A History of American Literature

An unpremeditated bit in one of his letters shows how the mind of professor and literary editor reverted to the excitement of politics on the eve of the war. It is in a fragment of burlesque on the type of love story submitted to the Atlantic: “Meanwhile the elder of the two, a stern-featured man of some forty winters, played with the hilt of his dagger, half drawing and then sheathing again the Damascus blade thin as the eloquence of Everett and elastic as the conscience of Cass.” From 1858 to 1866 he printed some sixteen vigorous and substantial political articles, besides many shorter notes and reviews, and during the latter four years resumed the “Biglow Papers,” repeating and building upon his original success. The aggressive fighting spirit which he carried into the discussion of definite men and measures did not blind him to the permanent values of the matters in dispute. The consequence was that his political writings were limited to the Civil War only in the facts he cited, and that they apply to any war in the principles to which he appealed. There is no better illustration than “Mason and Slidell: a Yankee Idyll.” In this the Concord Bridge and Bunker Hill Monument bring the spirit of the Revolution to the discussion of a Civil War issue, and between them they utter almost all the basic contentions of the World War which broke out fifty years later. They anticipate the vital things that have recently been said for and against military preparedness, international jealousies, the changes made necessary in international law by the progress of invention, the appeals to national hatred and to a tribal or national God, the viciousness of an indeterminate peace, and the essential values of democracy.

From this ordeal by battle Lowell seems to have risen into a broader and nobler serenity. He balanced the prose essay on “The Rebellion: its Cause and Consequences” with the Harvard “Commemoration Ode”; the next prose volumes, “Among my Books” (1870 and 1876) and “My Study Windows” (1871), with the odes on “Agassiz” (1874) and “The Concord Centennial” (1875) and the “Three Memorial Poems” of 1877. In all the poems he looked to the past, the struggle being over, for some evidences of strength and beauty in American life and for some assurances for its future; and in the literary essays he looked beyond nationalism to the permanent and universal values in literature. His political writings had appeared mainly in the North American Review, which he had edited (1864–1872) in coöperation with Charles Eliot Norton; and at this point younger admirers called him into public appearances as presiding officer, as committee chairman, as delegate to a Republican national convention, and as presidential elector. It even took some insistence to carry through his refusal to run for Congress. Finally, in 1877 he entered as foreign minister on eight years of the highest service to his country, the first two and a half at Madrid and the remainder at London. Few men in America could have equaled him in his qualifications for the Spanish mission. He had taught the language and the literature and was especially well-versed in the drama, and temperamentally there was much in him which responded to the national character. He wrote to Mr. Putnam, “I like the Spaniards very well as far as I know them, and have an instinctive sympathy with their want of aptitude for business”; and to Professor Child, “There is something oriental in my own nature which sympathizes with this ‘let her slide’ temper of the hidalgos.” Both of which statements should be taken as partly true to the letter and partly indicative of the adjustability which distinguishes the American from the Englishman.

The most compact tribute to his five and a half years at the court of St. James was the remark of a Londoner that he found all the Britons strangers and left them all cousins. Lowell was one of the two extreme types of American whom Victorian England chose to like and admire. One, of the Mark Twain and Joaquin Miller sort, was free and easy, smacking of the wild West, completely in contrast with the English gentleman; the other, in the persons of men like Lowell and Charles Eliot Norton, was the nearest American approach to cultivated John Bull. In diplomatic circles Lowell’s tact always mollified his firmness, even leading to criticism from some of his countrymen because he never defied nor blustered. And in his immensely important appearances as the representative of the United States at all manner of social occasions, he charmed his hosts by the grace and pertinence of his public speech.

His speech was the happiest, easiest, most graceful conceivable, with just the right proportion of play to seriousness, the ideal combination of ingredients for a post-prandial confection… He was pithy without baldness and full without prolixity. He never said too much, nor said what he had to say with too much gravity. His manner, in short, was perfection; but the real substance that his felicity of presentation clothed counted for still more… And in England his unexampled popularity was very largely due to this gift.21

In the years remaining to him after his return from London in 1885 he literally uttered much of the best that he wrote. He was no longer an eager producer, but he could be stimulated to speak by special invitations. So he delivered addresses out of the fullness of his experience at Birmingham University, at Westminster Abbey, at the celebration of Forefathers’ Day in Plymouth, at the 250th Anniversary of the founding of Harvard, before the reform leagues of Boston and New York, and at a convention of the Modern Language Association of America. These, with his last volume of verse, “Heartsease and Rue” (1888), became his valedictory. He died in 1891.

