Chapter III: First Ventures (3)

MY DEAR FRIEND,--James is so hurried with his book that he has not
an instant to spare, and has therefore commissioned me to answer
your letter, and account to you for his long silence. The truth is,
he delayed writing his articles on Poets and Old Dramatists, or
rather delayed arranging them in the form of conversations, until
he had only two months left for what really required four. The book
must be out before we are married; he has three printers hard upon
for copy, for which he has to rise early and sit up late, so that
he can only spare time to see me twice a week, and then I have but
transient glimpses of his dear face.

The pears were thought delicious, and James would have told you
that we all thought so, had not these troubles about his book just
been dawning upon him. The basket still remains upon a shelf in my
closet, and when I look at it a pleasant train of thoughts comes up
in regard to my housekeeping, in which I see it filled, with eggs
white as snow, or apples from our little plot, though never again
with pears like those which first consecrated it.

Both James and myself feel greatly interested in your journal,[40]
in spite of its proposed name. James told me to express his horror
to you at the cockneyism of such a title. _The Broadway Chronicle_
chronicles the thoughts and feelings of Broadway, not those of the
New England people whom you seem willing to receive somewhat from.
Should not a title have truth for its first recommendation? Do you
write from the meridian of Broadway? I think you write from a
sturdy New England heart, that has a good strong well-spring of old
Puritan blood beating therein, with all its hatred to forms and
cant, to fashion and show. If ‘Pistol speaks naught but truth,’
should his name be a lie? Pistol’s is not; it expresses the man
truly. I wish yours did as much to us here, though if it _really_
gratifies your taste and judgment, if it is not a _whim_, but a
_thought_, we shall all like it in time, I suppose, if we do not
now. If it is good we shall of course come round to it. I always
say just what I think, as you see, and I trust it will not seem
harsh and unlovely to you in me as a woman. I do not wish to appear
so ever, but I had rather than give up what I think is truly and
undeniably one of _woman’s_ rights in common with man.

James says he cannot say anything now with certainty in regard to
his contributions to your paper, except that he will give you, of
course, the best he has. Mrs. Putnam, I believe, has nothing
translated at present, but James will ask her, also William Story
and Nathan Hale. I have some translations I made from the German,
songs, ballads, etc., which are at your service if you care to have
them. I hope to write somewhat when I can have James always by my
side to encourage me, and in time it may be something more than a
source of pleasure to us. Carter has seen your letter, and I do not
doubt will be ready to do all he can, ready and glad.

I intended to have written to you and Mrs. Briggs expressly to
invite you to our wedding, but I cannot do it now with much force
or grace after your paragraph on the subject.[41] To us who have
been married for nearly five years, it is of course no spiritual
change; but if it were merely for the fact that from that day we
can always be together, it would be well worth celebrating by some
rite and calling our friends about us to participate in it. What
that rite is does not greatly matter, but I prefer that which time
has consecrated.

“I can scorn nothing which a nation’s heart
Hath held for ages holy.”

That is, nothing in the form of rite or observance for things in
themselves sacred, for you will tell me the Ages held the gibbet,
the scourge and rack holy, if I let it pass without qualification.
Still, I bid you to our marriage, though I trust even if you do not
come you can see it whenever you see us. Some have great need to
ask their friends at such a time, that they may afterwards certify
such a thing has taken place because no trace of it remains. It can
never be so with us, it could never be so with any who hold love
sacred....

We shall be married the night after Christmas, and go on to New
York after one day and night spent at home. We should love to stop
there to see you” as long as you would like to have us, but our
present engagements in Philadelphia will take us directly on there.
We shall be in New York on Sunday, _where_ is not decided yet. With
love to your wife, yours with friendly heart,

MARIA WHITE.

