Mr. Scudder's Life of Lowell

MR. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL occupied a unique position in the history of American literature. In the first place, he was a poet of a high order. At the age of twenty-two he published a volume of poetry, and from that time his gift was recognized : he was spoken of as the coming American poet. Although the promise of his youth was never quite fulfilled, his poetry alone would entitle him to distinction and remembrance. He is not so widely read nor so popular as Longfellow and Whittier ; there is too much metaphysical subtlety, and often difficult and remote allusion, in his poetry; yet by the few he is cherished as having done some exquisite things. But as he did not give himself exclusively to poetry, we are not called upon to speculate on the possibilities wrapped up in his imaginative art. He devoted himself to other lines of intellectual activity, and, as his biographer¹ intimates, his critical powers were developed at the expense of his poetry. Thus he became a professor in Harvard College, holding the position for nearly twenty years; lecturing on Dante and on German and Spanish literature, and acquiring influence and repute as a teacher and philosophical critic. And still further, from his youth he was interested in political issues, taking a prominent part in the anti-slavery movement. He never became a professional reformer, as did many of his contemporaries, and he was never quite identified with the abolitionist party, but yet was regarded as a most valuable ally. He continued to follow the course of politics, and with intenser interest, in the years immediately preceding the Civil War; in his capacity as editor successively of the Atlantic Monthly and the North American Review, he wrote numerous articles by which he exerted a deep and far-reaching influence, especially on the more thoughtful minds. In the third stage of his career he appears as a statesman, sent as American minister first to Spain, and then to England, where his reputation and popularity reached the fullest measure. He rose to be one of the foremost citizens of America, making his country respected in other lands, and receiving at home and abroad honorable recognition, such as comes but rarely and to the few. When his term of service as minister to England expired, the English people would gladly have retained him in some other capacity; and had he been willing to accept it, he would have been elected to a professorship of literature in Oxford University. He returned to America to enjoy the few remaining years of his life. In 1891 he died, at the age of seventy-two.

As we muse over this record of a life, Lowell appears not only as the poet, the man of letters, and the minister of the state, but as having fulfilled in his age something of the rôle which Petrarch played in the time of the early Renaissance, or Erasmus in the sixteenth century. His high character as a man, his capacity for affairs, his entire devotion to ideal ends,— these qualities, combining with his endowment of imagination and his acquirements as a scholar, placed him upon a pinnacle in the eyes of the world. Such a life deserved a careful and an ample record; there was called for in the biographer a rare union of gifts in order to do justice to so rich and complex a career. No one who reads the life of Lowell, by Mr. Horace Scudder, can rise from its perusal without a profound sense of gratitude that it was given to him to write this biography. He has wrought out his task with painstaking and conscientious fidelity, bringing to it qualifications which no one else possesses in equal degree. Tenderness and reverence, delicacy and restraint, are everywhere apparent. There is criticism and comment, but always subordinate to telling the story of a life. The hand of the accomplished literary artist is manifest in the disposition of the material. But especially valuable to the reader is the insight which serves for the interpretation of Lowell’s work. Incidentally, also, the book becomes a history of American literature in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

To do justice to this biography in a brief review is not possible, nor is it here attempted. Only a few comments are offered, which are suggested by some of the more striking aspects of Lowell’s life as Mr. Scudder has described them. And in the first place, we are impressed with a certain vagueness of purpose running through all the years, a tone of dissatisfaction with himself and with his work, as though Lowell did not feel that he had ever quite found or completely realized his mission to the world. The history of the first stage of his life, from the time he left Harvard College in 1838 till his appointment to the chair of literature in 1855, is like that of many young men, with a consciousness of undeveloped power, blindly feeling their way in search of the motive or the opportunity of self-expression. What to say, how and where to say it, in order to the fulfillment of the moral obligation which life by its very law imposes, — that was Lowell’s problem. The inference would seem to be that to know definitely, without shadow of misgiving, what one’s task is in this world, and exactly how it is to be performed, is not always, at least, essential to the highest success. Lowell is one of many illustrations of this groping after a vocation, to which one may know he is called without knowing what the vocation is. In these cases a fascination attaches to the seeking and the groping, no longer felt so keenly when the vocation has been found. St. Francis of Assisi and Ignatius Loyola are more interesting as we watch them in their uncertainty, eager to pour their lives into some new mould, unwilling to follow tamely in the steps of their predecessors, and yet forced at last to accommodate themselves to the world’s order, to combine somehow the new impulse with past achievement. John Henry Newman, on his way back to England, burning with intense purpose to do something, he knew not what, is more thrilling than the record of what he achieved. It was so with Lowell for many years. There were tentative efforts, in all of which he was more or less successful, until at last it was evident that, consciously or unconsciously, he had devoted his life to the promotion of American literature, helping to win for it natural expression and also native independence, in contrast with the imitativeness and the servile sensitiveness to foreign criticism which had marked its previous history.