The outstanding feature of Lowell’s career is that he was a poet in action. His first and last volumes were lyrics. In the forty-seven years between their issues he was always the artist. He brought his emotional fervor and his sense of phrase to his essays, addresses, and occasional poems and to his pursuit of scholarship. His natural first interests were in the printed page and in the wielding of the pen; measured by weeks and months his life was largely lived in retirement, but the step from reading and writing to active citizenship was an easy one, and in the world of action he seemed to make few waste motions. What he did not only counted in itself but it enriched his mind as much as what he read. And back of all his activity were certain qualities that contributed to his effectiveness. He was a representative man, a fact acknowledged by his classmates who elected him their poet. He had the journalistic gift of saying excellently what others were on the verge of thinking. He did little thinking of his own that was original but much that was independent, and as a sane radical he was sure of the hearing he richly deserved. He was clever and charming, with a glint of errant unexpectedness, which was ingratiating even when it was far-fetched or even wantonly malapropos. His quips are like the gifts and favors of old-time children’s parties – hidden all over the house and just as likely to defy search as to turn up under a napkin or in the umbrella of a departing guest. And behind all, Lowell was prevailingly American, with the combined trust in democracy and fear for it that belonged to his group in his generation.

From 1820 on, Irving, Cooper, Bryant, and their followers had protested more and more frequently (see pp. 111–114) at the certain condescension in foreigners to which Lowell addressed himself in his essay of 1865. Yet all these men, and cultured America as a whole, played up to this condescension and encouraged it by evidently expecting it – stimulating it by the peevish feebleness of their protests. Lowell, though loyal, was always apologetic, always hoping to gain confidence in his countrymen. His intimate friend, Charles Eliot Norton, was deferent toward all things British or European, and, while working valiantly to establish sound canons of taste, felt a distress for the crudities of American life that was only a refinement upon the snobbishness of the Effinghams in Cooper’s “Homeward Bound” and “Home as Found.” The fact is that the refined American of the mid-nineteenth century was afraid to contemplate the incarnation of America. He knew that Uncle Sam was too mature for it; he feared that it was like Tom Sawyer; he did what he could to mold it into the image of Little Lord Fauntleroy; and he apologized for Whitman. When Mark Twain visited William Dean Howells in Cambridge in 1871 they were both young sojourners from what was to Cambridge an undiscriminated West. Young Mr. Clemens did not care at all, and young Mr. Howells did not care as far as he was concerned, though he cared a great deal in behalf of his friend, who was so incorrigibly Western. And in recording his anxiety he recorded a striking fact of that generation: that American culture was afraid even of the rough-and-ready Americans whom Europe was applauding. “I did not care,” said Mr. Howells of Mr. Clemens, “to expose him to the critical edge of that Cambridge acquaintance which might not have appreciated him at, say, his transatlantic value. In America his popularity was as instant as it was vast. But it must be acknowledged that for a much longer time here than in England polite learning hesitated his praise… I went with him to see Longfellow, but I do not think Longfellow made much of him, and Lowell made less.”22

In habits of intellectual nicety, in manners, and in social inclination Lowell was an aristocrat; yet in spite of these tendencies, and quite evidently in spite of them, he was in principle a stanch democrat, and when put to the test that sort of democrat is the most reliable. The conflict is interestingly apparent throughout his writings. The address on “Democracy” of 1888 need not be gravely cited as proof of Lowell’s belief in government by the people; it is only the final iteration of what he had all his life been saying. Yet after his usual leisurely introduction he approached his subject with the smile of half apology which had become a habit to him: “I shall address myself to a single point only in the long list of offences of which we are more or less gravely accused, because that really includes all the rest.” It crops out in the Thoreau essay, apropos of Emerson: “If it was ever questionable whether democracy could develop a gentleman, the problem has been affirmatively solved at last”; and in the Lincoln essay: “Mr. Lincoln has also been reproached with Americanism by some not unfriendly British critics; but, with all deference, we cannot say that we like him any the worse for it.” In the ode on Agassiz he heaved a sigh of relief that the great naturalist was willing to put up with New England conditions; and even in the Harvard “Commemoration Ode” he broke out suddenly with:

Who now shall sneer?Who dare again to say we traceOur lines to a plebeian race?

