Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
Cambridge circles, and the difficulty with which it made headway
elsewhere. Though he traveled much in his library--as Thoreau would
say--his prejudices remained narrowly local. To the last he remained
extraordinarily parochial.
Yet the culture he served so faithfully never fruited in wisdom. He
was never quite certain of himself, of what he really believed. He was
fond of standing off and studying himself quizzically, to learn what
sort of person he was; yet he was swayed by so many impulses he was
never quite sure what sort of legs were under him. He was hopelessly
bewildered by his own vast disorder. His mind was as cluttered as
a garret, filled with an endless miscellany of odds and ends. Life
puzzled him, as it puzzles every serious mind; but he allowed himself
to be too easily discouraged by his inveterate unwillingness to
think. He never speculated widely or analyzed critically. Ideas,
systems of thought, intellectual and social movements, he had no
interest in; he was content to remain a bookish amateur in letters,
loitering over old volumes for the pleasure of finding apt phrases and
verbal curiosities. With all his reading, history remained a blank
to him; and science he would have none of. “I hate it,” he confessed
late in life; “I hate it as a savage hates writing, because I fear
it will hurt me somehow.” A good many things hurt him in those later
years, and it was characteristic of him to say, “I continue to shut
my eyes resolutely in certain speculative directions.” He defined
culture as “intelligent purpose”; yet of such intelligent purpose his
intellectual life revealed little. Naturally he did not relish the
theological unsettlement that came with the advance of scientific
inquiry. Leslie Stephen’s rationalism troubled him, and after reading
the former’s _English Thought in the Eighteenth Century_, he wrote, “I
am very much in the state of mind of the Bretons who revolted against
the Revolutionary Government and wrote upon their banners, ‘Give us
back our God!’” (_Letters_, Vol. II, p. 168.) Neither did he relish
the economic unsettlement the industrial revolution was bringing to
Cambridge and America, but he looked back longingly to the quiet
days “before our individuality had been trampled out of us by the
Irish mob.” Standing between the older America and the new, with the
foundations disintegrating under his feet, he confused the disorder in
his own mind with the disorder in the external world of society, and
desperately sought to cling to his ancient hopes. A pathetic yearning
for orderliness in an age that has grown heedless of it was natural
enough in a mind that had come to expect little of life; but surely
orderliness, like charity, should begin at home.
It was, perhaps, not altogether his fault. His impulses were liberal
and his mind generous, but he was never strong enough to overcome the
handicap of the Lowell ancestry and training. When he spoke of himself
half whimsically as a natural Tory, he was putting his finger on the
Brahmin strain. The sanctity of the Lowell blood is a commonplace in
New England; but that it was Tory blood is less frequently remarked.
His grandfather, John Lowell, to be sure, was visited by certain
humanitarian compunctions, and in 1772 convinced himself that at
Common Law slavery could not stand, and was eager to put it to the
test in Massachusetts. But John Lowell was high in the councils
of the Federalist party, and a judge, and it is a safe guess that
his radicalism did not go deep. Certainly, the next generation was
stalwartly conservative. The three brothers represented the three major
professions of law, theology, and business, that constituted the New
England hierarchy. His father, Charles Lowell, after traveling abroad,
was settled as pastor of the West Church, Boston--Jonathan Mayhew’s
church--a post he held for fifty-six years. He was a stout Federalist,
a good hater of Jefferson,[469] a pleasant, cautious gentleman who
refused to be drawn into the bitter Unitarian-Trinitarian controversy
of the day--as unlike the militant Mayhew as a conventional soul could
well be.[470] His uncle, John Lowell, was a capable lawyer-politician,
one of the directing minds of the Federalist machine, earnestly
engaged in defending Massachusetts against the wicked Republicans.
Another uncle, Francis Cabot Lowell, was an enterprising capitalist,
founder of the city of Lowell, whose multiplying spindles, it was
hoped, would turn the wives and daughters of Yankee farmers, and the
poverty-stricken Irish immigrants, into efficient revenue-producers for
State Street securities.
From this pleasant background of Brahmin conservatisms, Lowell went
forth into a world given over to momentous changes, contemptuous of
all Brahmin standards, to find his way as he might. An original mind
would have marked out its own path, as Emerson did; a conventional mind
would have gone with the better sort, as Josiah Quincy did; but Lowell
was neither Emerson nor Quincy. Sensitive to change, he was rarely
self-reliant; generous in sympathies, he was timid in convictions. He
was no Come-outer to stand alone against the world, but unconsciously
he took color from his environment and was always glad to find a
staff to lean on. It was fortunate for his peace of mind that he
never realized how frequently he was no more than an echo of other
minds; yet the confusions and contradictions that mark off the several
periods of his life can be explained in no other way. From Brahminism
he drifted to radicalism, and from radicalism back to a modified
Brahminism; and these changes resulted from no native intellectual
unfolding, but from certain dominant personalities who drew him aside
from his natural orbit. He quitted college as a pleasant young Tory,
who paused in his Commencement Poem to address some pointed remarks at
Abner Kneeland--the last man imprisoned in Massachusetts for religious
opinion--upon the wickedness of an atheism that denied the faith of
Charles Lowell. But the ferment of the times was already working in
him, and when he was nineteen he wrote with youthful fervor, “I am
fast becoming ultra-democratic.... Liberty is now no longer a cant
word in the mouths of knaves and fools” (_Letters_, Vol. I, p. 33).