Mr. Scudder has not failed to point out some of the defects in Lowell’s attitude and in his mental make-up in the earlier years. There were traces of crudeness and of flippancy, an apparent effort always to be saying new or smart things, an air of jauntiness and of forced jocularity, as though these were essential features of the literary attitude. To some extent, it appeared in Lowell as a sort of intoxication with life, exuberant and tumultuous. Perhaps it was likewise a reminiscence of what may be called the Knickerbocker phase in our history, when affectation became almost natural, and to give humorous expression to life was the aim of every literary aspirant. But in Lowell’s case the wit, the humor, and the satire had deeper roots and touched more closely the springs of life, yielding fruit as in the Fable for Critics, and finally, in its perfected form, the Biglow Papers. Here also deep moral purpose underlay the humor. It is an interesting incident, which Mr. Scudder records, that Lowell’s second wife could not endure the Biglow Papers. She was not without a sense of humor, but she told Mr. Stillman that she thought this line of expression was unworthy of her husband’s genius.

Humorous satire often verges on irreverence, and we get a glimpse of this in Lowell’s youth, in his criticism on Daniel Webster. The criticism, of course, was anonymous, appearing in the Standard, an anti-slavery newspaper ; but it hardly seems quite right for so young a man to be taking the venerable statesman to task for his supposed deficiencies, even to be twitting him with his defeat and sore disappointment. Here are a few of Lowell’s sentences:—

“ ‘ What will Mr. Webster do ? ’ asks Smith. ‘ Greatest man of the age! ’ says Brown. ‘ Of any age! ’ adds Jones triumphantly. Meanwhile the greatest man of any age is sulking at Marshfield. It has had its rattle taken away from it. It has been told that nominations were not good for it. It has not been allowed to climb up the back of the presidential chair. . . . We would not be understood as detracting in the least from Mr. Webster’s reputation as a man of great power. He has hitherto given evidence of a great force rather than of a great intellect. But it is a force working without results. It is like a steam engine which is connected by no band with the machinery which it ought to turn. A great intellect leaves behind it something more than a great reputation. The earth is in some way the better for its having taken flesh upon itself. We cannot find that Mr. Webster has communicated an impulse to any of the great ideas which it is the destiny of the nineteenth century to incarnate in action. His energies have been absorbed by Tariff and Constitution and Party, — dry bones into which the touch of no prophet could send life.”

But Lowell, it may be said by way of apology, was for the moment in a somewhat exceptional mood, unable to recognize the great principle for which Webster stood, — the cause of national unity, endangered alike by Southern devotees and Northern abolitionists. The Lowell of later years was a different man from the young Lowell who was anonymously assaulting the great statesman.

At the age of twenty-one Lowell had become engaged to Miss Maria White, of Watertown, near Cambridge, a young lady of beautiful appearance and possessing marked intellectual and spiritual gifts. She was also of a transcendental tendency, of which Emerson was then the spokesman; but she was practical withal, and her influence upon Lowell was profound. She interested him in reforms, especially in the antislavery movement, to such an extent that he was almost ready to identify himself with it, and in danger of making his poetry “ a handmaid to wait upon Reform.” But there was an inward protest which he could not silence, and in the final outcome he refused to go to the full extent of the abolitionist dream. Thus he saved his art from degradation, while yet also he helped the cause of anti-slavery by his poetry as well as by his prose. During the period of his engagement to Miss White, which lasted for five years, Lowell seems to have been living in exalted, ecstatic mood, writing much poetry to be compared with that of Petrarch as giving the language of love. No one can understand Lowell who does not dwell on this episode in his life, fully described by Mr. Scudder:

“Maria White and her brother belonged to a group of young people on most friendly terms with one another, and known offhand by themselves as the Band. They lived in various places, Boston, Cambridge, Watertown, Salem, and were constantly seeking occasions for familiar intercourse.

