Chapter V (1)

I suppose that every man's faith is the outgrowth of his disposition, and mine makes me believe that the truth embraces all the blackest of this pessimism and also the victory over it. I admit and declare that our case is as bad as anybody has found it to be. In a generation which soothes itself with the assurance that there is no hell, I am one who fears that its fire is leaping through every artery of society.

And yet I have never a doubt that there is a spirit which may lead a man through any calling always into more of the life and freedom of the Kingdom of God.

For one thing, it is necessary that your calling at its best, the best that it has done, the best that it may do, should lay before you a program of tasks, the first of them lying definitely before you and within your power, the others stretching away into all that a man can do in that sort. This is no treadmill. This is a ladder, resting on the ground, stretching toward heaven.

For another thing, you must delight in your work. Your heart and body must be in it and not tugging to be away at something else. You do not then deal out to each bit of work its stingy bit of your attention. You delight in the thing. You hover and brood over it like a lover and lavish upon it the wealth of uncounted hours.

The sure consequence is that you are not doing the same things over and over and grooving the same habits deeper and deeper. Habits cannot stand in this heat. They fuse and flow together. They are no longer chains. They are wings. They lift you up and bear you swiftly and joyfully forward.

This is indeed the life of joy. You have the joy of efficiency. You have the joy of doing the best you had hoped to do. And it may be that once and again you will be set shaking with delight because something within you has turned out a better bit of work than you had thought possible.

And if, besides all this, the background of feeling and will in you is wholly right; if, by the grace of God, you have learned to work in delicate veracity, stern against yourself, loyal to the Perfection whose veils no man has lifted; if the far vision of that Perfection touches you with humility, mans you with courage, and makes you leap glad to meet the tasks which are set for you,--what is this but entrance here and now into the Kingdom of God?

And if this crowning grace comes to you, as it may in any calling--it came to Uncle Tom--you will not, I think, believe that all your hands have wrought is vanity. You will not believe that the Logos who has called our race out of the earth to behold and share in his creation is a dream, a mockery of our despair, as we make the last useless turns about the dying sun. But you will see that He knew the truth of things who said:

My Father worketh hitherto and I work. The works that I do shall ye do
also and greater works than these shall ye do because I go to the
Father.

THE FALLOW[13]

JOHN AGRICOLA

[Footnote 13: By permission of the author, John Finley.]

In a book on "Roman Farm Management" containing translations of Cato and Varro by a "Virginia Farmer" (who happens also to be an American railroad president), there is quoted in the original Latin a proverb whose practice not only gave basis for the proud phrase "_Romanus sum_" but also helped to make the Romans "a people of enduring achievement." It is "_Romanus sedendo vincit_." For, as this new-world farmer adds by way of translation and emphasis, "The Romans achieved their results by _thoroughness_ and _patience_." "It was thus," he continues, "they defeated Hannibal, and it was thus that they built their farmhouses and fences, cultivated their fields, their vineyards and their olive yards, and bred and fed their livestock. They seemed to have realized that there are no shortcuts in the processes of nature and that the law of compensations is invariable." "The foundation of their agriculture," he asserts, "was the _fallow_"; and concludes, commenting upon this, that while "one can find instruction in their practice even to-day, one can benefit even more from their agricultural philosophy, for the characteristic of the American farmer is that he is in too much of a hurry."

This is only by way of preface to saying that the need in our educational philosophy, or, at any rate, in our educational practice, as in agriculture, is the need of the _fallow_.

It will be known to philologists, even to those who have no agricultural knowledge, that the "fallow field" is not an idle field, though that is the popular notion. "Fallow" as a noun meant originally a "harrow," and as a verb, "to plough," "to harrow." "A fallow field is a field ploughed and tilled," but left unsown for a time as to the main crop of its productivity; or, in better modern practice, I believe, sown to a crop valuable not for what it will bring in the market (for it may be utterly unsalable), but for what it will give to the soil in enriching it for its higher and longer productivity.

I employ this agricultural metaphor not in ignorance; for I have, out on these very prairies, read between corn-husking and the spring ploughing Virgil's _Georgics_ and _Bucolics_, for which Varro's treatises furnished the foundations. And I have also, on these same prairies, carried Horace's _Odes_, in the spring, to the field with me, strapping the book to the plough to read while the horses rested at the furrow's end.

Nor do I employ this metaphor demeaningly. Nothing has so glorified for me my youthful days on these prairies as the associations which the classics, including the Bible, gave to them on the farm; and also in the shop, I may add, for it was in the shop, as well as on the farm, that I had their companionship. When learning the printer's trade, while a college student, I set up in small pica my translation of the daily allotment of the _Prometheus Bound_ of Aeschylus, and that dark and dingy old shop became the world of the Titan who "manward sent Art's mighty means and perfect rudiment," the place where the divine in man "defied the invincible gesture of necessity." And nothing can so glorify the classics as to bring them into the field and into the shop and let them become woven into the tasks that might else seem monotonous or menial.