Within a year he had met Maria White, whose influence till her death
in 1853 was the determining factor in his intellectual life. She was
an ardent Abolitionist and reformer, and under her pleasant tutelage
Lowell was indoctrinated in the current philosophy of radicalism. He
spoke at Abolition meetings, and contributed to the Abolition press.
More important, he conceived that he had come upon his true mission
in letters. In an ode beginning “In the old days of awe and keen-eyed
wonder,” he put into verse his new creed, a prose statement of which
he elaborated in a letter explaining his _Prometheus_ in 1843, a year
before his marriage to Miss White:
Although such great names as Goethe, Byron, and Shelley have all
handled the subject in modern times, you will find that I have
looked at it from a somewhat new point of view. I have made it
_radical_, and I believe that no poet in this age can write much
that is good unless he give himself up to this tendency. For
radicalism has now for the first time taken a distinctive and
acknowledged shape of its own. So much of its spirit as poets in
former ages have attained (and from their purer organization they
could not fail of some) was by instinct rather than by reason. It
has never till now been seen to be one of the two great wings that
upbear the universe.... The proof of poetry is, in my mind, that it
reduces to the essence of a single line the vague philosophy which
is floating in all men’s minds, and so renders it portable and
useful and ready to the hand. (_Letters_, Vol. I, p. 73.)
Six years later he asserted confidently, “I am the first poet who has
endeavored to express the American Idea, and I shall be popular by and
by.” Yet within a few months he found the vein nearing exhaustion.
In a survey of his course up to 1850, he remarked that he had served
love and freedom hitherto, and he now proposed to serve beauty, adding
the significant comment, “I find that Reform cannot take up the whole
of me, and I am quite sure that eyes were given us to look about
us sometimes, and not to be always looking forward.... I am tired
of controversy” (_ibid._, Vol. I, p. 173). Between these several
confessions lies the bulk of Lowell’s contribution to the “causes”
of the times, and how adequately he served them is revealed in the
successive poems that came from his pen.[471] Their equal as a whole
is not to be found in the work of other contemporary radicals. The
better work is solidly vigorous, with competent iambs that often rise
to the dignity of such lines as “Slowly the Bible of the race is writ.”
The eager rhetoric of _The Present Crisis_ was the highwater mark of
Abolition argument in verse; but its serviceableness for quotation
cannot make it so good a poem as _Prometheus_ with its muscular blank
verse, or as _A Glance behind the Curtain_ with its portrait of
Cromwell, strong in his faith, ready for all needful iconoclasms:
I have no dread of what
Is called for by the instinct of mankind;
Nor think I that God’s world will fall apart
Because we tear a parchment more or less.
This is frank transcendental radicalism, yet the truer Lowell of those
days of youthful enthusiasm is found in the _Biglow Papers_, first
written with spontaneous gusto out of his hatred of the imperialism of
the Mexican war, and later carefully embedded in the heavy machinery of
the prose setting. The native clutter of Lowell’s mind is there laid
bare--the grotesque mixture of homely satire, moral aphorisms, Yankee
linguistics, literary criticism--an unwieldy mass that he could neither
simplify nor reduce to order. The machinery spoils the propaganda and
weighs down the satire; yet the verse has survived because for once
Lowell let himself go and hit such heads as he had a mind to.
Lowell saw fit to retain most of his radical verse in the definitive
edition of his works, but his radical prose he disowned, and it was
left for pious hands to gather together long after his death. It was
perhaps as well for his reputation that the ambassador at the Court
of St. James’s should not be plagued by his youthful indiscretions.
In those prose writings were combustible materials. He went with
the Abolitionists in their brisk assaults on law, order, and the
Constitution. Whatever revolution was stirring anywhere found him
sympathetic. He was strong for the workingman’s revolution of 1848 in
France; it was social injustice that was to blame for mob violence, and
the fetish of _laissez faire_ was a sorry enough god to worship.
The great problem of the over-supply of labor is not to be settled
by a decimation of the laboring class, whether by gunpower or
starvation.... The giant Labor did not merely turn from one side
to the other for an easier position. Rather he rose up, “Like
blind Orion hungry for the morn.”... They had learned by bitter
experience that it was on the body of old King Log _Laissez-faire_
that King Stork perched to devour them. _Let-alone_ is good policy
after you have once got your perfect system established to let
alone. (Quoted in Scudder, _James Russell Lowell_, Vol. I, pp.
205-206.)
In common with the Abolitionists, Lowell appealed to the Declaration of
Independence against the Constitution. He took delight in satirizing
his Federalist forebears, who, he asserts, beginning to fear the light
of freedom, ingeniously constructed a “Sacred Parasol” for the new
Goddess of Liberty, “to prevent her from being tanned”: