BOOKS.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.* His was a very delightful personality. The present writer. remembers an afternoon spent with him in his home at Cambridge (Mass.) in the year '68, when he was at his fiercest in his anti-English proclivities born of the civil war, and had little that was civil to say of poor England, but was none the- less a kindly and delightful host. " Aro you come here to• get up facts,' or to go home and laugh at us P" was his question. And when the writer frankly admitted that he had simply come out to enjoy a holiday, nobody could have thawed more instantly. But he had nothing good to say of any public Briton but John Bright, or any private one but Leslie Stephen, to whom he kept on referring in an affec- tionate spirit, pleasantly recalled to memory by some remarks and letters in the volumes before us. To these Mr. Under- wood's booklet may serve as a kind of introduction, though perhaps not much of the kind Lowell would have appreciated.. So straightforward a writer might have been surprised to see that his muse was inspired in big initials by Truth, Idealism, Brotherhood, Beauty, and Melody, in order, including the supremacy of right and spiritual aspiration, with a spiritual conception of life. While the Brotherhood was of a kind ignored in the pulpit, the Beauty was always arm-in-arm with Strength, and the Melody had to be compatible with other indispensable qualities. Thus modified, these qualities, made the poet, though at first, we are told, they formed an unattractive combination. We suppose that many American commentators must write like this. Mercifully, Lowell did not. And we must gather something of Mr. Underwood'a meaning from the context, which tells us that Thackeray, who wondered why on earth such a brilliant humorist as Hosea Biglow should write serious verse, was " a great man and a great artist in a certain sphere, but never had any per- ception or consciousness of an ideal world." Lowell's own answer to the many admirers who wanted to know why he didn't write more Biglow Papers we s bitter—being simply that he couldn't. The power or the inclination left him with the occasion which gave it rise. And there is no doubt that his essentially student mind found greater pleasure in the pursuit of the graver muse. The Commemoration Ode rises to our mind quite to the proportions of the noble ; and in many of the minor poems, especially, perhaps, in such flights of fancy as one which he calls, we think, " My Love," he has surely "touched the magic string "—to quote from his friend and colleague, Wendell Holmes—to very musical pur- pose indeed. " Not as all other women are Is she that to my soul is dear," as in a different way, but not more attractively- " Taking fresh clay from the breast Of the unexhausted West," is one of those melodies which tempts the reciter to go on. But as Lowell's poems do not form part of these volumes, quotation is no part of our present business. And we can let. Parson Wilbur and John P. Robinson alone among the- band of surely immortal humorists to whom they belong.
To Lowell the man Mr. Underwood more pleasantly intro- duces us in a passage which describes him as one of the literary coterie which founded the Atlantic Monthly, and recalls in its way the club which revolved round Johnson, or the brilliant set which started the Edinburgh.. ' The descriptions of Emerson, and Whittier, and Longfellow, of Agassiz, and Molloy, and * (1.) Lotion: of J. R. Lows17. Edited by O. E. Norton, Lnndon: Osgood. Afollvaine, and co,—(2.) Thu Pod and thk Kan: Ilc fotiaationa. By se
Underwood. London: Bliss, Sande, and Foster.
Lowell himself, and of the " Jed.ge," Mr. Rockwood Hoar, are well worth reading. The latter seems to have been the inevitable " outsider " of these literary bodies, who brings to bear an amount of appreciation, good-fellowship, and good talk which make him one of the most valuable members of them all. But here, too, the " boss " takes his usual place. The universal consent of the circle assigned the post to Wendell Holmes, the delightful Autocrat of the Break- fast-Table,' who was one of the few who could write like his talk and talk like his writing. We are of those who are inclined to think that some of his work will live somewhere in the sphere of Lamb, whom in some respects he much resembled; and not only from Mr. Underwood's book, but from his own letters, is Lowell's admiration for Holmes con- stantly apparent. Nor can Lowell be more characteristically introduced to the world than by Mr. Underwood in a story of his financial methods. Having been appointed Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard to succeed Longfellow, he went to Dresden to study German (something of the cart-before-the- horse method, one might think), and instructed his London bankers to notify him when his balance was reduced to a certain sum. Living very moderately, he kept no account, pnd fancied he had plenty in hand, when he was surprised by the warning asked for. Having nothing else to do, he packed and went home, and some years afterwards was in- formed that a clerk had blundered, and that he had so much to his credit. Regretting their mistake, the bank offered to stone by investing the sum for him to advantage, which ho agreed to their doing. In a year he got a draft for £700, and refurnished his house with it, proving satisfactorily to his friends and himself the use of carelessness. " If I had kept accounts, you wouldn't bare been sitting in that easy- chair."
