JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL (1819-1891) Though by far the youngest of the mid-century American writers, Lowell may be called the Dr. Johnson of the period. From 1857, when he assumed the editorship of the Atlantic Monthly, he was our literary dictator. He revised the manuscript of Thoreau until that individual genius refused longer to contribute to the magazine, he reproved Holmes who was ten years his senior, he wrote Whittier, I shall not let you rest until I have got a New England pastoral out of you,' he labeled and dismissed many of his contemporaries with almost brutal harshness, and he trained with dogmatic authority the new group of poets and novelists that was beginning to appear. Lowell's ancestors, like those of Emerson and Holmes, were New England Brahmins': he was of a long line of Puritan ministers. His father was stationed at Cambridge when Lowell was born and this house of his birth was the home of the poet - rare circumstance in America during his whole life. Naturally he entered Harvard, and quite as naturally, since his temperament was not at all ministerial, he entered the legal course, actually finishing it and entering upon the practice of law, at least to the extent of producing a volume of poems - A Year's Life, 1841. But law had no charms for the wayward young genius: like the youthful Longfellow. he dreamed of a literary career, and America as yet had not made literature a profession by which one might win a respectable livelihood. He tried editorial work, edited in New York a literary magazine, The Pioneer, which died after its third issue. In 1844 he launched another volume of poems which sold eleven hundred copies in three months. Emboldened by this unexpected income, he immediately was married to a poetess of real inspiration, Miss Maria White, a marriage as perfect as that of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. Both had become ardent abolitionists, and at once they started for Philadelphia where Lowell had secured a position as editorial writer for the Pennsylvania Freeman, which earlier had been edited by Whittier. The salary of ten dollars a month proved inadequate, and after four months they were again back in Cambridge. With the inspiration of his new home life upon him, there began now.the creative period of his literary career. He wrote eagerly, copiously. In 1847 he began The Biglow Papers, his protest against the Mexican war. The next year, 1848, was the wonder year of his life. He issued a new edition of his poems, A Fable for Critics, The Biglow Papers, The Vision of Sir Launfal, and some twenty other articles and poems for the magazines. In 1851 with his family he went for a year to Europe. In 1853 Mrs. Lowell died, and his poetic period abruptly ended: Save for the flashing up of his poetic soul at the time of the Civil War which produced his inspired improvisation, The Commemoration Ode, the rest of his life produced only prose. He became professor of French and Spanish at Harvard in 1855, entering upon his duties after a year in Europe and holding his chair until 1877. In 1857 he added the editorship of the Atlantic to his professional duties, and, resigning in 1861, became joint editor with Charles Eliot Norton of The North American Review, a position which he held until 1872. From 1877 to 1885 he was abroad, first as Minister to Spain, then as Minister to the Court of St. James, England. His writings during the whole period are significant. They touch a broad variety of subjects: literary criticism, statesmanship, international politics, mere literature,' social problems. His pregnant studies of our American democracy were especially noteworthy. As a critic he has been in many respects overrated. His greatest work for American letters, undoubtedly, was his influence and guidance during a critical era. He stood ever for originality and native wood notes wild.' More than any one else, perhaps, he was instrumental in freeing American literature from the slavery of English and continental influences. Than all the prouder summer-blooms may be. And with a child's undoubting wisdom look On all these living pages of God's book. Graham's Magazine, Jan., 1845. THE BIGLOW PAPERS, FIRST SERIES No. III WHAT MR. ROBINSON THINKS A few remarks on the following verses will not be out of place. The satire in them was not meant to have any personal, but only a general, application. Of the gentleman upon whose letter they were intended as a commentary Mr. Biglow had never heard, till he saw the letter itself. The position of the satirist is oftentimes one which he would not have chosen, had the election been left to himself. In attacking bad principles, he is obliged to select some individual who has made himself their exponent, and in whom they are impersonate, to the end that what he says may not, through ambiguity, be dissipated tenues in auras. For what says Seneca? Longum iter per proecepta, breve et efficace per exempla. A bad principle is comparatively harmless while it continues to be an abstraction, nor can the general mind comprehend it fully till it is printed in that large type which all men can read at sight, namely, the life and character, the sayings and doings, of particular persons. It is one of the cunningest fetches of Satan, that he never exposes himself directly to our arrows, but, still dodging behind this neighbor or that acquaintance, compels us to wound him through them, if at all. He holds our affections as hostages, the while he patches up a truce with our conscience. Meanwhile, let us not forget that the aim of the true satirist is not to be severe upon persons, but only upon falsehood, and, as Truth and Falsehood start from the same point, and sometimes even go along together for a little way, his business is to follow the path of the latter after it diverges, and to show her floundering in the bog at the end of it. Truth is quite beyond the reach of satire. There is so brave a simplicity in her, that she can no more be made ridiculous than an oak or a pine. The danger of the satirist is, that continual use may deaden his sensibility to the force of lan guage. He becomes more and more liable to strike harder than he knows or intends. He may be careful to put on his boxing-gloves, and yet forget that, the older they grow, the more plainly may the knuckles inside be felt. Moreover, in the heat of contest, the eye is insensibly drawn to the crown of victory, whose tawdry tinsel glitters through that dust of the ring which obscures Truth's wreath of simple leaves. I have sometimes thought that my young friend, Mr. Biglow, needed a monitory hand laid on his arm, -aliquid sufflaminandus erat. I have never thought it good husbandry to water the tender plants of reform with aqua fortis, yet, where so much is to do in the beds, he were a sorry gardener who should wage a whole day's war with an iron scuffle on those ill weeds that make the garden-walks of life unsightly, when a sprinkle of Attic salt will wither them up. Est ars etiam maledicendi, says Scaliger, and truly it is a hard thing to say where the graceful gentleness of the lamb merges in downright sheepishness. We may conIclude with worthy and wise Dr. Fuller, that one may be a lamb in private wrongs, but in hearing general affronts to goodness they are asses which are not lions." -H. W.] Sez this is his view o' the thing to a T. Parson Wilbur he calls all these argimunts lies; Sez they're nothin' on airth but jest fee, faw, fum; An' thet all this big talk of our destinies Is half on it ign'ance, an' t' other half Parson Wilbur sez he never heerd in his life Thet th' Apostles rigged out in their swaller-tail coats, 50 An' marched round in front of a drum an' a fife, To git some on 'em office, an' some on 'em Sez they didn't know everythin' down in Judee. 