Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
A stout machine of parchment was accordingly constructed, and,
under the respectable name of a Constitution, was interposed
wherever there seemed to be danger from the hostile incursions of
light. Whenever this is spread, a dim twilight, more perplexing
than absolute darkness, reigns everywhere beneath its shadow....
This contrivance of ours, though the work of our own hands, has
acquired a superstitious potency in our eyes. (_Ibid._, Vol. I, p.
210.)
No wonder Lowell later disowned such apostasies, for after Maria
White’s death in 1853 came the dun professorial period of his life,
when Harvard laid hands on him and came near to reducing him to
its own ways. It revived the old Brahmin instincts that had lain
dormant during the years of his Abolitionism, without reviving the
old sanctions. Left without a cause, half ashamed of his youthful
indiscretions yet ill content to drift, he turned bookman and for
twenty-one years wandered with Norton and Longfellow and Child in the
Sahara of medieval scholarship. It was not a happy time with him.
There is plenty of evidence of his restlessness and dissatisfaction
that occasionally prompted the wish to turn wholly scholar and keep
his note-books in order; that prodded him to salvage the mass of his
accumulation by turning his lecture-notes into literary essays; and
that in other moods induced him to turn half savagely upon his dead
enthusiasms and find solace in clever satire. His vigorous salvagings
were scarcely worth the trouble. He had nothing important to say
about Dante or Pope or Wordsworth, and he said it with a good deal of
needless verbal exertion. The essay on Thoreau, written in 1865, was a
different matter. Here he was brought face to face with a past which
it still hurt him to remember; and the ill nature that colors his
comment is sufficient testimony to the painfulness of his memories.
Certainly he did not understand Thoreau, was incapable of understanding
him; yet might not his dislike have been prodded by the consciousness
that Thoreau had refused to make terms with Harvard culture as he had
done? An intelligent reading of Thoreau must have been an unpleasant
experience in Lowell’s mood, keenly aware of certain backslidings of
his own; and the essay is suggestive for the light it throws on Lowell,
not on Thoreau.
To this period belong most of the essays on which rests Lowell’s
reputation as a critic of letters and politics. Bright as that
reputation long was, it is beginning to show tarnish. Subjected to
the scrutiny of eyes unblinded by the congenialities of the Cambridge
coterie, it appears that Lowell’s brilliancy covered over certain grave
shortcomings that unfitted him for serious critical judgment.[472]
He had no standards other than ethical, only likes and dislikes; no
interest in ideas, only a pottering concern for the text; no historical
backgrounds, only isolated figures dwelling in a vacuum. He was puzzled
over new schools and unfamiliar technic, and was at ease only in
praising established reputations and confirming approved judgments.
He scoffed at Taine instead of going to school to him, and made merry
over Masson’s _Life of Milton_; yet he was wholly incapable of dealing
with men from whose fruitful minds came ideas that summoned throngs of
followers. In almost the last year of his life he spent weeks rereading
Rousseau, and was satisfied to dismiss him with the comment, “a
monstrous liar, but always the first dupe of his own lie” (_Letters_,
Vol. II, p. 424). _Leaves of Grass_ he dismissed as affected, not
original. He was shocked at Swinburne’s “Adamite” heresy--“When a man
begins to lust after the Muse instead of loving her, he may be sure
that it is never the Muse that he embraces” (_ibid._, Vol. I, p. 377).
He admired Howell’s prose style and loved the man, but he could not
bring himself to approve his literary and social theories.
During those sterile professorial years he was closing one door after
another. Scarcely an important movement of contemporary thought
awakened his interest. The hypothesis of evolution he rejected somewhat
flabbily. “I think the evolutionists will have to make a fetish of
their protoplasm before long,” he said in 1879. “Such a mush seems
to me a poor substitute for the Rock of Ages--by which I understand
a certain set of higher instincts which mankind have found solid
under their feet in all weathers” (_ibid._, Vol. II, p. 245). And as
late as 1886 he wrote, “I am a conservative (warranted to wash) and
keep on the safe side--with God as against evolution.” Naturally so
provocative a doctrine as economic determinism never showed its face in
his study; Karl Marx was not one of his intellectual companions. Even
the home-bred knight-errant, Henry George, did not greatly interest
him. “Why, who in the world buys such a book as that,” he exclaimed of
_Progress and Poverty_; and learning that a friend had subscribed for a
thousand copies, he remarked, “He _must_ be getting eccentric.”[473]
The political principles that he discovered in the smoke of his
professor’s pipe were equally naïve. He took himself seriously as a
guide and mentor in matters political. He was fond of talking about the
“noble science of politics”; yet he never took the trouble to ground
himself in the elements of the subject. He had scarcely read the primer
of political theory. Burke was probably the only political writer
who ever made any impression on his mind. Of American constitutional
history he was as ignorant as a politician, and when in Civil War
days he began to scratch the field of politics, he only uncovered
certain old Federalist prejudices that lay hidden under his later
accumulations. The extreme parochialism of the Brahmin mind is revealed
in Lowell’s incapacity to understand the South. The comment on Sibley’s
_Harvard Graduates_--“I do not know when the provincialism of New
England has been thrust upon me with so ineradicable a barb”--should be
turned upon Lowell’s dogmatic essays in American politics. He had not
the slightest comprehension of Calhoun’s doctrine of majorities; yet he
dismissed it contemptuously, after attributing it to one of Calhoun’s
followers.[474] He speaks of the “weak and wicked element” of states
rights--which he supposes the South owed to “the unhappy ingenuity of
Mr. Jefferson”--as an unhistorical repudiation of the principle of
coercive sovereignty established by the fathers, quite overlooking
the Hartford Convention. His treatment of Jefferson Davis and Andrew
Johnson is marked by the dogmatisms of one who is defending God’s will
against the devil’s sophistries. He will have no other interpretation
of history than an ethical interpretation, in which good and evil are
eternally at combat; and he closes his volume of political essays with
a comment that embodies for him the sum of all political wisdom:
We have only to be unswervingly faithful to what is the true
America of our hope and belief, and whatever is American will rise
from one end of the country to the other instinctively to our side,
with more than ample means of present succour and of final triumph.