This buoyant humour of the man is everywhere apparent in the letters before us, which show him as a master among letter-writers---" to inferiors, generous and considerate; to the vulgar and presuming, a glacier; to his family and near friends, the most delightful and sunshiny being that ever came from the Author of Joy "—in lesser words, a very attractive man when he chose, He is immensely amusing over the German advertisements, which have furnished genial reading to so many. "The this morning, at 3 o'clock, happily accomplished delivery of his wife of a healthy boy, announces earnestly hereby to worthy friends and acquaint- ances—the Director L. F. Leucke." " This forenoon God made us a present of a lusty daughterkin—Julius and Theresa Zilliel"—are poetical contrasts to the columns of the Times, and extracts of the kind contrast pleasantly with Lowell's 4omments upon graver German matters, and with the Northern love of keen air which is constantly consoling him when he reflects upon Italian art and Italian climate. Upon the first matter his tastes were marked, and he is very characteristic again over same of his favourites, and others where awe of the established by no means restrain him. The angels of Titian's "Assumption" "mingle so charmingly with the clouds, that you can fancy that if you wait you will see the whole of it transmuted into such heavenly butterflies by the touch of the Virgin's feet." The Domenichino cherubs in the " Com- munion of St. Jerome," on the contrary, look to him as if they had been tossed up there by a mad bull, just whipped by their mothers, and expecting to be whipped again when they tumble, as they so soon must. And assuredly criticism never before dared to speak of Our Lady in the " Assumption " thus :—" Those two hundred pounds of solid Venetian woman —how irresistibly they go up ! No danger of her stumping through the clouds to dislocate the neck of some poor apostle below,— a consummation which one is apt to expect in com- positions of the kind." This same delightfully light touch Lowell applied to every- thing. This is how he writes to Longfellow about the pro- fessorship in which he has succeeded him :—"My dear Philoctetes"—[Longfellow had been prevented by lameness from taking a journey to Europe],—"I am enjoying the academic delights from which you too early withdrew your- self, being pursued by the entire Teutonic, Swiss, Hungarian, Polish, and other emigrations, who are all desirous (especially the last three) to teach the German tongue at Cambridge. I have done nothing but read certificates in various unknown tongues, and stand at bay, protecting myself with a cheval. de frise of English." The duties of a Minister in later years sate upon this poet- humorist with a like pleasant unfitness, His first post in that way was at Madrid, and he plunges in medias res directly he arrives there, " We are obliged to go about somewhat in the heat of the day house hunting. We can't go in a cab like ordinary mortals, but must have coachman and footman in livery, with their coats folded over the coach-box in a. cascade of brass buttons. The first day it rather amused me, but yesterday the whole thing revealed itself to me as a tre- mendous bore, but essential to the situation. Tu l'as voulu, Georges Dandin I was beckoned to the King's side, and be talked with me all the way, even quoting one of my own verses. He had been crammed, of course, beforehand.
The dances of peasants from the different provinces before the King took place in the Plaza de Armas. In the evening a grand reception. The uniforms (there are six special embassies here with very long tails) and diamonds were very brilliant, But to me all is vanity and vexation of spirit. I like America better every day." " We have had General Grant here," he says at another time, " and I gave him a dinner and reception. As he speaks nothing but English, he was incommunicable as an iceberg, and, I think, is rather bored by peregrination. What he likes best is to escape, and wander about the streets with his Achates Young. After being here two days he knew Madrid better than I.
He is perfectly unconscious and natural, naïvely puzzled, I fancied, to find himself a personage, and going through the ceremonies to which he is condemned with a dogged imperturbability that annotated for me his career as General." The bored General and the bored Minister from the West present us with a curious study, and set us much wondering whether anybody in the whole show, the Sovereign included, are the least amused or edified by the costly promenade of artificial life, Does that exist merely to amuse a populace P and why do an American populace get on so well without it P Meanwhile that active agent of artificial life, the gout, did not spare the poet on his wanderings. We find it accompanying him with strict fidelity everywhere ; and though he jokes with it bravely, it evidently got a good deal the worse for his Minis- terial labours. He writes about it to Mr. Hughes, amongst others (another of his exceptions to his anti-English rule), and dilates upon his troubles with his "new trade." At the same time we are amused to find in him the curious combina- tion of American Republican and British Tory which is so common a product of the West. " Between ourselves," he says, in 1878, " I am satisfied that Dizzy's policy has done a good deal to restore the prestige of England among the ' rest of mankind,' and as I back the English race against the field, I am not sorry for it. And then I think a good deal of the prejudice against Beaconsfield is inediceval." Six years later he writes from London, of the rival giant. " The other day I said to Gladstone that I was very glad he had included Ireland in the Franchise Bill, or rather bad not excluded her. ' I had rather the heart were torn out of my breast, than that clause out of the Bill,' said he. A day or two ago I met Morley at dinner, who regretted that I had not heard Gladstone, a few nights ago, when he turned on Sir Stafford Northeote, and rent him, I said that scoffers said the passion was simulated. Morley laughed, and said that in the lobby afterwards, he had said to — What an old lion it is.' What an old fox,' smiled the other."
