Horace Elisha Scudder

“ He quotes the recommendation of a friend that he should read poetry, feed himself on bee bread so that he might get into the mood of writing poetry; but, though all his life long Lowell fed, as by the most natural appetite, on poetry and other forms of imaginative literature, his own poetry is not bookish, nor does it borrow in form or phrase. Even when most impressionable in his youth, the influence upon him of Keats and Tennyson was more obvious than that of Shakespeare or Marlowe, only because, eschewing the imitative, his verse took the color of his generation. ”

“ As we have had frequent occasion to note, Lowell all his life was subject to fluctuation of moods. The most comprehensive cause was no doubt in the very constitution of his temperament, and as he was overclouded at times, so for him the sun when it shone was more brilliant than to many. But one asks most anxiously, are such moods superficial or do they trench upon the very citadel of being, sapping and mining the walls, so that if entrance is made, the very heart stops beating. In all the shifting of Lowell’s mind there were great fundamental beliefs from which he would not be separated. ”

“ Our literature has developed itself out of English literature, as our political forms have developed themselves out of English political forms, but with a difference. Not as parasitic plants fed from the parent stock, but only as new growths from seeds the mother tree has dropped, could they have prospered as they have done. And so our literature is a part of English literature and must always continue to be so, but, as I have said, with a difference. What that difference is, it would be very hard to define, though it be something of which we are very sensible when we read an American book. ”

“ Are we basely content with our pecuniary good-fortune? Do we look on the tall column of figures on the credit side of our national ledger as a sufficing monument of our glory as a people? Are we of the North better off as provinces of the Slave-holding States than as colonies of Great Britain? Are we content with our share in the administration of national affairs, because we are to have the ministry to Austria, and because the newspapers promise that James Gordon Bennett shall be sent out of the country to fill it? ”

“ We must convince men that treason against the ballot-box is as dangerous as treason against a throne, and that, if they play so desperate a game, they must stake their lives on the hazard.... A ten years’ war would be cheap that gave us a country to be proud of, and a flag that should command the respect of the world because it was the symbol of the enthusiastic unity of a great nation.... We cannot think that the war we are entering on can end without some radical change in the system of African slavery. ”

“ Norton, “but am as fond of London as Charles Lamb. The rattle of a hansom shakes new life into my old bones, and I ruin myself in them. I love such evanescent and unimportunate glimpses of the world as I catch from my flying perch. I envy the birds no longer, and learn better to converse with them. Our views of life are the same.” It was the summer also when Dr. Holmes made his royal progress through England, and Lowell had the pleasure of seeing the hearty welcome his old friend received. ”

“ When I was in Spain I saw reason to think that the decay of that noble nation, due, no doubt, to many causes, was due above all to a Civil Service like our own that had gone farther on the inevitable road which ours is going.
“It should seem that a reform like ours, so reasonable, so convenient, so economical, would at once commend itself to the good sense of the people. And I think there are manifest signs that it is more and more so commending itself. The humanity of our day is willing (as our ancestors were not) that the state should support its inefficient members. ”

“ So free, so spontaneous is this characterization of Lincoln, and so concrete in thought, that it has been most frequently read, we suspect, of any single portion of the ode, and it is so eloquent that one likes to fancy the whole force of the ode behind it, as if Lowell needed the fire he had fanned to white heat, for the very purpose of forging this last, firm tempered bit of steel.{71}
Into these threescore lines Lowell has poured a conception of Lincoln which may justly be said to be to-day the accepted idea which Americans hold of their great President. ”

“ Democracy is, after all, nothing more than an experiment like another, and I know only one way of judging it—by its results. Democracy in itself is no more sacred than monarchy. It is Man who is sacred: it is his duties and opportunities, not his rights, that nowadays need reinforcement. It is honor, justice, culture, that make liberty invaluable, else worse than worthless if it mean only freedom to be base and brutal. ”

“ It was so unusual for Lowell to dramatize, even in poetry, that this assumption has a singular interest, and, barring the element of Southern birth, is a close copy of Lowell’s mind at this time. Every man of thought has his dream of action, and we can read in this speech how Lowell would have translated his ideals of truth, freedom, and justice into executive acts, could he, who had watched the conflict closely, have had the chance that poets picture of being king for a day. ”