It is only by being loyal and helpful to Truth that men learn at
last how loyal and helpful she can be to them. (_Ibid._, Vol. V, p.
326.)
Into the stagnant atmosphere of the Elmwood study came on a happy day
in the middle sixties the vibrant personality of Edwin Lawrence Godkin,
and under the stimulus of his crisp thinking there began for Lowell
what may perhaps be reckoned an intellectual renaissance. Godkin was
a moderate English liberal, a man of complete self-assurance, whose
tart comment on politics and economics was pointed by a conviction
of the finality of his own conclusions. Under such teaching Lowell
made rapid progress in the new school of criticism fathered by _The
Nation_. The delight with which he read Godkin’s comment and the eager
faith with which he greeted his ideas suggest that his own ethical
interpretation of politics was giving way under the strain of post-war
experience. From Godkin he got some casual instruction in _laissez
faire_, and certain of its teachings snuggled down comfortably in his
mind beside the principles of coercive sovereignty and a centralizing
state, without awakening any suspicion of their incompatibility of
temperament. He never went over wholly to _laissez faire_; he was too
strongly Brahmin Federalist for that; but his leanings often carried
him into the English camp. It was a tonic to his native conservatism
that was troubled about the new theories of collectivism, and it
awakened strong doubts about the experiment in democracy. The reaction
against the radicalism of his Abolition days became sharp and final.
“We have got to work back from a democracy to our original institution
as a republic again,” he wrote Leslie Stephen in 1879 (_Letters_,
Vol. II, p. 161); and in 1888 he asserted that the republic would
endure only “so long as the ideas of the men who founded it continue
dominant” (_The Independent in Politics_, Vol. VI, p. 207). He warned
Thomas Hughes against the extension of suffrage in England,[475] and he
was more and more inclined to think that democracy meant a slough of
mediocrity underlain with the mud of corruption--that it might prove
to be “a Kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of
fools” (_Letters_, Vol. II, p. 159).
From the vigorous movements of protest of the seventies and eighties,
the agrarian uprising of the Middle Border and the proletarian
organization in the industrial centers, he drew added confirmation of
his fears. In his attitude towards both he was little more than an
echo of Godkin, who was laying about him briskly, hitting both farmer
and workingman with fine impartiality. He shared the latter’s contempt
for all agrarian programs, without quite understanding them. He knew
little of America. The continent was scarcely more than a hinterland
to Cambridge, a hinterland that he explored with some bewilderment
on a trip that carried him as far as Cincinnati. Equally ignorant of
economics and of the Middle Border, he had no basis for any opinion;
a juster man would have put the agrarian question aside as beyond his
competency; at least he would have been careful to clear his mind of
prejudice. But Lowell was as much a victim of capitalistic prejudice
as Thomas Bailey Aldrich and other Boston pseudo-intellectuals. The
old Brahminism was close to the surface in those later years, and a
scratch would reveal it. In the matter of the “Haymarket Riot” he
wrote Howells that “he thought those Chicago ruffians well hanged”--a
comment that recalls the Abner Kneeland episode of fifty years before.
Physically Lowell was in close proximity to the labor problem, but
intellectually he was worlds removed. He looked upon the labor unions
with heavy misgivings. He frankly feared the power of the proletariat
and was bitter in denunciation of social legislation. In 1869 he wrote
Godkin, “Pray give Henry Wilson a broadside for dipping his flag
to that piratical craft of the eight-hour men.... I have a thorough
contempt for a man who pretends to believe that eight is equal to ten”
(_Letters_, Vol. II, p. 31). And somewhat later he wrote Norton:
I sometimes feel a little blue over the outlook here, with our
penny-paper universal education and our workingmen’s parties, with
their tremendous lever of suffrage, decrying brains.... But the
more I learn, the more am I impressed with the wonderful system
of checks and balances which history reveals (our Constitution is
a baby-house to it!) and the more my confidence in the general
commonsense and honest intention of mankind increases.... I take
great comfort in God. I think He is considerably amused with us