips of living men--from Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour and Viscount Grey and President Wilson--there are pleas for international honor and international justice and for a commonwealth of free nations.

It is a magnificent story, this record of Anglo-Saxon idealism during four hundred years. The six or seven hundred pages of the book which I have mentioned are indeed rich in purely literary material; in the ill.u.s.tration of the temper of historic periods; in the exhibition of changes in language and in literary forms. The lover of sheer beauty in words, the a.n.a.lyzer of literary types, the student of biography, find here ample material for their special investigations. But the stress is laid, not so much upon the quality of individual genius, as upon the political and moral instincts of the English-speaking races, their long fight for liberty and democracy, their endeavor to establish the terms upon which men may live together in society. And precisely here, I take it, is the significance of the pages which Professors Greenlaw and Hanford a.s.sign to James Russell Lowell. The man whom we commemorate to-night played his part in the evolution which has transformed the Elizabethan Englishman into the twentieth-century American.

Lowell was an inheritor and an enricher of the Great Tradition.

This does not mean that he did not know whether he was American or English.

He wrote in 1866 of certain Englishmen: "They seem to forget that more than half the people of the North have roots, as I have, that run down more than two hundred years deep into this new-world soil--that we have not a thought nor a hope that is not American." In 1876, when his political independence made him the target of criticism, he replied indignantly: "These fellows have no notion what love of country means. It is in my very blood and bones. If I am not an American, who ever was?"

It remains true, nevertheless, that Lowell's life and his best writing are keyed to that instinct of personal discipline and civic responsibility which characterized the seventeenth century emigrants from England. These successors of Roger Ascham and Thomas Elyot and Philip Sidney were Puritanic, moralistic, practical; and with their "faith in G.o.d, faith in man and faith in work" they built an empire. Lowell's own mind, like Franklin's, like Lincoln's, had a shrewd sense of what concerns the common interests of all. The inscription beneath his bust on the exterior of Ma.s.sachusetts Hall runs as follows: "Patriot, scholar, orator, poet, public servant." Those words begin and end upon that civic note which is heard in all of Lowell's greater utterances. It has been the dominant note of much of the American writing that has endured. And it is by virtue of this note, touched so pa.s.sionately, so n.o.bly, throughout a long life, that Lowell belongs to the elect company of public souls.

No doubt we have had in this country distinguished pract.i.tioners of literature who have stood mainly or wholly outside the line of the Great Tradition. They drew their inspiration elsewhere. Poe, for example, is not of the company; Hawthorne in his lonelier moods is scarcely of the company.

In purely literary fame, these names may be held to outrank the name of James Russell Lowell; as Emerson outranks him, of course, in range of vision, Longfellow in craftsmans.h.i.+p, and Walt Whitman in sheer power of emotion and of phrase. But it happens that Lowell stands with both Emerson and Whitman in the very centre of that group of poets and prose-men who have been inspired by the American idea. They were all, as we say proudly nowadays, "in the service," and the particular rank they may have chanced to win is a relatively insignificant question, except to critics and historians.

The centenary of the birth of a writer who reached three score and ten is usually ill-timed for a proper perspective of his work. A generation has elapsed since his death. Fas.h.i.+ons have changed; writers, like bits of old furniture, have had time to "go out" and not time enough to come in again.

George Eliot and Ruskin, for instance, whose centenaries fall in this year, suffer the dark reproach of having been "Victorians." The centenaries of Hawthorne and Longfellow and Whittier were celebrated at a period of comparative indifference to their significance. But if the present moment is still too near to Lowell's life-time to afford a desirable literary perspective, a moral touchstone of his worth is close at hand. In this hour of heightened national consciousness, when we are all absorbed with the part which the English-speaking races are playing in the service of the world, we may surely ask whether Lowell's mind kept faith with his blood and with his citizens.h.i.+p, or whether, like many a creator of exotic, hybrid beauty, he remained an alien in the spiritual commonwealth, a homeless, masterless man.