“ Lowell asks, “to make all our public men cowards? An ounce of pluck just now were worth a king’s ransom. There is one comfort, though a shabby one, in the feeling that matters will come to such a pass that courage will be forced upon us, and that when there is no hope left we shall learn a little self-confidence from despair. That in such a crisis the fate of the country should be in the hands of a sneak! If the Republicans stand firm we shall be saved, even at the cost of disunion. If they yield, it is all up with us and with the experiment of democracy.” ”

“ Lowell was quick to see the weakness of McClellan’s position in defending himself, preliminary to assuming a position where he was to defend the country, and in making his defence issue in charges against the authority under whose orders he had acted. He saw not so much the politician under the soldier’s cloak as a man of such calibre as fitted him to become the tool of politicians, and so self-conscious that once he is possessed of the notion of his political importance he looks at everything from a personal point of view. ”

“ I am satisfied, though, that nobody has such a sympathy with the seasons and feels himself so truly a partner in the trade of nature as a farmer. I find great pleasure in my own little ventures in this Earth-ship of ours on her annual voyages, and shall even grow jolly again if my college duties are so arranged next year that I shall get rid of some of my worries, and be able to give my trees and crops the encouragement of a cheerful face. Depend upon it, they feel it and grow in proportion. ”

“ It is a spectacle portentous of moral lapse and social disorganization, to see a statesman, who has had fifty years’ experience of American politics, quibbling in defence of Executive violence against a free community, as if the conscience of the nation were no more august a tribunal than a police justice sitting upon a paltry case of assault.... ”

“ Many people seem to think that some such divinity doth hedge a Democracy as was once supposed to hedge a king. But perpetual motion is as idle a dream in political organization as in mechanics. It is in the little wheels, in those least obvious to inspection, that the derangement is likely to begin. Are we to expect more vigilance from what used to be called the Jacksonian Democracy? I must be allowed to doubt it. ”

“ He had refrained, as we have seen, from touching in his English address on Democracy upon the perils which beset it in its American stronghold, but here, at home, in the very heart of its stoutest defence, he must needs use these perils to emphasize his doctrine that the prime business of the college is to “set free, to supple, and to train the faculties in such wise as shall make them most effective for whatever task life may afterwards set them, for the duties of life rather than for its business, and to open windows on every side of the mind where thickness of wall does not prevent it.” ”

“ Still, in undertaking to account for the evolution of the democratic idea in American life, he was questioning whether after all opportunity had not much to do with it, and whether now that the walls were closing about this new country, the force of evolution had not been largely spent. The dangers imminent in the constant inflow of an ignorant body of foreigners, in the easy good-nature with which the American tolerated abuses, and in the aristocratic character of a civil service as diseased as the rotten borough of English politics,—these dangers rose before him, threatening, alarming. ”

“ Largely by reason of its historic genesis and development, New England is more an individual than any other group of commonwealths unless it be the Cotton States, and a man of Massachusetts, clearly the heart of the whole system, is very sure to think of himself as a New Englander without prejudice to his loyalty to his own state. Lowell certainly did. It was through New England, its history, its spirit, its genius, that he apprehended the very nature of freedom and the principles of democracy. ”

“ At my time of life one is not apt to vex his soul at any criticism, but I confess that in this case I was more than annoyed, I was even saddened. For what was said was so childish and showed such shallowness, such levity, and such dulness of apprehension both in politics and morals on the part of those who claim to direct public opinion (as, alas! they too often do) as to confirm me in my gravest apprehensions. ”

“ One does not need to doubt or believe in this particular collegiate method to give full assent to Lowell’s dictum that “the most precious property of culture and of a college as its trustee is to maintain higher ideals of life and its purpose, to keep trimmed and burning the lamps of that pharos, built by wiser than we, that warns from the reef and shallows of popular doctrine.” For as he moves forward in his address, he is drawn inevitably into a consideration of what was, first and last, the fundamental social question with him, the democratic idea. ”

“ The genius of our political organism, by which one is called on for a double loyalty to state and nation, a loyalty jeoparded by the heresy of an extreme state-rights dogma, was finely disclosed in Lowell’s attitude. Fortunately for us the locality, the community in which our fortune is cast, has in itself a political essence, so that it is not mere attachment to the place of birth and breeding which makes its natural demand on us, but membership in an organism{80} lacking only the crown of absolute independence to make it a unit of politics. ”