The point is not in the least that Lowell did not believe in democracy; every deprecating remark of this sort was prefatory to a fresh defense of it. The point is that, as with a quarrel, it takes two to make a condescension and that Lowell did his part. It is difficult to imagine the young foreigner of “German-silver aristocracy” condescending with success to Lincoln or Emerson or to Mark Twain or Whitman.

The frequent expression of this self-defensive mood is an illustration of another leading trait in Lowell – his spontaneity. Since he felt as he did there would have been no virtue in concealing the fact, and Lowell seldom concealed anything. He wrote readily and fully, often beyond the verge of prolixity. He gave his ideas free rein as they filed or crowded or raced into his mind, not only welcoming those that came but often seeming to invite those that were tentatively approaching. Only in a few of his lyrics did he compact his utterance. Most of the introductions to essays and longer poems proceed in the manner of the “musing organist” of the first stanza in “Sir Launfal,” “beginning doubtfully and far away,” and what follows is in most cases somewhat lavishly discursive. The consequences of this manner of expression of a richly furnished mind are not altogether fortunate. Much of his writing could have been more quickly started and more compactly stated, and practically all of it could have been more firmly constructed. Emerson’s essays lack firm structure because they were not written to a program, but were aggregations of paragraphs already set down in his journals. Lowell’s essays, although deliberately composed, were equally without design. His method was to fill himself with his subject of the moment and then to write eagerly and rapidly, letting “his fingers wander as they list.” His productions were consequently poured out rather than built up. They have the character of most excellent conversation which circles about a single theme, allows frequent digression, admits occasional brilliant sallies, includes various “good things,” and finally stops without any definitive conclusion. In this respect, while Lowell was by no means artless in the sense of being unsophisticated, he was also by no means artful in the sense of calculating his effects upon the reader. The only reader of whom he seems to have been distinctly conscious was the bookish circle of his own associates. He would fling out recondite allusions as though in challenge, and he wrote in a flowing, polysyllabic diction which was nicely exact but which rarely would concede the simpler word.

This same surging spontaneity was both the strength and weakness of his poetry. He inclined too much to foster the theory of inspiration. “’Tis only while we are forming our opinions,” he once wrote, “that we are very anxious to propagate them”; and as he indited most of his poems while he was in this state of “anxiety” they became effusions rather than compositions. His first drafts, in fact, were fulfillments of Bryant’s injunction in “The Poet”:

While the warm current tingles through thy veinsSet forth the burning words in fluent strains.

But in his revisions he was unable to follow the instructions to the end:

Then summon back the original glow, and mendThe strain with rapture that with fire was penned.

As a consequence his poems when published were as invertebrate as when he first wrote them, and of the revisions in detail many were shifted back to their original form. The degree to which he tempered the wind of self-criticism to his own poetical lambs is the more noteworthy on account of the acumen with which he commented as editor on the work of his fellow-poets.

On the other hand, his easy command of versification, his gift of phrasing, and his rich poetic imagination resulted in very many passages of beauty and feeling, particularly in the later odes like the Commemoration and Agassiz poems, into which he poured the fine fervor of his patriotism. In these his sincerity, his intellectual solidity, his idealism, and his nature-feeling combined with “the incontrollable poetic impulse which is the authentic mark of a new poem” and which Emerson ascribed to him in a journal entry of 1868.

