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JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

[James Russell Lowell was born in the Lowell homestead, Elmwood, in Cambridge, Mass., Feb. 22, 1819, and died there Aug. 12, 1891. He came from a distinguished New England family. He was educated at Harvard College, where he graduated in 1838. On leaving college he began the study of law and was admitted to the bar in 1840, but never practised his profession. Genius and taste alike turned him to literature. In 1843 he was the editor and one of the founders of the short-lived periodical, The Pioneer, which took a higher stand than any magazine of the time. He contributed to other periodicals, but he became widely known in 1848 through the ringing satire of the Biglow Papers, in which his convictions of the wrong of slavery and the crime of the Mexican War found ardent and effective expression; and also by his Fable for Critics and Sir Launfal. In 1851 he made his first visit to Europe, and in 1855, after his appointment to succeed Longfellow as Smith professor of the French and Spanish languages and literatures and of belles-lettres at Harvard College, a second visit of several years, during which he laid the foundations of his wide knowledge of the Romance languages and literatures. For twenty years his time was absorbed by his academic duties, by his share in the editorship of the Atlantic Monthly (1857), and the North American Review (1863–72), and by the writing of many of his best essays. In 1872, however, he again spent a year in Europe, and in 1877 he virtually severed his connections with Harvard College by his acceptance of an appointment as minister to Spain. In 1880 he was transferred to England, where he served until 1885. In 1887 he paid a last visit to England. Oxford conferred on him the degree of D.C.L. in 1873, and Cambridge that of LL.D. in 1874. Lowell served his country well, not only as a diplomat, an editor, a patriot poet, and an essayist, but as a teacher, and through his continuation at Harvard College of the studies in European languages and literatures begun by Ticknor and Longfellow, the cause of learning and culture throughout the land received a distinct impetus.

Much of Lowell's best work in prose was contributed to various periodicals. The names and dates of the volumes containing his published prose work are as follows: Conversations on Some of the Old' Poets (1845), Fireside Travels (1864), Among my Books (first series, 1870; second series, 1876), My Study Windows (1871), Democracy and Other Addresses (1886), Political Essays (1888), Latest Literary Essays and Addresses (1891), The Old English Dramatists (1892). His Letters, edited by C. E. Norton, appeared in 1883.]

AMONG American men of letters Lowell stands conspicuous alike for variety of natural gift and breadth of culture. Poet, wit, humorist, scholar, critic, essayist, professor, diplomatist, in each capacity he exhibited an excellence which served as warrant that had he limited himself to a single art, he might easily have attained to the highest distinction in its pursuit. But the very multiplicity of his endowments interfered with the complete expression of any one of them. His talents hampered his genius. A lifetime is long enough for most men to make full use of their possessions. But so ample were his resources that he seemed to need a secular term in which to fulfil the service which they were capable of rendering. In all that he did he was troubled, not by lack but by superfluity of means. Masterly as was his performance in many fields, his seventy years were but as a long youth, a period of preparation for the completely disciplined exercise of his natural powers. He was never content with his own achievements, but, with unexhausted ardor and unwearied industry, he continued to the end of life preparing himself for the work in which his genius should exhibit the full sweep of its wing.

Yet in his poetry and in his prose, however much there may be that is deciduous, there is much of perennial quality which "gives it a title to rank as literature in the highest sense." His best work is replete with an undying vitality; it is the expression of a spirit of perpetual contemporaneousness. His own words in speaking of the classics are largely applicable to himself: "Their vitality is the vitality not of one or another blood or tongue, but of human nature; their truth is not topical and transitory, but of universal acceptation; and thus all great authors seem the coevals not only of each other, but of whoever reads them, growing wiser with him as he grows wise, and unlocking to him one secret after another as his own life and experience give him the key, but on no other condition. Their meaning is absolute, not conditional; it is a property of theirs quite irrespective of manners or creed; for the highest culture, the development of the individual by observation, reflection, and study leads to one result, whether in Athens or in London" or on the banks of the Charles.

Lowell was fortunate in his birth and his early training. The time was the happiest period of the historic life of New England. The

community was one in which homogeneousness of blood, common traditions, simplicity of customs, wide diffusion of comfort and of culture, an unusual equality of condition, a general disposition to individual independence and mutual reliance, all combined to promote a spirit of hopefulness, confidence, and sympathy, such as has rarely existed among men. For a youth of genius it was a fortunate society in which he grew up. There were few adventitious difficulties to be struggled with; there was little to pervert the natural course of his powers; there was learning enough to be had for their due cultivation; the moral atmosphere was healthy. The influence of such conditions is manifest not only in Lowell's writings, but in those of his contemporaries as well it gave its quality to the wisdom of Emerson, to the poetry of Longfellow; and, in the work of these and other men their fellows, the salutary influence is perpetuated for the benefit of later generations. These men in their writings, and in their lives, gave expression and form to the true ideals of American democracy.