In a recent editorial in the _New York Times_ it was said that the men and the times of Aristophanes were much more modern than the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes. But this was simply because Aristophanes immortally portrayed the undying things in human nature, whereas the issues associated with this particular administration were evanescent. The immortal is, of course, always modern, and the classic is the immortal, the timeless distillation of human experience.

But I wander from my thesis which is that the classics are needed as the _fallow_ to give lasting and increasing fertility to the natural mind out upon democracy's great levels, into which so much has been washed down and laid down from the Olympic mountains and eternal hills of the classical world.

In the war days we naturally ignored the _fallow_. We cultivated with Hooverian haste. It was necessary to put our soil in peril of exhaustion even as we put our men in peril of death. Forty million added acres were commandeered, six billions of bushels of the leading cereals were added to the annual product of earlier seasons. The land could be let to think only of immediate defense. Crops only could be grown which would help promptly to win the war. Vetch and clover and all else that permanently enriched must be given up for war gardening or war farming. The motto was not _Americanus sedendo vincit_ but _Americanus accelerando vincit_.

But on this day of my writing (the day of the signing of the peace) I am thinking that in agriculture and in education as well, we must again turn our thoughts to the virtues of thoroughness and patience--the virtues of the fallow, that is, to ploughing and harrowing and tilling, _not_ for the immediate crop, but for the enrichment of the soil and of the mind, according as our thought is of agriculture or education.

Cato, when asked what the first principle of good agriculture was, answered "To plough well." When asked what the second was, replied "To plough again." And when asked what the third was, said "To apply fertilizer." And a later Latin writer speaks of the farmer who does not plough thoroughly as one who becomes a mere "clodhopper." You will notice that it is not sowing, nor hoeing after the sowing, but ploughing that is the basic operation.

It is the sowing, however, that is popularly put first in our agricultural and educational theory. "A sower went forth to sow." A teacher went forth to teach, that is, to scatter information, facts:--arithmetical, historical, geographical, linguistic facts. But the emphasis of the greatest agricultural parable in our literature was after all not on the sowing but on the soil, on that upon which or into which the seed fell,--or as it might be better expressed, upon the _fallow_. It was only the fallow ground, the ground that had been properly cleared of stones, thorns, and other shallowing or choking encumbrances, that gave point to the parable. It was the same seed that fell upon the stony, thorny, and fallow ground alike.

There is a time to sow, to sow the seed for the special crop you want; but it is after you have ploughed the field. There is a time to specialize, to give the information which the life is to produce in kind; but it is when you have thoroughly prepared the mind by its ploughing disciplines.

I have lately seen the type of agriculture practised out in the fields that were the Scriptural cradle of the race. There the ploughing is but the scratching of the surface. Indeed, the sowing is on the top of the ground and the so-called ploughing or scratching in with a crooked stick comes after. Contrast this with the deep ploughing of the West, and we have one explanation at least of the greater productivity of the West. And there is the educational analogue here as well. In those homelands of the race, the seed of the mind is sown on the surface and is scratched in by oral and choral repetitions. The mind that receives it is not ploughed, is not trained to think. It merely receives and with shallow root, if it be not scorched, gives back its meager crop.

There must be ploughing before the sowing, and deep ploughing if things with root are to find abundant life and fruit. And the classics to my thought furnish the best ploughs for the mind,--at any rate for minds that have depth of soil. For shallow minds, "where there is not much depth of earth," where, because there cannot be much root, that which springs up withers away, it were perhaps not worth while to risk this precious implement. And then, too, there are geniuses whose fertility needs not the same stirring disciplines. There are also other ploughs, but as a ploughman I have found none better for English use than the plough which has the classical name, the plough which reaches the sub-soil, which supplements the furrowing ploughs in bringing to the culture of our youthful minds that which lies deep in the experience of the race.

There are many kinds of fallow as I have already intimated. The more modern is not the "bare fallow" which lets the land so ploughed and harrowed lie unsown even for a season, but the fallow, of varied name, where the land is sown to crops whose purpose is to gather the free nitrogen back into the ground for its enrichment. So is our fallowing by the classics not only to prepare the ground, clear it of weeds, aerate it, break up the clods, but also to enrich it by bringing back into the mind of the youth of to-day that which has escaped into the air of the ages past through the great human minds that have lived and loved upon this earth and laid themselves down into its dust to die.

In New York City, a young man, born out upon the prairies, was lying, as it was thought, near to death, in a hospital. He turned to the nurse and asked what month it was. She answered that it was early May. He thought of the prairies, glorified to him by Horace's _Odes_. He heard the frogs in the swales amid the virgin prairie flowers as Aristophanes had heard them in the ponds of Greece. He saw the springing oats in a neighboring field that should furnish the pipes for the winds of Pan. He saw, as the dying poet Ibycus, the cranes go honking overhead. And he said, "I can't die now. It's ploughing time."

* * * * *

It is "ploughing time" for the world again, and ploughing time not only because we turn from instruments of war to those of peace, symbolized since the days of Isaiah by the "ploughshares" beaten from swords, but because we must turn to the cultivation with _thoroughness_ and _patience_ not only of our acres but of the minds that are alike to have world horizons in this new season of the earth.