The book which this letter speaks of as absorbing Lowell’s time and thought was his “Conversations on Some of the Old Poets,” for which Miss White made a cover design and which was published by John Owen early in January, 1845. It will be remembered that Lowell began in the _Boston Miscellany_ and continued in the _Pioneer_ some studies on the Old Dramatists. The series might have gone on at greater length, for he was working a vein which yielded him great delight, and never indeed ceased to engage his attention. He resumed the theme in the last considerable venture of his life, and gave a course of lectures at the Lowell Institute in the spring of 1887, which was in effect a series of readings from the dramatists with running comments. “When I selected my topic for this new venture,” he said to his audience at the opening of the course, “I was returning to a first love. The second volume I ever printed, in 1843 I think it was,[42]--it is now a rare book, I am not sorry to know; I have not seen it for many years,--was mainly about the Old English Dramatists, if I am not mistaken. I dare say it was crude enough, but it was spontaneous and honest.”

The suspension of the _Pioneer_ left Lowell without any convenient vehicle for carrying further these appreciative papers, and he projected a book partly because the subject was in his mind, partly because he was anxious to turn his printed matter to fresh account, but chiefly, it must be inferred from the contents of the book, because he was eager to have freedom of speech on several matters which lay close to his mind. He resolved, therefore, to remodel his papers, so far as he used them at all, into a series of conversations. His work upon the book was hurried, as the letter last quoted from Miss White intimates. In September, 1844, he was planning a course of four or five lectures on English poetry, beginning with Chaucer, which he proposed delivering in Philadelphia in the winter immediately after his marriage; but he seems suddenly to have changed his mind, and to have tossed what he might have prepared into this new book, which opens with a long conversation on Chaucer,--a conversation split in the next edition into two. The passages from Chaucer which he quotes are drawn sometimes from the modernization by Wordsworth, but are also, in some cases, his own much closer simplification of the original. To the ear they depart very little from the original, the widest departure being in getting rid of the final _e_. The talk on Chaucer is followed by comments on Chapman and Ford, with reference by easy suggestion to Shakespeare, Marlowe, Fletcher, Pope, and Wordsworth.

But though the staple of the “Conversations” is poetry, and there are generous examples and much keen appreciation of the poets discussed, the book would interest a reader to-day less by its treatment of the subjects which gave it excuse for being than by its free and careless exhibition of Lowell’s mind on topics of current concern. There is very little of dramatic assumption in the interlocutors. Philip and John are simply convenient personages playing at a battledore and shuttlecock game of words. Philip is the major character, who does all of the reading and advances most of the propositions, but John, whose chief part is to start Philip by questions, and to interpose occasional jibes or independent observations, is not differentiated in manner; he is another of Lowell’s many selves, and may be taken as the critical, interrupting side of his mind.[43] But both speakers are after the same game.

One of the agreeable touches in the volume is in the asides with which Lowell refers to contemporary authors like Hawthorne and Longfellow, to Page, to Dwight, and to such beginners as W. W. Story and R. C., and when he takes up for discussion a recent address by the Rev. Mr. Putnam. These references and allusions help one to understand the attitude which Lowell took toward his book. He did not deceive himself as to its importance. It was a prolongation of his magazine work and gave him an opportunity to free his mind. The form, as I have intimated, was not that of a true conversation; it is far removed from such excellent exemplars as the “Imaginary Conversations” of Landor, the first of which had appeared a score of years before; it had but little of the graceful fencing which brings the talkers closer and closer to the heart of a subject, till one makes the final thrust that disarms his antagonist. No; it was simply a device to secure flexibility and discursiveness, and is talk run mad, sometimes an harangue, sometimes an epigram, most often a rapid flow of views on literature and life. “If some of the topics introduced seem foreign to the subject,” says Lowell, in his prefatory address To the Reader, “I can only say that they are not so to my mind, and that an author’s object in writing criticisms is not only to bring to light the beauties of the works he is considering, but also to express his own opinions upon those and other matters.”

The reading which lies behind the talk is varied, and the talker speaks from a full mind, but there is none of that restraint of art which gives weight to the words and makes one wish to read again and again the reflections. The cleverness is of the showy sort, and an interesting comparison could be drawn between the portions of the book which relate directly to the dramatists and the more mellow discussion of the same subject in the latest of Lowell’s published prose. But despite the crudeness which marks the earlier book, it shares with the later that delightful spontaneity and first hand intelligence which make Lowell always worth attention when he speaks on literary art. It was characteristic of him that when at sixty-eight he discoursed on the dramatists whom he had been reading all his life, he had not the need and apparently not the curiosity to turn back and see what he said about them at twenty-five. There was little, if any, of the careful husbandry of his ideas which marks some men of letters; out of the abundance of the heart his mouth spoke.