BOOK LIST

Individual Author

James Russell Lowell. Works. Riverside Edition. 1890. 11 vols. Elmwood Edition. 1904. 16 vols. (Contains one more volume of literary essays, one more of poetry, and the three volumes of letters. C. E. Norton, editor. 1904.) These appeared in book form originally as follows: Class Poem, 1838; A Year’s Life, 1841; Poems, 1844; Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, 1845; Poems, Second Series, 1848; A Fable for Critics, 1848; The Biglow Papers, 1848; The Vision of Sir Launfal, 1848; Fireside Travels, 1864; The Biglow Papers, Second Series, 1867; Under the Willows and Other Poems, 1869; The Cathedral, 1870; Among my Books, 1870; My Study Windows, 1871; Among my Books, Second Series, 1876; Three Memorial Poems, 1877; Democracy and Other Addresses, 1887; Political Essays, 1888; Heartsease and Rue, 1888; Latest Literary Essays and Addresses, 1891; The Old English Dramatists, 1892; Last Poems, 1895; Impressions of Spain, 1899.

Bibliography

A volume compiled by George Willis Cooke. 1906. Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. II, pp. 544–550.

Biography and Criticism

The standard life is by H. E. Scudder. 1901. 2 vols.

Benton, Joel. Lowell’s Americanism. Century, November, 1891.

Brownell, W. C. American Prose Masters. 1909.

Curtis, G. W. Orations and Addresses, Vol. III. 1894.

Godkin, E. L. The Reasons why Mr. Lowell should be Recalled. Nation, June 1, 1882.

Greenslet, Ferris. Lowell: his Life and Work. 1905.

Hale, E. E. Lowell and his Friends. 1898.

Hale, E. E., Jr. Lowell. 1899.

Higginson, T. W. Book and Heart. 1897.

Higginson, T. W. Old Cambridge. 1899.

Howells, W. D. A Personal Retrospect of Lowell. Scribner’s, September, 1900.

Howells, W. D. Literary Friends and Acquaintances. 1900.

James, Henry. Essays in London. 1893.

Mabie, H. W. My Study Fire. Ser. 2. 1894.

Meynell, Alice. The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays. 1893.

Norton, C. E. James Russell Lowell. Harper’s, May, 1893.

Norton, C. E. Letters of Lowell. Harper’s, September, 1893.

Scudder, H. E. Mr. Lowell as a Teacher. Scribner’s, November, 1891.

Stillman, W. J. The Autobiography of a Journalist, chap. xiv. 1901.

Stoddard, R. H. Recollections Personal and Literary. 1903.

Taylor, Bayard. Critical Essays. 1880.

Thorndike, A. H. Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. II, Bk. II, chap. xxiv.

Underwood, F. H. Lowell; a Biographical Sketch. 1882.

Underwood, F. H. The Poet and the Man. 1893.

Wendell, Barrett. Stelligeri. 1893.

Wilkinson, W. C. A Free Lance in the Field of Life and Letters. 1874.

TOPICS AND PROBLEMS

Read “The Present Crisis” as determining the temper in which Lowell wrote his essay on Thoreau in view of their different reactions to the same national situation.

Read what Poe, Longfellow, and Lowell had to say concerning overemphasis on the American quality of American literature as noted on pages 177, 272, and 284. Is there any clear reason for this common dissent?

Compare the people discussed in Lowell’s “Fable for Critics” and in Poe’s “Literati,” published within two years of each other.

Read the connecting prose passages between the “Biglow Papers” for interesting evidence of Lowell’s attention to and knowledge of linguistic detail.

Read “Mason and Slidell: a Yankee Idyll” in “Biglow Papers,” Second Series, as a commentary on the Great European War.

Analyze the structure of a selected long poem and of a literary essay with a view to studying its firmness or looseness.

Read any one of Lowell’s five great odes and note the rhetorical fitness of meter and subject as contrasted with the artificiality of Lanier’s later poems.

Read “The Shepherd of King Admetus,” “Invita Minerva,” “The Origin of Didactic Poetry,” and the passages on Lowell and his fellow-poets for his comments on poetry and poetic art.

CHAPTER XX

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

The name of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) is in all likelihood not so well known as the title of her most famous work, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Millions upon millions have read her story, both for its interest and because of its place in American history. Yet relatively few have read her other novels, and to-day those who turn to them do so not so much for their own sakes as because they contribute a minor chapter in the history of the American novel. She entered literature by the pathway of reform. “The heroic element was strong in me, having come down by ordinary generation from a long line of Puritan ancestry, and … it made me long to do something, I knew not what: to fight for my country, or to make some declaration on my own account.” Then, when the story-telling gift was developed and the reform was accomplished, she continued to hold her mirror up to nature – a kind of Claude Lorraine glass with a strong tint of moralistic blue in it.