No one needs to speak in Cambridge of Lowell's devotion to the community in which he was born and in which he had the good fortune to die. In some of his most delightful pages he has recorded his affection for it. Yonder in the alcoves of Harvard Hall, then the College Library, he discovered many an author unrepresented among his father's books at Elmwood. In University Hall he attended chapel--occasionally. In the open s.p.a.ce between Hollis and Holden he read his "Commemoration Ode." He wrote to President Hill in 1863: "Something ought to be done about the trees in the Yard." He loved the place. It was here in Sanders Theatre that he p.r.o.nounced his memorable address at the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the College--an address rich in historic background, and not without solicitude for the future of his favorite humanistic studies--a solicitude, some will think, only too well justified. "Cambridge at all times is full of ghosts,"

said Emerson. But no ghost from the past, flitting along the Old Road from Elmwood to the Yard, and haunting the bleak lecture-rooms where it had recited as a careless boy and taught wearily as a man, could wear a more quizzical and friendly aspect than Lowell's. He commonly spoke of his life as a professor with whimsical disparagement, as Henry Adams wrote of his own teaching with a somewhat cynical disparagement. But the fact is that both of these self-depreciating New Englanders were stimulating and valuable teachers. From his happily idle boyhood to the close of his fruitful career, Lowell's loyalty to Cambridge and Harvard was unalterable.

Other tastes changed after wider experience with the world. He even preferred, at last, the English blackbird to the American bobolink, but the Harvard Quinquennial Catalogue never lost its savor, and in the full tide of his social success in London he still thought that the society he had enjoyed at the Sat.u.r.day Club was the best society in the world. To deracinate Lowell was impossible, and it was for this very reason that he became so serviceable an international personage. You knew where he stood.

It was not for nothing that his roots ran down two hundred years deep. He was the incarnation of his native soil.

Lowell has recently been described, together with Whittier, Emerson, and others, as an "English provincial poet--in the sense that America still was a literary province of the mother country." To this amazing statement one can only rejoin that if "The Biglow Papers," the "Harvard Commemoration Ode," "Under the Old Elm," the "Fourth of July Ode," and the Aga.s.siz elegy are English provincial poetry, most of us need a new map and a new vocabulary. Of both series of "Biglow Papers" we may surely exclaim, as did Quintilian concerning early Roman satire, "This is wholly ours." It is true that Lowell, like every young poet of his generation, had steeped himself in Spenser and the other Elizabethans. They were his literary ancestors by as indisputable an inheritance as a Masefield or a Kipling could claim. He had been brought up to revere Pope. Then he surrendered to Wordsworth and Keats and Sh.e.l.ley, and his earlier verses, like the early work of Tennyson, are full of echoes of other men's music. It is also true that in spite of his cleverness in versifying, or perhaps because of it, he usually showed little inventiveness in shaping new poetic patterns. His tastes were conservative. He lacked that restless technical curiosity which spurred Poe and Whitman to experiment with new forms. But Lowell revealed early extraordinary gifts of improvisation, retaining the old tunes of English verse as the basis for his own strains of unpremeditated art. He wrote "A Fable for Critics" faster than he could have written it in prose. "Sir Launfal" was composed in two days, the "Commemoration Ode" in one.

It was this facile, copious, enthusiastic poet, not yet thirty, who grew hot over the Mexican War and poured forth his indignation in an unforgettable political satire such as no English provincial poet could possibly have written. What a weapon he had, and how it flashed in his hand, gleaming with wit and humor and irony, edged with scorn, and weighted with two hundred years of Puritan tradition concerning right and wrong! For that, after all, was the secret of its success. Great satire must have a standard; and Lowell revealed his in the very first number and in one line:

"'T aint your eppylets an' feathers Make the thing a grain more right."

Some readers to-day dislike the Yankee dialect of these verses. Some think Lowell struck too hard; but they forget Grant's characterization of the Mexican War as "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation." There are critics who think the First Series of "Biglow Papers" too sectional; an exhibition of New England's ancient tendency towards nullification of the national will. No doubt Lowell underestimated the real strength of the advocates of national expansion at any cost.

Parson Wilbur thought, you remember, that

"All this big talk of our destinies Is half on it ign'ance an' t'other half rum."

Neither ignorance nor rum was responsible for the invasion of Belgium; but at least one can say that the political philosophy which justifies forcible annexation of territory is taught to-day in fewer universities than were teaching it up to 1914. Poets are apt to have the last word, even in politics.

The war with Mexico was only an episode in the expansion of the slave power; the fundamental test of American inst.i.tutions came in the War for the Union. Here again Lowell touched the heart of the great issue. The Second Series of "Biglow Papers" is more uneven than the First. There is less humor and more of whimsicality. But the dialogue between "the Moniment and the Bridge," "Jonathan to John," and above all, the tenth number, "Mr.

Hosea Biglow to the Editor of the Atlantic Monthly," show the full sweep of Lowell's power. Here are pride of country, pa.s.sion of personal sorrow, tenderness, idyllic beauty, magic of word and phrase.