In no one of his books can the reader discern better the spontaneous element in Lowell’s mind, and the length to which he could go under the impulse of the immediate thought. So fluent was he, so unaware of any effort, and so swept away for the time being by the stream of his ideas, that he seemed to himself as one possessed, and more than once he hinted darkly that he was not writing the book, but was the spokesman for sages and poets who used him as their means of communication. The visionary faculty which he possessed could easily be confused at this time with the half-rapt condition of the mind fed with emotional ardor. The book, as we have seen, was written at full speed, and it reflects the generous nature of the writer; but it reflects also the untempered thought, and registers judgments in the process of making.

Running through the entire book, and making the real excuse for it, is Lowell’s study of the essence of poetry. This is what gives to the volume its chief interest; it is really a half-conscious explication of the concern which was most agitating his mind at this time. What was poetry? Could it be the substance of a man’s life? There is a prosecution of some of the same problems which recently he had been trying to solve in his own volume of poems. He had to ask himself if he was a poet. The witness for that was to be found not so much in his taste and his preferences in literature, nor solely in the delight which he took in versification; he felt the stirring in his nature of that high vocation of the poet which makes him a seer and an interpreter. His impulse was to yield to it, but the question arose, What was he to interpret? What was there in life about him which was crying out for articulation? And here, if I mistake not, he fell into some confusion of mind through the insistence of one particular incarnation of divine thought. He was conscious and aware of a momentous idea, that of freedom expressed in terms of human brotherhood, words which even then had the dull ring of cant when they were used by counterfeit-minded men, yet had in the minds of genuine men and women a vibrant and exultant sound as if they were to pay all the debts of poor human nature. Remembering that this was on the eve of ’48, when the visionaries of Europe and America were very sure that they saw a great light, one sees how forcible this idea could be as a motive in the throbbing and ingenuous heart of a young American who was quite sure he was called to high endeavor.

But with the shrewdness which belonged to his mother wit, Lowell could not satisfy himself with merely windy utterances. He needed emphatically to kindle something with his divine flame. As he says of Lessing: “His genius was not a St. Elmo’s fire, as it so often is with mere poets,--as it was in Shelley, for example, playing in ineffectual flame about the points of his thoughts, but was interfused with his whole nature and made a part of his very being.” Now he found himself confronting a monstrous denial of this truth of freedom issuing in human brotherhood when he contemplated slavery in America, and his natural indignation was heightened by the ardor of the woman he loved. Was he not, after all, to be a reformer beyond everything else? and where was the point of contact between the poet and the reformer? His mind circled about this problem; his convictions called upon him with a loud voice to make good his professions; his instinctive sense of congruity, which is hardly more than an alternate form of the sense of humor, forbade him to make poetry the maid of all work for the anti-slavery cause, and he sought diligently to resolve this particular form of spiritual activity into the elemental properties of freedom, and so to find therein a true medium for the sustenance of poetry. Moreover, though he described himself not long after, in “A Fable for Critics,” as--

“striving Parnassus to climb
With a whole bale of _isms_ tied together with rhyme,”--

it must be said with emphasis that he held these _isms_ too lightly for them to become the determining factor in his intellectual and spiritual growth. They did hamper him, as he says a little ruefully in the next line, and while it is idle business to speculate on what a man might have become in the absence of the very conditions that made him what he was, one is tempted to wonder if with his endowments Lowell might not, under less strenuous conditions, have been exclusively a poet. What is one man’s meat is another man’s poison, says the homely adage, and it is a curious fact that but for the same flame of anti-slavery passion Whittier might never have been more than a verbose Quietist versifier.