Amos prophesied that in the day of restoration "the ploughman would overtake the reaper." War's grim reaper is quitting the field to-day. The ploughman has overtaken him. May he remember the law of the "_fallow_" and not be in too great a hurry.

WRITING AND READING[14]

JOHN MATTHEWS MANLY AND EDITH RICKERT

[Footnote 14: From _The Writing of English_, by John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert. Copyright, 1919, by Henry Holt and Co. By permission of the authors and of the publishers.]

Do you like to write? Probably not. What have you tried to write? Probably "themes."

The "theme" is a literary form invented by teachers of rhetoric for the education of students in the art of writing. It does not exist outside the world of school and college. No editor ever accepted a "theme." No "theme" was ever delivered from a rostrum, or spoken at a dinner, or bound between the covers of a book in the hope that it might live for centuries. In a word, a "theme" is first and last a product of "composition"--a laborious putting together of ideas, without audience and without purpose, hated alike by student and by instructor. Its sole use is to exemplify the principles of rhetoric. But rhetoric belongs to the past as much as the toga and the snuffbox; it is an extinct art, the art of cultivating style according to the mannerisms of a vanished age.

Forget that you ever wrote a "theme," and ask yourself now: "Should I like to write?" Of course you would--if you could. And you can. You have had, and you will have, some experiences that will not be repeated exactly in any other life--that no one else can express exactly as you would express them. And the art of expressing what you have experienced, what you think, what you feel, and what you believe, can be learned.

If you stop to consider the matter, you will realize that self-expression is one of the laws of life; you do express yourself day after day, whether you will or not. Hence, the more quickly you learn that successful self-expression is the source of one of the greatest pleasures in life, the more readily will you be able to turn your energy in the right direction, and the more fun will you get out of the process. The kind of delight that comes through self-expression of the body, through the play of the muscles in running or hurdling, through the play of muscles and mind together in football or baseball or tennis or golf, comes also through the exercise of the mind alone in talk or in writing.

Remember always throughout this course, that you have something to say--something peculiar to yourself that should be contributed to the sum of the world's experience, something that cannot be contributed by anyone but yourself. It may be much or it may be little: with that you are not concerned at present; your business now is to find out how to say it; how to clear away the obstacles that clog self-expression; how to give your mind free swing; and how to get all the fun there is in the process.

The initial problems in learning to write are: How can you get at this store of material hidden within you? and how can you know when you have found it? Your experience, however interesting, is as yet very limited. How can you tell which phases of it deserve expression, and which are mere commonplace? The quickest way to answer this question is by reading. Reading will tell you which phases of experience have been commonly treated and which have been neglected. Moreover, as you read you will be surprised to find that very often the features of your life which seem to you peculiarly interesting are exactly those that are commonly--and even cheaply--written about, while those which you have passed over as not worth attention may be aspects of life that other people too have passed over; they may therefore be fresh and well worth writing about. For instance, within the last twenty-five years we have had two writers, Joseph Conrad and John Masefield, writing of the sea as it has never been written of before. Both have been sailors; and both have utilized their experience as viewed through the medium of their temperaments in a way undreamed of before. Again, within the last ten years we have had Algernon Blackwood, using his imagination to apply psychology to the study of the supernatural, and so developing a field peculiar to himself. Still again, H. G. Wells, who began his career as a clerk and continued as a teacher of science, has found in both these phases of his experience a mine of literary wealth; and Arnold Bennett, born and educated in the dreariest, most unpicturesque, apparently least inspiring, part of England, has seen in the very prosiness of the Five Towns untouched material, and has given this an enduring place in literature. In your imagination there may lie the basis of fantasies as yet unexpressed; or in your experience, aspects of life that have not as yet been adequately treated. As you read you will find that until recently the one phase of life most exploited in literature was the romantic love of youth; this was the basis of nearly all novels and of most short stories; its presence was demanded for either primary or secondary interest in the drama; and it was the chief source of inspiration for the lyric. But within the last thirty years all sorts of other subjects have been opened up. To-day the writer's difficulty is, not that he is restricted by literary convention in his choice of material, but that he is so absolutely unrestricted that he may be in doubt where to make his choice. He is, to be sure, conditioned in two ways: To do the best work, he must keep within the bounds of his own temperament and experience; and he should as far as possible avoid phases of life already written about, unless he can present them under some new aspect.

With these conditions in mind, you are ready to ask yourself: What have I to write about? Let us put the question more concretely: Have you lived, for instance, in a little mining town in the West? Such a little town, with its saloons and automatics and flannel-shirted hero, stares at us every month from the pages of popular magazines. But perhaps your little mining town is dry, perhaps there has not been a shooting fray in it for ten years, and all the young men go to Bible class on Sunday. Well, here is something new; let us have it. Is New York your home? The magazines tell you that New York is parceled out among a score of writers: the Italian quarter, the Jewish quarter, the Syrian quarter, the boarding-houses, Wall Street. What is there left? The suburbs? Surely not; and yet have you ever seen a story of just your kind of street and just the kind of people that you know? If not, here is your opportunity.