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The first of Lowell's prose works, Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, was published in 1845, when he was but twenty-six years old, "standing as yet only in the outer porch of life." Alike in substance and in form it exhibits the youthfulness of its author, but it is the work of a youth already capable of such things as betoken great achievements to come. There is in it the evidence of native force of mind, of poetic temperament, of imaginative insight and critical discrimination, as well as of wide reading and capacity of so assimilating the thought of others as to make it the nutriment of originality of genius. But there is also in it something of the perfervid zeal of youth, its disposition to rhetorical exuberance, its exclusiveness of taste, and its subjection to the influences of favorite writers. Lowell rapidly outgrew these defects, they became distasteful to him, and in later years he refrained from reprinting the little book which, in spite of its containing much that remained characteristic of its author, was the work of a writer different in some important respects from what he had become. In the Address to the Reader with which it begins there is, however, a passage which is of interest in its bearing on the whole of Lowell's literary work. "For the minor faults of the book," said the young author, "the hurry with which it has been prepared must

plead in extenuation, since it was in process of writing and printing at the same time, so that I could never estimate its proportions as a whole." The same words might have been repeated as an introduction to much, indeed to the greater part, of his writing at every period of his life. Poem or essay as it might be, the expression of life-long sentiment, or of years of study and reflection, it was written hastily. The pages flew from the study to the press. Lowell's faculties were so ready at command, were so trained and disciplined by continual service, that he could trust them to perform efficiently the bidding of his genius whatever it might require. But even the most consummate master cannot always give perfection of form to work in his first shaping of it. The mentis æternæ forma is not to be rendered in its completeness at the first effort. But he was impatient of revision. The poetic impulse was stronger in him than the artistic. He could not bring himself to follow Donne's example, and "cribrate, recribrate, and postcribrate." The very abundance of his genius was a temptation which led him to care little for what lay behind him already accomplished, in comparison with the allurement of what still lay before him to be done. And he had, indeed, such ample reason for confidence in his own powers, that the lover of his work is left with little to desire but that the gods had added to his other gifts the disposition of perfecting.

At its best Lowell's prose style is that of a master of the English tongue. It is full of life and masculine vigor. In its large, clear, and easy flow it is the expression of a strong, rich, and well-nurtured mind, of a nature generous and sweet, and of a poetic temperament modified by the tastes of a scholar and of a student of nature. The resources of the language are at his command. There is no conscious effort in his sentences, no mere rhetorical display, but they possess a natural and often noble modulation. The form which he gives to his thought seldom makes too great a claim on the attention of the reader; his diction is in general simple and direct, full without redundancy, word and phrase happily coalescing with the thought. There is much in his style of what he called "that happy spontaneousness which delights us in the best writers," and which, seeming to partake of the element of luck, is evidence of the highest culture. Now and then his

vivacity of fancy leads him beyond the bounds of a chastened taste, and he drops the wand of the magician to play for a brief instant with the lath of the jester. But the fulness of life is less often manifest in superabundance of vivacity than in happy illustration, vivid metaphor, imaginative simile, or wise reflection.

Of all his prose work that which most fully displays his genius is, perhaps, the body of his essays on the English poets and dramatists. There are no literary studies in the language more instinct with the true spirit of critical appreciation, none which may serve better as an introduction not merely to the work of special poets, but to English poetry in general. For, in treating of the poets from Spenser to Wordsworth, the whole field is traversed along the main road leading through it, and many of its by-paths are incidentally explored. The treatment is throughout large, liberal, and just, distinguished by poetic insight, scholarly urbanity, and mature reflection.

Yet if his native genius finds its freest expression in these literary essays, his character is perhaps manifested even more impressively in his political writings. The spirit that pervades them is that of the wise and practical idealist, who knows that the worth of a nation and the strength of its institutions depend upon the nature of the ideas which they embody and represent, and that material prosperity is in the long run dependent upon the supremacy of moral principles. The vigorous reasoning, the large knowledge of history, the wit, the clearness of statement, the strong, right sentiment of these essays and speeches give them a high rank in political literature.

Lowell's place is secure among the great writers of English prose; for it is not presumptuous to prophesy that much of his work will be read by future generations, not merely for its importance in the history of American letters, but for its own sake, its wisdom and its charm, its abiding classic quality.

CHARLES ELIOT NORTON

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