In his dedication of the volume to his father, Lowell speaks of it as “containing many opinions from which he will wholly, yet with the large charity of a Christian heart, dissent,” and the most flagrant of these is probably in a passage in which he speaks with vehemence of the church and religion. As falls to the hearer of many impulsive utterances of young men, one is apt to see in them rather the impatience of a generous heart (“why so hot, my little man?”) than the deliberate convictions into which one has been forced reluctantly, but the passage is so characteristic of Lowell at this period and so expressive of the turbulence of his mind that it may well be read here. John has been commenting on the innate piety of Chaucer as illustrated by his glowing words on the daisy, and Philip takes up the parable.

“PHILIP.

“Piety is indifferent whether she enters at the eye or the ear.
There is none of the senses at which she does not knock one day or
other. The Puritans forgot this and thrust beauty out of the
meeting-house, and slammed the door in her face. I love such
sensuality as that which Chaucer shows in his love of nature.
Surely, God did not give us these fine senses as so many posterns
to the heart for the Devil to enter at. I believe that he has
endowed us with no faculty but for his own glory. If the Devil has
got false keys to them, we must first have given him a model of
the wards to make a mould by. The senses can do nothing unless the
soul be an accomplice, and, in whatever the soul does, the body
will have a voice....

“JOHN.

“All things that make us happy incline us also to be grateful, and
I would rather enlarge than lessen the number of these. Morose and
callous recluses have persuaded men that religion is a prude, and
have forced her to lengthen her face, and contract her brows to
suit the character. They have laid out a gloomy turnpike to heaven,
upon which they and their heirs and assigns are privileged to levy
tolls, and have set up guide-boards to make us believe that all
other roads lead in quite an opposite direction. The pleasanter
they are, the more dangerous. For my part, I am satisfied that I am
upon the right path so long as I can see anything to make me
happier, anything to make me love man, and therefore God, the more.
I would stamp God’s name, and not Satan’s, upon every innocent
pleasure, upon every legitimate gratification of sense, and God
would be the better served for it. In what has Satan deserved so
well of us, that we should set aside such first-fruits for him?
Christianity differs not more widely from Plato than from the
Puritans.

“PHILIP.

“The church needs reforming now as much as in Luther’s time, and
sells her indulgences as readily. There are altars to which the
slaveholder is admitted, while the Unitarian would be put forth as
unclean. If it be God’s altar, both have a right there,--the sinner
most of all,--but let him not go unrebuked. We hire our religion by
the quarter, and if it tells any disagreeable truths, we dismiss
it, for we did not pay it for such service as this. Christ scourged
the sellers of doves out of the temple; we invite the sellers of
men and women in. We have few such preachers now as Nathan was.
They preach against sin in the abstract, shooting their arrows into
the woundless air. Let sin wrap itself in superfine broadcloth, and
put its name on charitable subscription papers, and it is safe. We
bandy compliments with it, instead of saying sternly ‘Get thee
behind me!’ The Devil might listen to some preaching I have heard
without getting his appetite spoiled. There is a great deal of time
and money expended to make men believe that this one or that one
will be damned, and to scare or wheedle them into good Calvinists
or Episcopalians; but very little pains is taken to make them good
Christians....

“JOHN.

“It has never been a safe thing to breathe a whisper against the
church, least of all in this country, where it has no prop from the
state, but is founded only on the love, or, if you will have it so,
the prejudices of the people. Religion has come to be esteemed
synonymous with the church; there are few minds clear enough to
separate it from the building erected for its convenience and
shelter. It is this which has made our Christianity external, a
task-ceremony to be gone through with, and not a principle of life
itself. The church has been looked on too much in the light of a
machine, which only needs a little oil, now and then, on its joints
and axles, to make it run glibly and perform all its functions
without grating or creaking. Nothing that we can say will be of
much service. The reformers must come from her own bosom; and there
are many devout souls among her own priests now, who would lay down
their lives to purify her. The names of infidel and heretic are the
_San benitos_ in which we dress offenders in the nineteenth
century, and a bigoted public opinion furnishes the fagots and
applies the match! The very cross itself, to which the sacred right
of private judgment fled for sanctuary, has been turned into a
whipping post. Doubtless, there are no nations on the earth so
wicked as those which profess Christianity; and the blame may be
laid in great measure at the door of the church, which has always
sought temporal power, and has chosen rather to lean upon the arm
of flesh than upon that of God. The church has corrupted
Christianity. She has decked her person and embroidered her
garments with the spoils of pagan altars, and has built her temples
of blocks which paganism has squared ready to her hand. We are
still Huns and Vandals, and Saxons and Celts, at heart. We have
carved a cross upon our altars, but the smoke of our sacrifice goes
up to Thor and Odin still. Lately I read in the newspapers a toast
given at a military festival, by one of those who claim to be the
earthly representatives of the Prince of Peace. England and France
send out the cannon and the bayonet, upon missionary enterprises,
to India and Africa, and our modern Eliots and Brainerds among the
red men are of the same persuasive metal.