You have read about sailors, fishermen, farmers, detectives, Italian fruit-peddlers, Jewish clothes-merchants, commercial travelers, financiers, salesmen and saleswomen, doctors, clergymen, heiresses, and men about town, but have you often read a thrilling romance of a filing clerk? How about the heroism of a telephone collector? the humors of a street-car conductor? The seeing eye will find material in the street car, in the department store, in the dentist's waiting room, in college halls, on a lonely country road--anywhere and everywhere. And the seeing eye is cultivated by a perpetual process of comparing life as it is with life as it is portrayed in literature and in art. In other words, to get material to write about, you must cultivate alertness to the nature and value of your own life-experience, and to the nature and value of all forms of life with which you come into contact; but this you can never do with any degree of success unless you at the same time learn how to read.

You may say that you know how to read. It is almost certain that you do not. If by reading you mean that you can run your eye over a page, and, barring a word here and there, get the general drift of the sense, you may perhaps qualify as able to read. If you are set the task of interpreting fully every phrase in an article by a thoughtful writer, the chances are that you will fail. When only a small part of a writer's meaning has passed from his mind to yours, you can hardly be said to have read what he has written. On the other hand, no one can get out of written words all that was put into them. What was written out of one man's experience must be interpreted by another's experience; and as no two people ever have exactly the same experience--no two people are exactly alike--it follows that no interpretation is ever entirely what the writer had in mind. The ratio between what goes into a book and what comes out of it varies in two ways. Granted the same reader, he will take only to the limit of his capacity from any book set before him: he may get almost all from a book that contains but little, a good share of a book that contains much, but very little of a book that is far beyond the range of his experience. Granted the same book, one reader will barely skim its surface, another will gain a fair idea of the gist of it, a third will almost relive it with the author.

The main point is that this varying ratio depends upon the amount of life-experience that goes into the writing of a book and the amount of life-experience that goes into the reading of it. For as writing is the expression of life, so reading is vicarious living--living by proxy, reliving in imagination what the author has lived before he was able to write it. Hence, we grow _up to_ books, grow _into_ them, grow _out of_ them. Our growing experience of life may be measured by the books that we read; and conversely, as we cannot have all experience in our own lives, books are necessarily one of the most fruitful sources of growth in experience.

This is true, however, only of what may be called vitalized reading--reading, not with the eyes alone, nor with the mind alone, but with the stored experiences of life, with the emotions that it has brought, with the attitudes toward men and things and ideas that it has given--in a word, with imagination. To read with imagination, you must be, in the first place, active; in the second place, sensitive, and, because you are sensitive, receptive. Instead, however, of being merely passively receptive of the stream of ideas and images and sensations flowing from the work you are reading, you must be alert to take all that it has to give, and to re-create this in terms of your own experience. Thus by making it a part of your imaginative experience, you widen your actual experience, you enrich your life, and you increase the flexibility and vital power of your mind.

In order, then, to tap the sources of your imagination, you must learn to experience in two ways: first, through life itself, not so much by seeking experiences different from those that naturally come your way, as by becoming aware of the value of those that belong naturally to your life; and second, through learning to absorb and transmute the life that is in books, beginning with those that stand nearest to your stage of development. In the process of reading you will turn more and more to those writers who have a larger mastery of life, and who, by their skill in expressing the wisdom and beauty that they have made their own, can admit you, when you are ready, to some share in that mastery.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL[15]

BLISS PERRY

[Footnote 15: An address delivered at the exercises held by the Cambridge Historical Society in Sanders Theatre, Harvard University, Feb. 22, 1919, to commemorate the centenary of Lowell's birth. By permission of Professor Perry and of the editor of the _Harvard Graduates' Magazine_. Copyright, 1919, by _The Harvard Graduates' Magazine_.]

Two Harvard men, teachers of English in the University of North Carolina, have recently published a new kind of textbook for undergraduates. Abandoning the conventional survey of literary types and the examination of literary history in the narrow sense of those words, they present a program of ideas, the dominant ideas of successive epochs in the life of England and America. They direct the attention of the young student, not so much to canons of art as to noteworthy expressions of communal thought and feeling, to the problems of self-government, of noble discipline, of ordered liberty. The title of this book is _The Great Tradition_. The fundamental idealism of the Anglo-Saxon race is illustrated by passages from Bacon and Raleigh, Spenser and Shakespeare. But William Bradford, as well as Cromwell and Milton, is chosen to represent the seventeenth-century struggle for faith and freedom. In the eighteenth century, Washington and Jefferson and Thomas Paine appear side by side with Burke and Burns and Wordsworth. Shelley and Byron, Tennyson and Carlyle are here of course, but with them are John Stuart Mill and John Bright and John Morley. There are passages from Webster and Emerson, from Lowell and Walt Whitman and Lincoln, and finally, from the eloquent lips of living men--from Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour and Viscount Grey and President Wilson--there are pleas for international honor and international justice and for a commonwealth of free nations.