. . . To this coterie Lowell was now introduced, and the relations between him and Miss White made the pair the centre of attraction. Miss White’s spirituelle beauty and poetic temperament and Lowell’s spontaneity of wit and sentiment were heightened in the eyes of these young people by the attachment between them, and they were known with affectionate jesting as the Queen and King of the Band. In the exalted air upon which the two trod, stimulating each other, their devotion came to have, by a paradox, an almost impersonal character, as if they were creatures of romance; their life was led thus in the open. . . . The letters exchanged by them were passed about also among the other young people of the circle. . . . The two young poets — for Maria White was not only of poetic temperament, but wrote verses, some of which found place in current magazines — were lifted upon a platform by their associates, and were themselves so open in their consciousness of poetic thinking and acting that they took little pains to abscond from this friendly publicity. It is a curious instance of freedom from shamefacedness in so native a New Englander as Lowell, but his letters, his poems, and common report, all testify to an ingenuousness of sentiment at this time, which was a radical trait and less conspicuous later in life only because, like other men, he became subject to convention.”

Lowell was married in 1844, and went for a while to Philadelphia, managing to support himself and his wife by his writings, although, it must be admitted, in a somewhat meagre way. He soon returned to Cambridge, where his father and mother were living, taking up his residence with them at Elmwood; writing articles for various newspapers and magazines with forgotten names, for which he received slight compensation, and sometimes none at all. One is struck with the amount of his literary productiveness, and with his ingenuity in the suggestion of schemes of works, or plans for articles and books. It was, or seems, a desultory process, but he thought he detected beneath it all a unity of purpose. Thus he proposed to classify his poetry into four divisions : 1, Love; 2, Freedom; 3, Beauty ; 4, Life. All of his projects, with a complete summary of his accomplished work, have been carefully collated by his biographer, as they deserved to be, for they stand in vital relation to his development. It also appears that poverty or a straitened income was the experience of Lowell for many years, and, indeed, with one brief period of release, was the normal tenor of his life. There came a small legacy from his wife’s father, and this, together with money received from the sale of his ancestral acres, enabled him to spend the year 1851-52 in Europe, with his family. Hardly had they returned when the health of his wife gave way, and she died in 1853. Of four children who had been born to him but one survived, so that he was left alone with a little girl as the only salvage from the wreck of his life.

Yet this bereavement, as Mr. Scudder has remarked, proved an end and a beginning. His life gained concentration and steadier purpose from the time when he entered upon his Harvard professorship in 1856, though attended with the bitter regret that his wife could not share in the enrichment it brought. In preparation for his teaching he spent another year in Europe, mostly in Germany, for the purpose of acquiring the language. In 1857 he married Miss Frances Dunlap. He had only begun his work in the college when he accepted an invitation to become the editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Mr. Scudder has enumerated the successive efforts to establish some kind of monthly magazine as a vehicle for the best literature, in many of which schemes Lowell was interested to the extent of sending contributions; once even making himself financially responsible, — of course to his loss. These literary journals, with queer names, and with no financial support pledged in advance, were short-lived; sending out two or three interesting numbers, and then passing out of existence. With the Atlantic Monthly, however, a journal was projected destined to live and to exert a wide and profound influence. Lowell, as its first editor, stamped his impress so powerfully that, after nearly fifty years, it still perpetuates his spirit.

But it may be questioned whether his assumption of the duties of an editor helped Lowell to greater efficiency in his college work. He was indeed an inspiring teacher, as is evidenced by the testimony of his pupils. The routine of his position, however, was irksome. He took little interest in faculty meetings, nor could he bring himself to perform certain functions of his office — such as conducting examinations or assigning to pupils their rank — without feeling a degradation of himself or of the subject he was teaching. Thus a story is told of him that, on one occasion, a student asked for the mark assigned to some thesis he had written. Lowell, in reply, after inquiring what grade was expected, offered to give it rather than undergo the drudgery of reading the paper. That his vocation in life was not that of a college teacher is shown in other ways. Not only did he complain that his duties were wearisome, interfering with creative work, but he also exhibited a serious defect in that he did not apparently individualize his pupils, treating them rather as opportunities for self-expression. He stimulated powerfully a few who were anxious to learn, by informal conversations in the classroom or at his home, when he poured himself forth in generous freedom, exerting the spell of a wonderful fascination. And yet one of these students, Mr. Barrett Wendell, who was also an enthusiastic admirer, found that Lowell did not remember him in after years.