“PHILIP.

“Well, well, let us hope for change. There are signs of it; there
has been a growling of thunder round the horizon for many days. We
are like the people in countries subject to earthquakes, who crowd
into the churches for safety, but find that their sacred walls are
as fragile as other works of human hands. Nay, the very massiveness
of their architecture makes their destruction more sudden and their
fall more dangerous. You and I have become convinced of this. Both
of us, having certain reforms at heart, and believing them to be of
vital interest to mankind, turned first to the church as the
nearest helper under God. We have been disappointed. Let us not
waste our time in throwing stones at its insensible doors. As you
have said, the reformers must come from within. The prejudice of
position is so strong that all her servants will unite against an
exoteric assailant, melting up, if need be, the holy vessels for
bullets, and using the leaves of the holy book itself for wadding.
But I will never enter a church from which a prayer goes up for the
prosperous only, or for the unfortunate among the oppressors, and
not for the oppressed and fallen; as if God had ordained our pride
of caste and our distinctions of color, and as if Christ had
forgotten those that are in bonds. We are bid to imitate God; let
us in this also follow his example, whose only revenge upon error
is the giving success to truth, and but strive more cheerfully for
the triumph of what we believe to be right. Let us, above all
things, imitate him in ascribing what we see of wrong-doing to
blindness and error, rather than to wilful sin. The Devil loves
nothing better than the intolerance of reformers, and dreads
nothing so much as their charity and patience. The scourge is
better upon our backs than in our hands.

“JOHN.

“When the air grows thick and heavy, and the clouds gather in the
moral atmosphere, the tall steeples of the church are apt to
attract the lightning first. Its pride and love of high places are
the most fatal of conductors. That small upper room, in which the
disciples were first gathered, would always be safe enough.”

These kindling words are those of a reformer dealing with existing conditions. It would be much more to the point if we could have in definite terms that revelation of the inner verity of religion which visited Lowell a little earlier than this, as may be seen by a passage from a letter to Dr. Loring, 20 September, 1842. “I had a revelation last Friday evening. I was at Mary’s, and happening to say something of the presence of spirits (of whom, I said, I was often dimly aware), Mr. Putnam entered into an argument with me on spiritual matters. As I was speaking the whole system rose up before me like a vague Destiny looming from the abyss. I never before so clearly felt the spirit of God in me and around me. The whole room seemed to me full of God. The air seemed to wave to and fro with the presence of Something, I knew not what. I spoke with the calmness and clearness of a prophet.”[44]

No doubt this ecstasy may be regarded as one manifestation of that psychical temper which caused him to see visions in his childhood, but it allied itself with intellectual processes, for he goes on to say: “I cannot tell you what this revelation was. I have not yet studied it enough. But I shall perfect it one day, and then you shall hear it and acknowledge its grandeur. It embraces all other systems.”

We may not find a clear statement of this mystic revelation in the discursive “Conversations;” rather we should look for it in his poems of this period, and here, though we find nothing whatever to correspond to a system of divine order, we do find, recurring in various forms, a recognition of an all-embracing, all-penetrating power which through the poet transmutes nature into something finer and more eternal, and gives him a vantage ground from which to perceive more truly the realities of life. “The Token,” “An Incident in a Railroad Car,” “The Shepherd of King Admetus,” all in a manner witness to this, and show how persistently in Lowell’s mind was present this aspect of the poet which makes him a seer. Perhaps there is a more direct attempt at expressing this truth in one of the poems not retained in later collections. It is entitled “A Dirge,” and is the imagined plaint over a poet who has died. In this tumultuous period of Lowell’s youth, when the tranquillity which a returned love brought was after all a very self-conscious tranquillity, there was always room for morbid fancies, and the frequency with which in his poetry he recurs to the images of death leads one to suspect that he experimented a little with the idea of his own death. And it may be that in this poem, which a healthier judgment later led him to suppress, he was dramatizing himself.