It is a magnificent story, this record of Anglo-Saxon idealism during four hundred years. The six or seven hundred pages of the book which I have mentioned are indeed rich in purely literary material; in the illustration of the temper of historic periods; in the exhibition of changes in language and in literary forms. The lover of sheer beauty in words, the analyzer of literary types, the student of biography, find here ample material for their special investigations. But the stress is laid, not so much upon the quality of individual genius, as upon the political and moral instincts of the English-speaking races, their long fight for liberty and democracy, their endeavor to establish the terms upon which men may live together in society. And precisely here, I take it, is the significance of the pages which Professors Greenlaw and Hanford assign to James Russell Lowell. The man whom we commemorate to-night played his part in the evolution which has transformed the Elizabethan Englishman into the twentieth-century American. Lowell was an inheritor and an enricher of the Great Tradition.

This does not mean that he did not know whether he was American or English. He wrote in 1866 of certain Englishmen: "They seem to forget that more than half the people of the North have roots, as I have, that run down more than two hundred years deep into this new-world soil--that we have not a thought nor a hope that is not American." In 1876, when his political independence made him the target of criticism, he replied indignantly: "These fellows have no notion what love of country means. It is in my very blood and bones. If I am not an American, who ever was?"

It remains true, nevertheless, that Lowell's life and his best writing are keyed to that instinct of personal discipline and civic responsibility which characterized the seventeenth century emigrants from England. These successors of Roger Ascham and Thomas Elyot and Philip Sidney were Puritanic, moralistic, practical; and with their "faith in God, faith in man and faith in work" they built an empire. Lowell's own mind, like Franklin's, like Lincoln's, had a shrewd sense of what concerns the common interests of all. The inscription beneath his bust on the exterior of Massachusetts Hall runs as follows: "Patriot, scholar, orator, poet, public servant." Those words begin and end upon that civic note which is heard in all of Lowell's greater utterances. It has been the dominant note of much of the American writing that has endured. And it is by virtue of this note, touched so passionately, so nobly, throughout a long life, that Lowell belongs to the elect company of public souls.

No doubt we have had in this country distinguished practitioners of literature who have stood mainly or wholly outside the line of the Great Tradition. They drew their inspiration elsewhere. Poe, for example, is not of the company; Hawthorne in his lonelier moods is scarcely of the company. In purely literary fame, these names may be held to outrank the name of James Russell Lowell; as Emerson outranks him, of course, in range of vision, Longfellow in craftsmanship, and Walt Whitman in sheer power of emotion and of phrase. But it happens that Lowell stands with both Emerson and Whitman in the very centre of that group of poets and prose-men who have been inspired by the American idea. They were all, as we say proudly nowadays, "in the service," and the particular rank they may have chanced to win is a relatively insignificant question, except to critics and historians.

The centenary of the birth of a writer who reached three score and ten is usually ill-timed for a proper perspective of his work. A generation has elapsed since his death. Fashions have changed; writers, like bits of old furniture, have had time to "go out" and not time enough to come in again. George Eliot and Ruskin, for instance, whose centenaries fall in this year, suffer the dark reproach of having been "Victorians." The centenaries of Hawthorne and Longfellow and Whittier were celebrated at a period of comparative indifference to their significance. But if the present moment is still too near to Lowell's life-time to afford a desirable literary perspective, a moral touchstone of his worth is close at hand. In this hour of heightened national consciousness, when we are all absorbed with the part which the English-speaking races are playing in the service of the world, we may surely ask whether Lowell's mind kept faith with his blood and with his citizenship, or whether, like many a creator of exotic, hybrid beauty, he remained an alien in the spiritual commonwealth, a homeless, masterless man.

No one needs to speak in Cambridge of Lowell's devotion to the community in which he was born and in which he had the good fortune to die. In some of his most delightful pages he has recorded his affection for it. Yonder in the alcoves of Harvard Hall, then the College Library, he discovered many an author unrepresented among his father's books at Elmwood. In University Hall he attended chapel--occasionally. In the open space between Hollis and Holden he read his "Commemoration Ode." He wrote to President Hill in 1863: "Something ought to be done about the trees in the Yard." He loved the place. It was here in Sanders Theatre that he pronounced his memorable address at the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the College--an address rich in historic background, and not without solicitude for the future of his favorite humanistic studies--a solicitude, some will think, only too well justified. "Cambridge at all times is full of ghosts," said Emerson. But no ghost from the past, flitting along the Old Road from Elmwood to the Yard, and haunting the bleak lecture-rooms where it had recited as a careless boy and taught wearily as a man, could wear a more quizzical and friendly aspect than Lowell's. He commonly spoke of his life as a professor with whimsical disparagement, as Henry Adams wrote of his own teaching with a somewhat cynical disparagement. But the fact is that both of these self-depreciating New Englanders were stimulating and valuable teachers. From his happily idle boyhood to the close of his fruitful career, Lowell's loyalty to Cambridge and Harvard was unalterable. Other tastes changed after wider experience with the world. He even preferred, at last, the English blackbird to the American bobolink, but the Harvard Quinquennial Catalogue never lost its savor, and in the full tide of his social success in London he still thought that the society he had enjoyed at the Saturday Club was the best society in the world. To deracinate Lowell was impossible, and it was for this very reason that he became so serviceable an international personage. You knew where he stood. It was not for nothing that his roots ran down two hundred years deep. He was the incarnation of his native soil.