Never again, save in pa.s.sages of the memorial odes written after the War, was Lowell more completely the poet. For it is well known that his was a divided nature, so variously endowed that complete integration was difficult, and that the circ.u.mstances of his career prevented that steady concentration of powers which poetry demands. She is proverbially the most jealous of mistresses, and Lowell could not render a constant allegiance.

At thirty his friends thought of him, rightly enough, as primarily a poet: but in the next fifteen years he had become a professor, had devoted long periods to study in Europe, had published prose essays, had turned editor, first of the _Atlantic_, then of the _North American Review_, and was writing political articles that guided public opinion in the North. To use a phrase then beginning to come into general use, he was now a "man of letters." But during the Civil War, I believe he thought of himself as simply a citizen of the Union. His general reputation, won in many fields, gave weight to what he wrote as a publicist. His editorials were one more evidence of the central pull of the Great Tradition; it steadied his judgment, clarified his vision, kept his rudder true.

Lowell's political papers during this period, although now little read, have been praised by Mr. James Ford Rhodes as an exact estimate of public sentiment, as voicing in energetic diction the ma.s.s of the common people of the North. Lincoln wrote to thank him for one of them, adding, "I fear I am not quite worthy of all which is therein kindly said of me personally."

Luckily Lincoln never saw an earlier letter in which Lowell thought that "an ounce of Fremont is worth a pound of long Abraham." The fact is that Lowell, like most men of the "Brahmin caste," came slowly to a recognition of Lincoln's true quality. Motley, watching events from Vienna, had a better perspective than Boston then afforded. Even Mr. Norton, Lowell's dear friend and a.s.sociate upon the _North American Review_, thought in 1862 that the President was timid, vacillating, and secretive, and, what now seems a queerer judgment still, that he wrote very poor English. But if the editors of the _North American_ showed a typical Anglo-Saxon reluctance in yielding to the spell of a new political leaders.h.i.+p, Lowell made full amends for it in that superb Lincoln strophe now inserted in the "Commemoration Ode," afterthought though it was, and not read at the celebration.

In this poem and in the various Centennial Odes composed ten years later, Lowell found an instrument exactly suited to his temperament and his technique. Loose in structure, copious in diction, swarming with imagery, these Odes gave ample scope for Lowell's swift gush of patriotic fervor, for the afflatus of the improviser, steadied by reverence for America's historic past. To a generation beginning to lose its taste for commemorative oratory, the Odes gave--and still give--the thrill of patriotic eloquence which Everett and Webster had communicated in the memorial epoch of 1826. The forms change, the function never dies.

The dozen years following the Civil War were also the period of Lowell's greatest productiveness in prose. Tethered as he was to the duties of his professors.h.i.+p, and growling humorously over them, he managed nevertheless to put together volume after volume of essays that added greatly to his reputation, both here and in England. For it should be remembered that the honorary degrees of D.C.L. from Oxford and LL.D. from Cambridge were bestowed upon Lowell in 1873 and 1874; long before any one had thought of him as Minister to England, and only a little more than ten years after he had printed his indignant lines about

"The old J. B.

A-crowdin' you and me."

J. B. seemed to like them! A part of Lowell's full harvest of prose sprang from that habit of enormous reading which he had indulged since boyhood. He liked to think of himself as "one of the last of the great readers"; and though he was not that, of course, there was nevertheless something of the seventeenth century tradition in his gluttony of books. The very sight and touch and smell of them were one of his pieties. He had written from Elmwood in 1861: "I am back again in the place I love best. I am sitting in my old garret, at my old desk, smoking my old pipe and loving my old friends." That is the way book-lovers still picture Lowell--the Lowell of the "Letters"--and though it is only a half-length portrait of him, it is not a false one. He drew upon his ripe stock of reading for his college lectures, and from the lectures, in turn, came many of the essays. Wide as the reading was in various languages, it was mainly in the field of "belles-lettres." Lowell had little or no interest in science or philosophy. Upon one side of his complex nature he was simply a book-man like Charles Lamb, and like Lamb he was tempted to think that books about subjects that did not interest him were not really books at all.