“Poet! lonely is thy bed,
And the turf is overhead,--
Cold earth is thy cover;
But thy heart hath found release,
And it slumbers full of peace
’Neath the rustle of green trees,
And the warm hum of the bees
Mid the drowsy clover;
Through thy chamber still as death
A smooth gurgle wandereth,
As the blue stream murmureth
To the blue sky over.

* * * * *

Thou wast full of love and truth,
Of forgivingness and ruth,--
Thy great heart with hope and youth
Tided to o’erflowing;
Thou didst dwell in mysteries,
And there lingered on thine eyes
Shadows of serener skies,
Awfully wild memories
That were like foreknowing;
Thou didst remember well and long
Some fragments of thine angel-song,
And strive, through want, and woe, and wrong,
To win the world unto it;
Thy curse it was to see and hear
Beyond to-day’s scant hemisphere,
Beyond all mists of doubt and fear,
Into a life more true and clear,--
And dearly thou didst rue it.

* * * * *

“Poet! underneath the turf,
Soft thou sleepest, free from morrow;
Thou hast struggled through the surf
Of wild thoughts, and want, and sorrow;
Now, beneath the moaning pine
Full of rest thy body lieth,
While, far up in pure sunshine,
Underneath a sky divine,
Her loosed wings thy spirit trieth;
Oft she strove to spread them here,
But they were too white and clear
For our dingy atmosphere.”

The limitations of his theme and measure forbid more than a hint at this vocation of the poet, but it happens that we have a somewhat more explicit statement of the same general idea in a prose form. A very few weeks after the revelation referred to in the letter to Dr. Loring, too soon certainly for it to have faded from his mind, he sat down to write a paper on “The Plays of Thomas Middleton,” and the introductory passages contain what may fairly be taken as snatches from that music of the spheres which he seems suddenly to have overheard.

“Poets are the forerunners and prophets of changes in the moral world. Driven, by their finer nature, to search into and reverently contemplate the universal laws of soul, they find some fragments of the broken tables of God’s law, and interpret it, half conscious of its mighty import. While philosophers are wrangling, and politicians playing at snapdragon with the destinies of millions, the poet, in the silent deeps of his soul, listens to those mysterious pulses which, from one central heart, send life and beauty through the finest veins of the universe, and utters truths to be sneered at, perchance, by contemporaries, but which become religion to posterity....

“The dreams of poets are morning-dreams, coming to them in the early dawn and day-breaking of great truths, and are surely fulfilled at last. They repeat them, as children do, and all Christendom, if it be not too busy with quarrelling about the meaning of creeds which have no meaning at all, listens with a shrug of the shoulders and a smile of pitying incredulity: for reformers are always madmen in their own age, and infallible saints in the next.”

In such rhetorical terms did Lowell, all aflame himself with poetic zeal, try to outline the divine call of the poet, and the “Conversations” reënforce a doctrine which was held more firmly since the preacher was eager to display it in his own practice. At this time, certainly, Lowell’s conception of the function of the poet was blended with his apprehension of the divine order, and he entered upon the discharge of poetic duties with the seriousness which a young priest might have carried to the sacred office. The very suppression of his native humor, so that it makes only a few furtive leaps in his poetry up to this time,--for we are setting aside his boyish pranks in verse,--illustrates the exalted mood in which he was living.

* * * * *

The “Conversations on Some of the Old Poets” was published, as we have seen, in January, 1845,[45] but as soon as his own part of the book was done, he was free for a more vital venture: on the 26th of December, 1844, after a five years’ betrothal, he was married in her father’s house at Watertown to Maria White.