Lowell has recently been described, together with Whittier, Emerson, and others, as an "English provincial poet--in the sense that America still was a literary province of the mother country." To this amazing statement one can only rejoin that if "The Biglow Papers," the "Harvard Commemoration Ode," "Under the Old Elm," the "Fourth of July Ode," and the Agassiz elegy are English provincial poetry, most of us need a new map and a new vocabulary. Of both series of "Biglow Papers" we may surely exclaim, as did Quintilian concerning early Roman satire, "This is wholly ours." It is true that Lowell, like every young poet of his generation, had steeped himself in Spenser and the other Elizabethans. They were his literary ancestors by as indisputable an inheritance as a Masefield or a Kipling could claim. He had been brought up to revere Pope. Then he surrendered to Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley, and his earlier verses, like the early work of Tennyson, are full of echoes of other men's music. It is also true that in spite of his cleverness in versifying, or perhaps because of it, he usually showed little inventiveness in shaping new poetic patterns. His tastes were conservative. He lacked that restless technical curiosity which spurred Poe and Whitman to experiment with new forms. But Lowell revealed early extraordinary gifts of improvisation, retaining the old tunes of English verse as the basis for his own strains of unpremeditated art. He wrote "A Fable for Critics" faster than he could have written it in prose. "Sir Launfal" was composed in two days, the "Commemoration Ode" in one.

It was this facile, copious, enthusiastic poet, not yet thirty, who grew hot over the Mexican War and poured forth his indignation in an unforgettable political satire such as no English provincial poet could possibly have written. What a weapon he had, and how it flashed in his hand, gleaming with wit and humor and irony, edged with scorn, and weighted with two hundred years of Puritan tradition concerning right and wrong! For that, after all, was the secret of its success. Great satire must have a standard; and Lowell revealed his in the very first number and in one line:

"'T aint your eppylets an' feathers
Make the thing a grain more right."

Some readers to-day dislike the Yankee dialect of these verses. Some think Lowell struck too hard; but they forget Grant's characterization of the Mexican War as "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation." There are critics who think the First Series of "Biglow Papers" too sectional; an exhibition of New England's ancient tendency towards nullification of the national will. No doubt Lowell underestimated the real strength of the advocates of national expansion at any cost. Parson Wilbur thought, you remember, that

"All this big talk of our destinies
Is half on it ign'ance an' t'other half rum."

Neither ignorance nor rum was responsible for the invasion of Belgium; but at least one can say that the political philosophy which justifies forcible annexation of territory is taught to-day in fewer universities than were teaching it up to 1914. Poets are apt to have the last word, even in politics.

The war with Mexico was only an episode in the expansion of the slave power; the fundamental test of American institutions came in the War for the Union. Here again Lowell touched the heart of the great issue. The Second Series of "Biglow Papers" is more uneven than the First. There is less humor and more of whimsicality. But the dialogue between "the Moniment and the Bridge," "Jonathan to John," and above all, the tenth number, "Mr. Hosea Biglow to the Editor of the Atlantic Monthly," show the full sweep of Lowell's power. Here are pride of country, passion of personal sorrow, tenderness, idyllic beauty, magic of word and phrase.

Never again, save in passages of the memorial odes written after the War, was Lowell more completely the poet. For it is well known that his was a divided nature, so variously endowed that complete integration was difficult, and that the circumstances of his career prevented that steady concentration of powers which poetry demands. She is proverbially the most jealous of mistresses, and Lowell could not render a constant allegiance. At thirty his friends thought of him, rightly enough, as primarily a poet: but in the next fifteen years he had become a professor, had devoted long periods to study in Europe, had published prose essays, had turned editor, first of the _Atlantic_, then of the _North American Review_, and was writing political articles that guided public opinion in the North. To use a phrase then beginning to come into general use, he was now a "man of letters." But during the Civil War, I believe he thought of himself as simply a citizen of the Union. His general reputation, won in many fields, gave weight to what he wrote as a publicist. His editorials were one more evidence of the central pull of the Great Tradition; it steadied his judgment, clarified his vision, kept his rudder true.