“ In his half-homeless condition, Lowell looked with eagerness to his summers in England. There he had in its leisurely form the social life which had come to be a real solace to him, and there too he found the world arranged for the ease and comfort of a solitary. He sailed for England this year on the 21st of April, and found himself shortly in his familiar lodgings in London. He liked the sense of world activity which he felt in the heart of that great city. “Nothing can be more bewildering,” he wrote to his daughter, “than the sudden change in my habits and surroundings. ”

“ I have been reading some of Lowell’s new poems in which he shows unexpected advance on himself, but perhaps most in technical skill and courage. It is in talent rather than in poetic tone, and rather expresses his wish, his ambition, than the uncontrollable interior impulse which is the authentic mark of a new poem, and which is unanalyzable, and makes the merit of an ode of Collins or Gray or Wordsworth or Herbert or Byron, and which is felt in the pervading tone rather than in brilliant parts or lines ”

“ Lowell could not entertain, he was quite at liberty to accept all manner of invitations, and be under no obligation to return them. So his public duties called him in many directions socially, and he was able, besides doing a little business by the way in these diversions, to see the best of the intellectual life of the day. He had a choice group of friends who had known him before he was a public man, and his position gave shim the entrée in all society, but he whispered: “I think on the whole I find no society so good as what I have been accustomed to at home.” ”

“ His last word is a word of hope, as was befitting a prophet of literature, standing at the end of the first century of a nation’s life, as years are measured from the consciousness of existence.
“The literature of a people should be the record of its joys and sorrows, its aspirations and its shortcomings, its wisdom and its folly, the confidant of its soul. ”

“ What may easily have provoked the popular notion of his indolence was the privacy of his life, the fact that he himself was little en evidence, and the casual on-looker seeing him sitting for hours over his books and pipe, taking his social recreation only in the seclusion of his own cherished home, and the libraries and dining-rooms of a very small circle of friends, hardly ever going even to Boston, and drawn when on his feet rather to Beaver Brook than to the pavements,—such an one might fancy him almost a scholarly recluse, living anywhere but in the American present. ”

“ Shall there be nothing to enlist enthusiasm or kindle fanaticism? Are we to have no cause like that for which our English republican ancestors died so gladly on the field, with such dignity on the scaffold?—no cause that shall give us a hero, who knows but a Cromwell? To our minds, though it may be obscure to Englishmen, who look on Lancashire as the centre of the universe, no army was ever enlisted for a nobler service than ours. ”

“ The task of lecturing itself was sure to suggest the incompleteness of expression, and so offend all his genius as a writer. “Yesterday,” he writes to Miss Norton, in the fall of 1859, “I began my lectures. I came off better than I expected, for I am always a great coward beforehand. I hate lecturing, for I have discovered (entre nous) that it is almost impossible to learn all about anything, unless, indeed, it be some piece of ill-luck, and then one has the help of one’s friends, you know.... I am trying to reform the Spanish and Italian classes. ”

“ First of all is Democracy, which, within the memory of men yet living, has assumed almost the privilege of a Law of Nature, and seems to be making constant advances towards universal dominion. Its ideal is to substitute the interest of the many for that of the few as the test of what is wise in polity and administration, and the opinion of the many for that of the few as the rule of conduct in public affairs. That the interest of the many is the object of whatever social organization man has hitherto been able to effect seems unquestionable ”

“ By her good temper, good sense, and womanly virtue, the girl of seventeen had not only endeared herself to those immediately about her, but had become an important factor in the destiny of Spain. I know very well what divinity doth hedge royal personages, and how truly legendary they become even during their lives, but it is no exaggeration to say that she had made herself an element of the public welfare, and that her death is a national calamity. Had she lived she would have given stability to the throne of her husband, over whom her influence was wholly for good. ”

“ The advantage of our opponents has been that they have always had some sharp practical measure, some definite and immediate object, to oppose to our voluminous propositions of abstract right. Again and again the whirlwind of oratorical enthusiasm has roused and heaped up the threatening masses of the Free States, and again and again we have seen them collapse like a waterspout into a crumbling heap of disintegrated bubbles before the compact bullet of political audacity. ”