Among My Books

By JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, A. M., Professor of Belles-Lettres in Harvard College. Boston : Fields, Osgood, & Co.

THE essays which form this book are on Dryden, Shakespeare, Witchcraft, New England two centuries ago, Lessing, and Rousseau, and they are among the most valuable and delightful papers that their author has written, — that is, among the best that any one has written in our day. That on Dryden is almost an ideal criticism, and expresses for most readers all that they hesitate to utter, lest they

It leaves the imagination in entire possession of its poet, while it gives the mind something of Mr. Lowell’s means of more clearly and distinctly judging him. This is so perfectly managed that the reader may with no great immodesty find himself thinking, at the end, that it had always been just his own notion of Dryden.

The paper on Shakespeare is better in parts than the Dryden, even, but is less complete, necessarily, since Shakespeare has no bounds that criticism can set, and is only to be marked, as to his height and depth, at here and there a point. Still, this essay seems more strongly characterized than any of the rest by some of Mr. Lowell’s peculiar traits, and the whole is done in a wonderfully light, fresh, and racy spirit. There is much, of course, in it of the sort of thing which will always make him a puzzle to many very well-meaning people, who would like to fix his character as that of a humorist, or satirist, or critic, or moralist, or poet, and who are painfully affected when they find him all these at once. In his poetry he has a trick of singing as if he had been thinking, and in his prose of thinking as if he had been singing, that may well confound the single-minded ; some good hearts, without heads to match, have been troubled that with his love of reform he has so small passion for reformers; and more than one learned person is doubtless shocked at his habit of studying with his library windows up, and letting in the summer morning and the talk of the hired man in the meadow. A man who in a serious disquisition can speak in the following terms of the classic principle, as we moderns know it, can never be other than a mystery to many who would fain have him for a friend: —

“ So far as all the classicism then attainable was concerned, Shakespeare got it as cheap as Goethe did, who always bought it ready-made. For such purposes of mere æsthetic nourishment Goethe always milked other minds, — if minds those ruminators and digesters of antiquity into asses’ milk may be called. There were plenty of professors who were forever assiduously browsing in vales of Enna and on Pentelican slopes among the vestiges of antiquity, slowly secreting lacteous facts, and not one of them would have raised his head from that exquisite pasturage, though Pan had made music through his pipe of reeds. Did Goethe wish to work up a Greek theme ? He drove out Herr Böttiger, for example, among that fodder delicious to him for its very dryness, that sapless Arcadia of scholiasts, let him graze, ruminate, and go through all other needful processes of the antiquarian organism, then got him quietly into a corner and milked him. The product, after standing long enough, mantled over with the rich Goethean cream, from which a butter could be churned, if not precisely classic, quite as good as the ancients could have made out of the same material.”

It is seldom that Mr. Lowell barely states his conception of character ; he clothes it and makes it charming in beautiful or grotesque figures, and his notion of Dryden is given in a series of these. “Thrice unhappy he who, born to see things as they might be, is schooled by circumstances to see people as they are, to read God in a prose translation. . . . . He who was of a stature to snatch the torch of life that flashes from hand to hand along the generations, over the heads of inferior men, chose rather to be a link-boy to the stews.” “But this prosaic element in Dryden will force itself upon me. As I read him I cannot help thinking of an ostrich, to be classed with flying things, and capable what with leap and flap together, of leaving the earth for a longer or shorter space, but loving the open plain where wing and foot help each other to something that is both flight and run at once.” “ In his prose, you come upon passages that persuade you he is a poet in spite of his verses so often turning state’s evidence against him as to convince you he is none. He is a prose-writer with a kind of æolian attachment.” “ His mind (somewhat solid for a poet) warmed slowly, but once fairly heated through, he had more of that good luck of self-oblivion than most men.” “ His phrase is always a short-cut to his sense, for his estate was too spacious for him to need that trick of winding the path of his thought about, and planting it out with clumps of epithet, by which the landscape gardens of literature give to a paltry half-acre the air of a park.”

These passages, so perfect in themselves, are hurt by being taken from their context, where they are each a climax, and grouped together; but the reader will account for this injury and enjoy them none the less, as he recurs to them in Mr. Lowell’s book. In our own copy we marked them and their kind for the memorable things without thought of their precise use here; and they seem forcible illustrations of the imaginative or creative character of his criticism. He instinctively strives to give his sense not only a perfect form of speech, but to make it a tangible, detachable, portable image : the critic in him turns artist or poet, upon the first occasion. Of Davenant’s “ Gondibert,” he says: “Its shining passages, for there are such, remind one of distress rockets sent up at intervals from a ship just about to founder, and sadden rather than cheer ” ; of the early New England life, “ If there be any poetry, it is something that cannot be helped, — the waste of the water over the dam ” ; of the Puritans, “If their natures flowered, it was out of sight, like the fern ”; and in these and other like passages he gives meaning that no extent of comment would convey, and throws you, in a pure pleasure of some kind, an exquisite touch of wit or of poetry. We must own amid our liking that we have seen it doubted whether this sort of writing be true criticism, and it is certain that not one critic in a thousand can follow the costly fashion: we should all ruin ourselves upon our first book-notice.

Of the Rousseau and the Lessing in this volume, it is safe to say that they are of the same kind as the Dryden, but of less value : that is, they less completely embody literary character to the reader’s mind. But, as the reader will learn for himself, what they lose by comparison with the Dryden, here, they will gain by contrast with any essays out of the book.