Lowell's political papers during this period, although now little read, have been praised by Mr. James Ford Rhodes as an exact estimate of public sentiment, as voicing in energetic diction the mass of the common people of the North. Lincoln wrote to thank him for one of them, adding, "I fear I am not quite worthy of all which is therein kindly said of me personally." Luckily Lincoln never saw an earlier letter in which Lowell thought that "an ounce of Frémont is worth a pound of long Abraham." The fact is that Lowell, like most men of the "Brahmin caste," came slowly to a recognition of Lincoln's true quality. Motley, watching events from Vienna, had a better perspective than Boston then afforded. Even Mr. Norton, Lowell's dear friend and associate upon the _North American Review_, thought in 1862 that the President was timid, vacillating, and secretive, and, what now seems a queerer judgment still, that he wrote very poor English. But if the editors of the _North American_ showed a typical Anglo-Saxon reluctance in yielding to the spell of a new political leadership, Lowell made full amends for it in that superb Lincoln strophe now inserted in the "Commemoration Ode," afterthought though it was, and not read at the celebration.

In this poem and in the various Centennial Odes composed ten years later, Lowell found an instrument exactly suited to his temperament and his technique. Loose in structure, copious in diction, swarming with imagery, these Odes gave ample scope for Lowell's swift gush of patriotic fervor, for the afflatus of the improviser, steadied by reverence for America's historic past. To a generation beginning to lose its taste for commemorative oratory, the Odes gave--and still give--the thrill of patriotic eloquence which Everett and Webster had communicated in the memorial epoch of 1826. The forms change, the function never dies.

The dozen years following the Civil War were also the period of Lowell's greatest productiveness in prose. Tethered as he was to the duties of his professorship, and growling humorously over them, he managed nevertheless to put together volume after volume of essays that added greatly to his reputation, both here and in England. For it should be remembered that the honorary degrees of D.C.L. from Oxford and LL.D. from Cambridge were bestowed upon Lowell in 1873 and 1874; long before any one had thought of him as Minister to England, and only a little more than ten years after he had printed his indignant lines about

"The old J. B.
A-crowdin' you and me."

J. B. seemed to like them! A part of Lowell's full harvest of prose sprang from that habit of enormous reading which he had indulged since boyhood. He liked to think of himself as "one of the last of the great readers"; and though he was not that, of course, there was nevertheless something of the seventeenth century tradition in his gluttony of books. The very sight and touch and smell of them were one of his pieties. He had written from Elmwood in 1861: "I am back again in the place I love best. I am sitting in my old garret, at my old desk, smoking my old pipe and loving my old friends." That is the way book-lovers still picture Lowell--the Lowell of the "Letters"--and though it is only a half-length portrait of him, it is not a false one. He drew upon his ripe stock of reading for his college lectures, and from the lectures, in turn, came many of the essays. Wide as the reading was in various languages, it was mainly in the field of "belles-lettres." Lowell had little or no interest in science or philosophy. Upon one side of his complex nature he was simply a book-man like Charles Lamb, and like Lamb he was tempted to think that books about subjects that did not interest him were not really books at all.

Recent critics have seemed somewhat disturbed over Lowell's scholarship. He once said of Longfellow: "Mr. Longfellow is not a scholar in the German sense of the word--that is to say, he is no pedant, but he certainly is a scholar in another and perhaps a higher sense. I mean in range of acquirement and the flavor that comes with it." Those words might have been written of himself. It is sixty-five years since Lowell was appointed to his professorship at Harvard, and during this long period erudition has not been idle here. It is quite possible that the University possesses to-day a better Dante scholar than Lowell, a better scholar in Old French, a better Chaucer scholar, a better Shakespeare scholar. But it is certain that if our Division of Modern Languages were called upon to produce a volume of essays matching in human interest one of Lowell's volumes drawn from these various fields, we should be obliged, first, to organize a syndicate, and, second, to accept defeat with as good grace as possible.

Contemporary critics have also betrayed a certain concern for some aspects of Lowell's criticism. Is it always penetrating, they ask? Did he think his critical problems through? Did he have a body of doctrine, a general thesis to maintain? Did he always keep to the business in hand? Candor compels the admission that he often had no theses to maintain: he invented them as he went along. Sometimes he was a mere guesser, not a clairvoyant. We have had only one Coleridge. Lowell's essay on Wordsworth is not as illuminating as Walter Pater's. The essay on Gray is not as well ordered as Arnold's. The essay on Thoreau is quite as unsatisfactory as Stevenson's. It is true that the famous longer essays on Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Dryden, Milton, are full of irrelevant matter, of facile delightful talk which often leads nowhere in particular. It is true, finally, that a deeper interest in philosophy and science might have made Lowell's criticism more fruitful; that he blazed no new paths in critical method; that he overlooked many of the significant literary movements of his own time in his own country.

But when one has said all this, even as brilliantly as Mr. Brownell has phrased it, one has failed to answer the pertinent question: "Why, in spite of these defects, were Lowell's essays read with such pleasure by so many intelligent persons on both sides of the Atlantic, and why are they read still?" The answer is to be found in the whole tradition of the English bookish essay, from the first appearance of Florio's translation of Montaigne down to the present hour. That tradition has always welcomed copious, well-informed, enthusiastic, disorderly, and affectionate talk about books. It demands gusto rather than strict method, discursiveness rather than concision, abundance of matter rather than mere neatness of design. "Here is God's plenty!" cried Dryden in his old age, as he opened once more his beloved Chaucer; and in Lowell's essays there is surely "God's plenty" for a book-lover. Every one praises "My Garden Acquaintance," "A Good Word for Winter," "On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners" as perfect types of the English familiar essay. But all of Lowell's essays are discursive and familiar. They are to be measured, not by the standards of modern French criticism--which is admittedly more deft, more delicate, more logical than ours--but by the unchartered freedom which the English-speaking races have desired in their conversations about old authors for three hundred years. After all,

"There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays
And every single one of them is right."