She was born in 1811 at Litchfield, Connecticut, one of the five children of the Reverend Lyman Beecher by his first marriage. Her famous brother, Henry Ward Beecher, was two years younger. The death of her mother when she was but four years old resulted in her having a succession of homes during girlhood: first with an aunt, then for some years under her father’s roof after his remarriage in 1817, and next from 1824 to 1832 with her older sister, Catherine, who had established a school in Hartford. In all these experiences she lived under kindly protection and in somewhat literary surroundings, and in all of them she breathed an atmosphere which was heavy with the exhalations of the old-school Calvinistic theology. In 1832, when Harriet was twenty-one years old, her father, after a six-year pastorate of a Boston church, went to Cincinnati as president of the Lane Theological Seminary, and the two sisters joined him there.

This move into what was then the Far West was not, however, a banishment into the wilds, for Cincinnati was in those days a sort of outpost of Eastern culture. The Ohio River, which flowed by its doors, served as the great highway from the East to the Mississippi Valley. The city attracted early travelers like Mrs. Trollope and Harriet Martineau as visitors, and stimulated them to ungracious comment, which was offset by longer or shorter residence of a distinguished succession of Massachusetts men. There were literary clubs, good and prolific publishing houses, and, in the Western Monthly, the beginning of a succession of magazines. Catherine wrote back from an advance trip of inspection:

I have become somewhat acquainted with those ladies we shall have most to do with, and find them intelligent, New England sort of folks. Indeed, this is a New England city in all its habits, and its inhabitants are more than half from New England… I know of no place in the world where there is so fair a prospect of finding everything that makes social and domestic life pleasant.

The seminary, a new institution, and Mr. Beecher, its first president, were located together at Walnut Hills, about two miles out of the city; and while the father was occupied in his pioneer work the two daughters started a school for girls, with the double promise of Catherine’s Hartford experience and the type of people among whom they were settling. But Harriet was not to be a schoolmistress for long. In 1833 she was the winner of a fifty-dollar prize in a short-story competition conducted by the Western Monthly, and in 1836 she married the Reverend Calvin E. Stowe, her father’s colleague in Lane Seminary. How she persisted to combine authorship and maternity in the next sixteen years is a marvel; none the less so because since the days of Anne Bradstreet an occasional woman has succeeded. In 1842 her husband wrote to her: “My dear, you must be a literary woman. It is so written in the book of fate. Get a good stock of health and brush up your mind.” In the next year her first volume, a book of selected stories, was published by Harpers; but by 1848 she was the mother of six children, the oldest only eleven, and no more books had appeared.

Nevertheless she was not to sink under the tide of home drudgery. She had visited in the South, witnessing the more kindly aspects of slavery, and in her own town she had seen the pursuit of fugitives, the conscientious defiance of law by devoted abolitionists, the violence of proslavery mobs, and had feared for the life of her brother, who was reported to have suffered death with his friend Lovejoy, when the latter was shot in Alton by a band of Missourians. In these exciting times it came to her more and more insistently that her writing must be turned to good account. Lane Seminary was a seat of antislavery doctrine and was very likely saved from destruction by its fortunate remoteness from the town. But “Uncle Tom” was not to be written from here. In 1850, impelled by ill-health, Professor Stowe accepted a call to Bowdoin College, in which he had been a student. With three children she preceded him, and for the two months before the birth of her seventh child, in Brunswick, she carried the entire responsibility of choosing, equipping, and settling in their new home. In the meanwhile the family bank account was disturbingly low, and she was attempting to write. And in the meanwhile, too, Webster’s “Seventh of March Speech” on compromise with the slavery forces had stirred the North as nothing before and carried the country one step nearer to the Civil War. In the winter that followed Mrs. Stowe came to her great resolve to write something that would arouse the whole nation; and at a communion service in February of 1851 there appeared to her, as in a vision, the scene of the death of Uncle Tom.