The influence of his professional work on Lowell himself was marked and important; for it led him out of the provincial sphere of American literature with which he had been preoccupied, as in his Fable for Critics, into the study of the masterpieces of human thought. He had made his first beginning in this larger field when, still a youth, he had turned to the English dramatists, laying the foundation for his knowledge and observation of life. Yet in a letter to a student inquiring about methods of reading, he answers that in his own experience it had been the study of Dante which had opened to him the interrelations of human knowledge, and proved the beginning of exact scholarship together with the acquisition of learning. Some impression of Lowell’s work as a teacher may be gained from the volumes of his collected essays, where criticism is seen to have real and positive value, because the critic himself is also a producer in the line of creative, imaginative work. The wide range of Lowell’s studies is apparent in the list of authors on whom he comments, from Chaucer down to Wordsworth. Charming as these essays are, revealing as they do the student, the scholar, the philosophical thinker, yet they must be regarded as yielding, both in interest and in importance, to another phase in the author’s career. With Lowell life was always larger than literature, and its claim more pressing. The years of the Harvard professorship coincide with the preparation for the Civil War. Into that event he threw his soul with entire devotion, writing articles for the Atlantic Monthly and for the North American Review, — whose editor he became after closing his connection with the Atlantic, — articles whose appearance constituted sensations in the literature of the war. But this phase of Lowell’s activity goes back in its origin to those early years when he began writing for the anti-slavery papers.

Lowell was from the first and preeminently an American citizen, glorying in his country, believing in its future, striving to make the American people realize their divine calling and their high destiny among the nations of the world. He sought to expound and to vindicate the superiority of distinctive American principles, and in so doing emancipate his countrymen from the weakness which led them to look to the Old World for the standards of literary criticism. Lowell’s Americanism had thus an aggressive quality, and was easily challenged. He will always be remembered by an essay entitled On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners. The tendency among Americans to feel that European countries possess advantages which their own country can never hope to gain, or to ask of foreigners their opinion of America, as though it had any special value; the disposition to wait upon the judgment of European journals as to the merit of our literature; the fear of being laughed at or condemned by English critics, as though they were any better judges than ourselves of literary or artistic worth, — all this was obnoxious to Lowell in the last degree. It was a phase in our national experience which has now, for the most part, passed away. Indeed, it would be humiliating, if it were not also amusing, to recall that there was ever a time when, as a people, we were hurt by the criticism of a Dickens, or were afraid lest we should be despised abroad if our writers dared to let themselves “go ” with the abandon of native enthusiasm. It would be with a sense of shame, if it were not for a present consciousness of equality, not to say superiority, that we remember the depression caused by the English remark, “Who ever reads an American book?” We have learned better now, and it is to Lowell in great measure that we owe our larger self-respect. He was not afraid of enthusiasm; he even proposed, at one time, to write in defense of fanaticism. He has taught us that if people of other countries do not read our books, it is they who are to be pitied, and not we. It is because Americans read all books, of whatever country, that they carry the promise of the future.

But now what is Americanism, and how shall it be defined? In Lowell’s case the answer is apparent. There have been two potent influences acting upon American society at large, and with a special force upon Lowell and such as he, — influences which are like the circulating waves of the invisible ether, known to exist by the manifestation of their results in American life. One of these is Puritanism, and the other is the French Revolution. The first asserted the grandeur and the urgency of moral ideals even to the extent of resisting, and, if necessary, overthrowing every power, however strongly enthroned, which stands in the way of moral advance. That spirit or tendency has passed into American life as one of its chief constituents. Lowell was inspired by it when he wrote his poem Prometheus, or again the lines which he puts into the mouth of Cromwell: —

The other influence, proceeding from France, is closely akin to Puritanism, and yet differs from it widely. Its ideal is human freedom in terms of human brotherhood and equality. How profoundly Lowell yielded to this mood is apparent in his early poetry, especially in the anti-slavery poems, where his utterance is inspired by a concrete motive and a tangible appeal. To the principles of the Declaration of Independence, drawn as they were from French writers who became the precursors of the French Revolution, Lowell, at least in his earlier years, gave an unqualified approval. Thus he spoke of Jefferson, who was saturated with French ideas, as the “first American.” When again in 1848 another revolution broke out in France, Lowell was stirred by his glowing enthusiasm into writing an Ode to France, together with an article in which he exultingly celebrates the triumph of the idea of the people.