Lowell, like the rest of us, is to be tested by what he had, not by what he lacked.

His reputation as a talker about books and men was greatly enhanced by the addresses delivered during his service as Minister to England. Henry James once described Lowell's career in London as a tribute to the dominion of style. It was even more a triumph of character, but the style of these addresses is undeniable. Upon countless public occasions the American Minister was called upon to say the fitting word; and he deserves the quaint praise which Thomas Benton bestowed upon Chief Justice Marshall, as "a gentleman of finished breeding, of winning and prepossessing talk, and just as much mind as the occasion required him to show." I cannot think that Lowell spoke any better when unveiling a bust in Westminster Abbey than he did at the Academy dinners in Ashfield, Massachusetts, where he had Mr. Curtis and Mr. Norton to set the pace; he was always adequate, always witty and wise; and some of the addresses in England, notably the one on "Democracy" given in Birmingham in 1884, may fairly be called epoch-making in their good fortune of explaining America to Europe. Lowell had his annoyances like all ambassadors; there were dull dinners as well as pleasant ones, there were professional Irishmen to be placated, solemn despatches to be sent to Washington. Yet, like Mr. Phelps and Mr. Bayard and Mr. Choate and the lamented Walter Page in later years, this gentleman, untrained in professional diplomacy, accomplished an enduring work. Without a trace of the conventional "hand across the sea" banality, without either subservience or jingoism, he helped teach the two nations mutual respect and confidence, and thirty years later, when England and America essayed a common task in safeguarding civilization, that old anchor held.

This cumulative quality of Lowell's achievement is impressive, as one reviews his career. His most thoughtful, though not his most eloquent verse, his richest vein of letter-writing, his most influential addresses to the public, came toward the close of his life. Precocious as was his gift for expression, and versatile and brilliant as had been his productiveness in the 1848 era, he was true to his Anglo-Saxon stock in being more effective at seventy than he had been at thirty. He was one of the men who die learning and who therefore are scarcely thought of as dying at all. I am not sure that we may not say of him to-day, as Thoreau said of John Brown, "He is more alive than ever he was." Certainly the type of Americanism which Lowell represented has grown steadily more interesting to the European world, and has revealed itself increasingly as a factor to be reckoned with in the world of the future. Always responsive to his environment, always ready to advance, he faced the new political issues at the close of the century with the same courage and sagacity that had marked his conduct in the eighteen-forties. You remember his answer to Guizot's question: "How long do you think the American Republic will endure?" "So long," replied Lowell, "as the ideas of its founders continue to be dominant"; and he added that by "ideas" he meant "the traditions of their race in government and morals." Yet the conservatism revealed in this reply was blended with audacity--the inherited audacity of the pioneer. No line of Lowell's has been more often quoted in this hall than the line about the futility of attempting to open the "Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key." Those words were written in 1844. And here, in a sentence written forty-two years afterward, is a description of organized human society which voices the precise hope of forward-looking minds in Europe and America at this very hour: "The basis of all society is the putting of the force of all at the disposal of all, by means of some arrangement assented to by all, for the protection of all, and this under certain prescribed forms." Like Jefferson, like Lincoln, like Theodore Roosevelt at his noblest, Lowell dared to use the word "all."

Such men are not forgotten. As long as June days come and the bobolink's song "runs down, a brook of laughter, through the air"; as long as a few scholars are content to sit in the old garret with the old books, and close the books, at times, to think of old friends; as long as the memory of brave boys makes the "eyes cloud up for rain"; as long as Americans still cry in their hearts "O beautiful, my country!" the name of James Russell Lowell will be remembered as the inheritor and enricher of a great tradition.

THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS[16]

CARL BECKER

[Footnote 16: _The Education of Henry Adams: an Autobiography._ Houghton Mifflin Co., 1918. The selection is a part of an admirable critique in the April, 1919, number of the _American Historical Review_. By permission of the author and of the editors of the magazine. The article should be read as a whole for a complete understanding of the critic's analysis.]

In 1771, Thomas Hutchinson wrote to one of his friends, "We have not been so quiet here these five years ... if it were not for two or three Adamses, we should do well enough." From that day to this many people have agreed with the fastidious governor. But so far, an Adams or two we have always had with us; and on the whole, although they have sometimes been exasperating, they have always been salutary. During four generations the men of this family have loved and served America as much as they have scolded her. More cannot be said, except that they have commonly given, on both counts, more than they have received. Theirs is therefore the blessing, and ours the benefit.