55 [The attentive reader will doubtless have perceived in the foregoing poem an allusion to that pernicious sentiment,'Our country, right or wrong.' It is an abuse of language to call a certain portion of land, much more, certain personages, elevated for the time being to high station, our country. I would not sever nor loosen a single one of those ties by which we are united to the spot of our birth, nor minish by a little the respect due to the Magistrate. I love our own Bay State too well to do the one, and as for the other, I have myself for nigh forty years exercised, however unworthily, the function of Justice of the Peace, having been called thereto by the unsolicited kindness of that most excellent man and upright patriot, Caleb Strong. Patriae fumus igne alieno luculentior is best qualified with this,— Ubi libertas, ibi patria. We are inhabitants of two worlds, and owe a double, but not a divided, allegiance. In virtue of our clay, this little ball of earth exacts a certain loyalty of us, while, in our capacity as spirits, we are admitted citizens of an invisible and holier fatherland. There is a patriotism of the soul whose claim absolves us from our other and terrene fealty. Our true country is that ideal realm which we represent to ourselves under the names of religion, duty, and the like. Our terrestrial organizations are but far-off approaches to so fair a model, and all they are verily traitors who resist not any attempt to divert them from this their original intendment. When, therefore, one would have us fling up our caps and shout with the multitude,- Our country, however bounded!' he demands of us that we sacrifice the larger to the less, the higher to the lower, and that we yield to the imaginary claims of a few acres of soil our duty and privilege as liegemen of Truth. Our true country is bounded on the north and the south, on the east and the west, by Justice, and when she oversteps that invisible boundary-line by so much as a hair's-breadth, she ceases to be our mother, and chooses rather to be looked upon quasi noverca. That is a hard choice when our earthly love of country calls upon us to tread one path and our duty points us to another. We must make as noble and becoming an election as did Penelope between Icarius and Ulysses. Veiling our face, we must take silently the hand of Duty to follow her.] Boston Courier, 1847. Says he, 'I'd better call agin'; Says she, Think likely, Mister': When Ma bimeby upon 'em slips, All kin' o' smily round the lips Her blood riz quick, though, like the tide An' all I know is they was cried (1848) 1848. LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL IN AT SEA 40 rises and falls with the slow breathing of the sleeping sea, one greasy, brassy swell following another, slow, smooth, immitigable as the series of Wordsworth's 5' Ecclesiastical Sonnets.' Even at his best, Neptune, in a tête-à-tête, has a way of repeating himself, an obtuseness to the ne quid nimis, that is stupefying. It reminds me of organ-music and my good 10 friend Sebastian Bach. A fugue or two will do very well; but a concert made up of nothing else is altogether too epic for me. There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer 15 wonder at the cruelty of pirates. Fancy an existence in which the coming up of a clumsy finback whale, who says Pooh! to you solemnly as you lean over the taffrail, is an event as exciting as an elec20 tion on shore! The dampness seems to strike into the wits as into the lucifermatches, so that one may scratch a thought half a dozen times and get nothing at last but a faint sputter, the forlorn hope of fire, which only goes far enough to leave a sense of suffocation behind it. Even smoking becomes an employment instead of a solace. Who less likely to come to their wit's end than W. M. T. and A. H. C.? Yet I have seen them driven to five meals a day for mental occupation. I sometimes sit and pity Noah; but even he had this advantage over all succeeding navigators, that, wherever he landed, he was sure to get no ill news from home. He should be canonized as the patron-saint of newspaper correspondents, being the only man who ever had the very last authentic intelligence from everywhere. The sea was meant to be looked at from shore, as mountains are from the plain. 25 Lucretius made this discovery long ago, and was blunt enough to blurt it forth, romance and sentiment in other words, the pretense of feeling what we do not feel being inventions of a later day. 30 To be sure, Cicero used to twaddle about Greek literature and philosophy, much as people do about ancient art nowadays; but I rather sympathize with those stout old Romans who despised both, and be- 35 lieved that to found an empire was as grand an achievement as to build an epic or to carve a statue. But though there might have been twaddle (as why not, since there was a Senate?) I rather think 40 Petrarch was the first choragus of that sentimental dance which so long led young folks away from the realities of life like the piper of Hamelin, and whose succession ended, let us hope, with Chateau- 45 has a kind of accidental hole in the top briand. But for them, Byron, whose real The finback whale recorded just above has much the look of a brown-paper parcel, the whitish stripes that run across him answering for the pack-thread. He of his head, through which he pooh-poohs the rest of creation, and which looks as if it had been made by the chance thrust of a chestnut rail. He was our first event. Our second was harpooning a sunfish, which basked dozing on the lap of the sea, looking so much like the giant turtle of an alderman's dream, that I am persuaded he would have made mockturtle soup rather than acknowledge his imposture. But he broke away just as they were hauling him over the side, and sank placidly through the clear water, |