These two influences have contributed more powerfully than any other to make America what she is; they form the qualities in which Lowell gloried as distinctively American. They are distinctive, for no other country has felt them both or in like degree. England, for example, never accepted the Puritan movement to the same extent; indeed, it would be nearer the truth to say that she rejected it, banishing it beyond the seas or breaking its backbone at home, so that it ceased to exert a controlling influence. Nor did England receive with such enthusiasm as America the principles of the French Revolution; Burke’s protest was the typical English attitude. France, on the other hand, never gained the moral force of the Puritan movement, and the aspiration for liberty, fraternity, and equaliity suffered from its absence. But it is not necessary to test the nations of Europe by this American standard, in order to demonstrate the existence of distinctive American characteristics; nor should we be justified in having introduced the subject here, were it not so prominent in the thought and experience of Lowell. While the Civil War was in process, he spoke of it as being waged for the “Americanization of all Americans; ” that is, their more thorough fusion into a nationality by the operation of distinctive American forces. It was because Lincoln seemed to embody these truths in his personality as no one had done before to the same extent that Lowell proclaimed him the greatest American.

It should be added, however, that Lowell was far from being a mere visionary or theorist in these matters. He was not what is called a doctrinaire, pushing devotion to moral causes, like that of anti-slavery, to such an extreme as to endanger the nationality. The anti-slavery men could never be made to see that nationality was a higher cause than their own. Hence their treatment of Daniel Webster, as in Whittier’s poem entitled Ichabod. If Lowell were tempted for a moment, as we have seen, into a similar mood, he soon escaped from it. Thus he writes in 1848: “I do not agree with the abolitionists in their disunion and nonvoting theories. They treat ideas as ignorant persons do cherries. They think them unwholesome unless they are swallowed stones and all.” And again, he speaks of Reform as though he had entirely measured it as an ideal of living and found it impossible: “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 with sometimes, and not to be always looking forward. If some of my good, red-hot friends were to see this, they would call me a backslider; but there are other directions in which one may get away from people besides the rearward one.”

Lowell’s enthusiasm for freedom and human brotherhood, but combined in organic fusion with his devotion to the cause of national unity, culminated in the Civil War. It was a proud moment in his life, as marking the fulfillment of his hopes, when he read his memorable Ode at the Harvard Commemoration in 1865. In that poem he reached the high-water mark of his poetic power and inspiration, and it is interesting to read what Mr. Scudder has told us of its composition, — that it was written at white-heat, the night before its delivery. To those who were looking forward, as was Lowell, to a period of moral advance and national honor, after the nation should have vindicated its unity and wiped away the stain of human slavery, — to such as those the revelation of corruption in the high offices of the state, in the years immediately following the Civil War, brought a sense of moral revulsion which words are inadequate to express. So deep was the sense of degradation as to make one blush to own that he was an American citizen. No one felt more keenly than Lowell the disgrace which had befallen the state, nor did any one express more vividly the sense of the common shame. He was now satirizing the Republican party, as previously he had directed his satire against their opponents. When efforts to reform the Republican party, where corruption was intrenched in high places, proved hopeless, Lowell joined the band of independents, — “Mugwumps” they were called,— and became one of their leaders, presiding at their meetings and making speeches in behalf of civil service reform.

To his prominence as an independent politician Lowell may have owed in part his promotion — if so it may be considered — from private life to public office. In Massachusetts, where the independent voters were most numerous, he was chosen in 1876 as a presidential elector, in which capacity he cast his vote for Mr. Hayes. Many will recall the strange proposal made to him, in the emergency which for a moment thrilled the country with its awful possibilities, that he should fall back upon the original conception of the function of an elector, in the exercise of his freedom cast his vote for Tilden, and thus save the state from the threatening peril. It was the choice between personal honor and the salvation of the state from anarchy. If that were the issue, it contained the elements of tragedy.