Recent critics have seemed somewhat disturbed over Lowell's scholars.h.i.+p. He once said of Longfellow: "Mr. Longfellow is not a scholar in the German sense of the word--that is to say, he is no pedant, but he certainly is a scholar in another and perhaps a higher sense. I mean in range of acquirement and the flavor that comes with it." Those words might have been written of himself. It is sixty-five years since Lowell was appointed to his professors.h.i.+p at Harvard, and during this long period erudition has not been idle here. It is quite possible that the University possesses to-day a better Dante scholar than Lowell, a better scholar in Old French, a better Chaucer scholar, a better Shakespeare scholar. But it is certain that if our Division of Modern Languages were called upon to produce a volume of essays matching in human interest one of Lowell's volumes drawn from these various fields, we should be obliged, first, to organize a syndicate, and, second, to accept defeat with as good grace as possible.

Contemporary critics have also betrayed a certain concern for some aspects of Lowell's criticism. Is it always penetrating, they ask? Did he think his critical problems through? Did he have a body of doctrine, a general thesis to maintain? Did he always keep to the business in hand? Candor compels the admission that he often had no theses to maintain: he invented them as he went along. Sometimes he was a mere guesser, not a clairvoyant. We have had only one Coleridge. Lowell's essay on Wordsworth is not as illuminating as Walter Pater's. The essay on Gray is not as well ordered as Arnold's. The essay on Th.o.r.eau is quite as unsatisfactory as Stevenson's. It is true that the famous longer essays on Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Dryden, Milton, are full of irrelevant matter, of facile delightful talk which often leads nowhere in particular. It is true, finally, that a deeper interest in philosophy and science might have made Lowell's criticism more fruitful; that he blazed no new paths in critical method; that he overlooked many of the significant literary movements of his own time in his own country.

But when one has said all this, even as brilliantly as Mr. Brownell has phrased it, one has failed to answer the pertinent question: "Why, in spite of these defects, were Lowell's essays read with such pleasure by so many intelligent persons on both sides of the Atlantic, and why are they read still?" The answer is to be found in the whole tradition of the English bookish essay, from the first appearance of Florio's translation of Montaigne down to the present hour. That tradition has always welcomed copious, well-informed, enthusiastic, disorderly, and affectionate talk about books. It demands gusto rather than strict method, discursiveness rather than concision, abundance of matter rather than mere neatness of design. "Here is G.o.d's plenty!" cried Dryden in his old age, as he opened once more his beloved Chaucer; and in Lowell's essays there is surely "G.o.d's plenty" for a book-lover. Every one praises "My Garden Acquaintance," "A Good Word for Winter," "On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners" as perfect types of the English familiar essay. But all of Lowell's essays are discursive and familiar. They are to be measured, not by the standards of modern French criticism--which is admittedly more deft, more delicate, more logical than ours--but by the unchartered freedom which the English-speaking races have desired in their conversations about old authors for three hundred years. After all,

"There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays And every single one of them is right."

Lowell, like the rest of us, is to be tested by what he had, not by what he lacked.

His reputation as a talker about books and men was greatly enhanced by the addresses delivered during his service as Minister to England. Henry James once described Lowell's career in London as a tribute to the dominion of style. It was even more a triumph of character, but the style of these addresses is undeniable. Upon countless public occasions the American Minister was called upon to say the fitting word; and he deserves the quaint praise which Thomas Benton bestowed upon Chief Justice Marshall, as "a gentleman of finished breeding, of winning and prepossessing talk, and just as much mind as the occasion required him to show." I cannot think that Lowell spoke any better when unveiling a bust in Westminster Abbey than he did at the Academy dinners in Ashfield, Ma.s.sachusetts, where he had Mr. Curtis and Mr. Norton to set the pace; he was always adequate, always witty and wise; and some of the addresses in England, notably the one on "Democracy" given in Birmingham in 1884, may fairly be called epoch-making in their good fortune of explaining America to Europe. Lowell had his annoyances like all amba.s.sadors; there were dull dinners as well as pleasant ones, there were professional Irishmen to be placated, solemn despatches to be sent to Was.h.i.+ngton. Yet, like Mr. Phelps and Mr. Bayard and Mr. Choate and the lamented Walter Page in later years, this gentleman, untrained in professional diplomacy, accomplished an enduring work. Without a trace of the conventional "hand across the sea" ba.n.a.lity, without either subservience or jingoism, he helped teach the two nations mutual respect and confidence, and thirty years later, when England and America essayed a common task in safeguarding civilization, that old anchor held.