The appointment of Lowell as American minister to England gave almost universal satisfaction, the only exception being certain discredited politicians who distrusted the appearance of the literary man in politics. In England, also, it was a welcome appointment; for Lowell was known and appreciated by his writings, and had been honored with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge. Among the incidents of the time spent in England Lowell’s speeches are prominent, remembered for their grace and felicity, — the speech at Birmingham on Democracy, or in honor of Longfellow when his memorial was placed at Westminster, or again in memory of Coleridge when his bust was placed in the Abbey, after long years of unmerited neglect. While Lowell was our minister, what was known as the “Irish Question ” was embarrassing the English government. There were possibilities of complication with America, which were treated by Lowell with practical wisdom in the interest of peace between the two nations. But Lowell’s course none the less drew down on him the suspicion and the charge of sympathizing with the English against the Irish, and of pursuing an un-American policy. Some color for the suspicion may have been found in his popularity with the English people, but in anything said or done by him there was no ground for accusation. He performed the duties of his office as any other incumbent would have done, whatever his political sympathies or affiliations.

Yet a change had passed over Lowell in the latter part of his life, so that his attitude was not quite the same toward political issues, and in his mode of expression the difference was marked. Not that he had lost his faith in those elemental convictions which constitute the hope and foundation of great possibilities in the future of America. This point his biographer has made clear. But he had no longer the same confidence in political parties as agencies for carrying on the government, nor did he clearly see the way by which existing evils were to be abolished. He could not have written now the enthusiastic poems of his youth, nor the political papers where human brotherhood hovers in the air, as if almost ready for materialization. He was no longer under any illusions in regard to America, though still retaining his faith in democracy. The truth was, he had not recovered from the sore experience which had destroyed his faith in the Republican party. He had found, when in Europe, that the case of America was being urged as the best argument against republican forms of government. From this abomination of desolation, with its frauds and defalcations, he saw no method of escape. In his own community in Massachusetts the men who were opposed to the removal of abuses were most in evidence : Butler running for office as governor, Boutwell the chief obstacle to civil service reform, and Banks returned to Congress by a large majority. And yet he writes: —

“These fellows have no notion what love of country means. It is in my very blood and bones. I am no pessimist, nor ever was. . . . What fills me with doubt and dismay is the degradation of the moral tone. Is it or is it not a result of democracy ? Is ours a government of the people, by the people, for the people, or a kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools ? Democracy is, after all, nothing more than an experiment like another, and I know only one way of judging it, — by its results. Democracy in itself is no more sacred than monarchy. It is Man who is sacred; it is his duties and opportunities, not his rights, that nowadays need reinforcement. ”

From this mood of moral revulsion, deep and intense as had been the previous mood of hope and exultation, Lowell did not live to recover, nor did he live to see the Republican party rise from its degradation under the influence of new motives and opportunities. The corruption had been but temporary and superficial, — the reaction, it may have been, after a period of prolonged tension, when for the moment the way of the state led through paths of dullness and monotony. However it may have been, Lowell did not live to discern the change which would bring moral purification. In his address The Place of the Independent in Politics, he falls back on the doctrine of the remnant as the only hope of the country, — a doctrine quite the opposite of the democratic creed, that the opinion of the many is the ground of faith. He saw the dangers from the immigration of ignorant foreigners; he groaned over the degradation of the civil service; he had lost faith in political parties. If the attempt to reform these parties from without should fail, then “the failure,” as he writes, “of the experiment of democracy would follow. ” Here is a notable utterance from an essay on Democracy, written in his last years: —

“No ideal [of democracy] is to substitute the interest of the many for that of the few as the test of what is wise in polity and administration, and the opinion of the many for that of the few as the rule of conduct in public affairs. That the interest of the many is the object of whatever social organization man has hitherto been able to effect seems unquestionable; whether their opinions are so safe a guide as the opinions of the few, and whether it will ever be possible, or wise if possible, to substitute the one for the other in the hegemony of the world, is a question still open for debate.”

In the same essay he asserts the authority of the state as the supremely important thing, and deprecates the principle of natural rights: “The claim to any selfish hereditary privilege because you are born a man is as absurd as the same claim because you are born a noble. In a last analysis there is but one natural right, and that is the right of superior force.” There is one sentence toward the close of his address on Democracy which deserves to be quoted, for it is significant as connecting the stages of Lowell’s life in continuous and natural piety: “Our healing is not in the storm or in the whirlwind, it is not in monarchies or aristocracies or democracies, but will be revealed by the still small voice that speaks to the conscience and the heart, prompting us to a wider and a wiser humanity.”