This c.u.mulative quality of Lowell's achievement is impressive, as one reviews his career. His most thoughtful, though not his most eloquent verse, his richest vein of letter-writing, his most influential addresses to the public, came toward the close of his life. Precocious as was his gift for expression, and versatile and brilliant as had been his productiveness in the 1848 era, he was true to his Anglo-Saxon stock in being more effective at seventy than he had been at thirty. He was one of the men who die learning and who therefore are scarcely thought of as dying at all. I am not sure that we may not say of him to-day, as Th.o.r.eau said of John Brown, "He is more alive than ever he was." Certainly the type of Americanism which Lowell represented has grown steadily more interesting to the European world, and has revealed itself increasingly as a factor to be reckoned with in the world of the future. Always responsive to his environment, always ready to advance, he faced the new political issues at the close of the century with the same courage and sagacity that had marked his conduct in the eighteen-forties. You remember his answer to Guizot's question: "How long do you think the American Republic will endure?" "So long," replied Lowell, "as the ideas of its founders continue to be dominant"; and he added that by "ideas" he meant "the traditions of their race in government and morals." Yet the conservatism revealed in this reply was blended with audacity--the inherited audacity of the pioneer. No line of Lowell's has been more often quoted in this hall than the line about the futility of attempting to open the "Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key." Those words were written in 1844. And here, in a sentence written forty-two years afterward, is a description of organized human society which voices the precise hope of forward-looking minds in Europe and America at this very hour: "The basis of all society is the putting of the force of all at the disposal of all, by means of some arrangement a.s.sented to by all, for the protection of all, and this under certain prescribed forms." Like Jefferson, like Lincoln, like Theodore Roosevelt at his n.o.blest, Lowell dared to use the word "all."

Such men are not forgotten. As long as June days come and the bobolink's song "runs down, a brook of laughter, through the air"; as long as a few scholars are content to sit in the old garret with the old books, and close the books, at times, to think of old friends; as long as the memory of brave boys makes the "eyes cloud up for rain"; as long as Americans still cry in their hearts "O beautiful, my country!" the name of James Russell Lowell will be remembered as the inheritor and enricher of a great tradition.

THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS[16]

CARL BECKER

[Footnote 16: _The Education of Henry Adams: an Autobiography._ Houghton Mifflin Co., 1918. The selection is a part of an admirable critique in the April, 1919, number of the _American Historical Review_. By permission of the author and of the editors of the magazine. The article should be read as a whole for a complete understanding of the critic's a.n.a.lysis.]

In 1771, Thomas Hutchinson wrote to one of his friends, "We have not been so quiet here these five years ... if it were not for two or three Adamses, we should do well enough." From that day to this many people have agreed with the fastidious governor. But so far, an Adams or two we have always had with us; and on the whole, although they have sometimes been exasperating, they have always been salutary. During four generations the men of this family have loved and served America as much as they have scolded her. More cannot be said, except that they have commonly given, on both counts, more than they have received. Theirs is therefore the blessing, and ours the benefit.

Among other things, we have to thank them for some diaries and autobiographies which have been notable for frank self-revelation. Henry Adams would of course have stoutly denied that any such impertinence as self-revelation was either intended or achieved in the _Education_. There is no evidence that he ever kept a diary (all things considered, the burden of proof is not on us!); but it is not to be supposed that he would have published it in any case. A man who regarded himself as of no more significance than a chance deposit on the surface of the world might indeed write down an intimate record of his soul's doings as an exercise in cosmic irony; but the idea of publis.h.i.+ng it could hardly have lived for a moment in the lambent flame of his own sardonic humor. He could be perverse, but perversity could not well go the length of perpetrating so pointless a joke as that would come to.

No, Henry Adams would not reveal himself to the curious inspection of an unsympathetic world; but he would write a book for the purpose of exposing a dynamic theory of history, than which nothing could well be more impersonal or unrevealing. With a philosophy of history the Puritan has always been preoccupied; and it was the major interest of Henry Adams throughout the better part of his life. He never gained more than a faint idea of any intelligible philosophy, as he would himself have readily admitted; but after a lifetime of hard study and close thinking, the matter struck him thus:

Between the dynamo in the gallery of machines and the engine-house outside, the break of continuity amounted to abysmal fracture for a historian's objects. No more relation could he discover between the steam and the electric current than between the Cross and the cathedral. The forces were interchangeable if not reversible, but he could see only an absolute _fiat_ in electricity as in faith.

In these two forces the secret must lie, since for centuries faith had ruled inexorably, only to be replaced by electricity which promised to rule quite as inexorably. To find the secret was difficult enough; but