It is in the word “humanity” that we have the clue to Lowell’s life and to his development, to any changes of opinion he may have undergone. Gradually and more and more he was emancipating himself from theories, from crude experiments, because he was reverting to deep and enduring human ways and convictions. Whatever humanity as a whole had loved or had lived and labored for; whatever was essentially human, the necessary outcome of the spirit in man, — to that his soul responded. In this connection, it is to be noted of Lowell’s intellectual history that he passed through life almost wholly unaffected by the scientific influence which was revolutionizing his age. It does not appear that he had given his allegiance to the doctrines of natural selection, the survival of the fittest, and heredity. He remarks on them that if they should be accepted they must profoundly modify the thought and action of men. Mr. Scudder has called attention to Lowell’s “aversion ” to the speculations of science: “he had but a bowing acquaintance with the investigations of Darwin and Huxley ; ” he was “impatient of the encroachments of science on the formation of intellectual beliefs.” In his famous address on the occasion of Harvard’s two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, when he was listened to eagerly by the large audience, he contended earnestly for the humanities as the chief interest of a university. His objection to the elective system was its appearance of making a departure “from the unbroken experience and practice of mankind. ”

From this point of view we may turn to Lowell’s attitude on the subject of religion. Here again he seems to have resented the encroachments of science, which in the interest of a theory was condemning as superstitious those deeper impulses of the human soul, demonstrated to be essentially human by their existence in every age and land. Thus, in his great poem The Cathedral, he defends the religious doctrine of a divine Providence, and the doctrine also of the creation of the world and of man by omnipotent will, in full consciousness of scientific opposition or denial. Again, after reading Mr. Leslie Stephen’s Essays on Free Thinking and Plain Speaking, he writes: —

“Science has scuttled the old Ship of Faith, and now they would fain persuade me that there is something dishonest as well as undignified in drifting about on the hencoop that I had contrived to secure in the confusion. They undertake to demonstrate to me that it’s a hencoop, and an unworthy perch for a philosopher. But I shall cling fast. ’T is as good as a line-ofbattle ship, if it only keep my head above water.”

To Mr. Stephen himself he writes: “My only objection to any part of your book is, that I think our beliefs more a matter of choice (natural selection, perhaps, but anyhow not logical) than you would admit, and that I find no fault with a judicious shutting of the eyes.” During the last illness of Frances Dunlap Lowell, his second wife, he writes : “We took great comfort together in the twenty-third Psalm. I am glad I was born long enough ago to have had some superstitions left. They stand by one, somehow, and the back feels that it has a brother behind it.” To his English friend Mr. Thomas Hughes he says, in a similar strain : “I hate farewells : they always seem to ignore another world by the stress they lay on the chances of never meeting again in this. We shall meet somewhere, for we love one another.”

Once more the subject of religious faith is referred to in the poem The Oracle of the Goldfishes, where doubt of spiritual realities alternates with belief; yet both are human moods, accompanying each other as light and shadow. But the doubts must not be turned by science into dogmatic conclusion, for that were to err with the theologian, who raises belief to a virtue, and condemns doubt as a sin. Lowell refuses, therefore, to permit his doubts to dismay him, as in the lines, —

During the last six years of his life (1885-91) Lowell spent most of his summers in England, and when at home lived partly at Southborough, the residence of his daughter, and partly at Elmwood, employing his time in literary work and to the bringing out of a complete edition of his writings. Ten volumes there are in all: three are given to poetry, two are occupied with his political papers, and the rest are devoted to literature and literary criticism. There is unity running through all that he has written, fusing together even contradictory utterances in its ample embrace, — ample enough to allow for a development whose latter end differed from its beginning. And the principle of the unity is the human outlook. Lowell is our great humanist, almost our solitary one in the closing part of the nineteenth century. He slowly escaped into his native air from the dogmatism of Puritanism, whether Orthodox or Unitarian; refusing also to allow himself to be identified with reforms which would have weakened his simple human sympathies by making him a partisan or an advocate of a theory, instead of an artist whose mission was a larger and a higher one, — to enlighten, to elevate, and to cheer humanity in its march through the world. To this end he held himself aloof from the scientific atmosphere : and here again he seems like an exception, a humanist in an age almost wholly given up to scientific interests or overcome by scientific presumptions. He became, as it were, the mouthpiece of humanity, and for this reason grew dear to his world, receiving in life and in death its highest honors. His wit and humor, as the years went on, became more simple and mellow, — more like that of Lamb or of Goldsmith. It may be said of his writings as Walter Scott said of The Vicar of Wakefield, that their charm lies in their power to reconcile us to life.