And a characteristic touch follows. " What puzzles and sometimes bores me in Gladstone, is that he takes as much interest in one thing as another, and is as diffusively emphatic about it John Inglesant ' (which I couldn't read) as in Gordon. Gordon sent me his regards from Khartoum, which pleased me like a friendly message from Judas Maccabreus." Asked to write on the Irish question in the Contemporary, Lowell preferred "to keep clear of hot potatoes—and Irish ones are apt to be particularly hut. Really nearly everybody who is anybody here is furious—there is no other word for.it —and denounces the G. 0. M. as a kind of born Judas Iscariot, all the more contemptible because he will be cheated of his thirty pieces. (an Irish Member) has said that they would want an Alien Act to enable them to deal with these d—d Irish American scoundrels. (This is confidential) " adds the writer—wherefore we suppose it is published. "The situation is a very grave one, and everybody who is not excited is depressed." And this was written seven years since—and Lowell is lost to us—and the question and the master continue on as ever. As for Lowell's own universality of taste, the same letter evidences it enough, as it disposes of Irving's " Faust " as " a wonderful spectacle, but a very disagreeable play," and of Sarah Bernhardt as " diabolically effective in certain rather unpleasant ways," while society, dinners, pictures, and places alt come in for the rapid touches of the observer's pen.
Altogether, the varied life these letters bring before us is of a very delightful and characteristic kind. The man of letters forced into other grooves, and making the best of them, has never had so complete an illustration ; and the way in which, both as Professor and Minister, Lowell seemed to hold the duties of his posts, while thoroughly discharging them to the best of his power, as subservient to the real purpose of his life, is apparent upon every page. He was as much always learning as Michael Angelo,—whether studying German at Dresden after becoming a professor of languages, or taking Spanish lessons in Madrid to pass away his Ministerial time. Some of his remarks upon the latter position, such as his comments upon finding himself conversing with the dons in a language which he could not talk, but understood better than any of them, are delightfully quaint and suggestive. For that he was a ripe Spanish scholar we know from his work and essays.
In his English letters, as we dip into them again and again, we find the allurements of Mr. Gladstone's name cropping up like Mr. Dick's memorial. Once the literary temptation to indulge in epigram produced the following :- " His greatness not so much in genius lies, As in adroitness, when occasions rise, Lifelong convictions to extemporise "- And we may imagine the Minister's alarm at finding the lines quoted in the Times, though luckily without his name. Whatever may have been Lowell's mistrust of the Liberal methods, however, the party, or what stands for it, may con- sole themselves with his express conclusion. "I still remain convinced that Home-rule in some shape will carry it one of these days." " One of these days !" In 1893 as in 1880, the indefiniteness of that one day to be seems vaguely in the air.
The pages of these letters tempt us with name after name as we turn them over. The writer declines to join in any of the cry against Carlyle, holding that the sharp corners of dyspepsia must be allowed to find their "sort of cure in the ribs of other folks " without lowering his genius, seeing that when a man has wings, and can " lift us away from this lower region of turmoil at will, the rest is rubbish." The last sentence is almost as pithy as " The rest is silence " of Hamlet's. On all literary questions Lowell is prepared for a tilt at any moment, and is never tired of recurring to his difficulties as professor and Minister, in driving him from his natural bent. Half-puzzled between his anti-English pro- clivities, and his love of the old place and tongue, he can only find it in his heart to regret that his grandchildren persist in growing up to talk through their noses, in defiance of sound family tradition ; and while regretting the futility of his London life, be sets down his love of London as equal to Charles Lamb's. " The rattle of a hansom shakes new life into my old bones," ho says, "and I ruin myself in them "- with the "evanescent and unimportunate glimpses" of life which they lend. We ourselves feel that the reputation which Lowell acquired in London as an after-dinner speaker, was per- haps not altogether worthy, or in keeping with the rest of his career, save in so far as it shows his many-sidedness. But at the close of his life it was part of his character and story, and tells itself in these attractive pages with the rest. The spirit of fun dies never in any part of them out of the great Hosea Biglow, and no quainter summary of the pleasures of gout is to be found than in his very last epistle, where he attributes it to his grandfather's famous Madeira, and wishes he had inherited " the cause instead of the effect." " With such a character, even without his phenomenal gifts and graces, he would have been A Great Man " ends Mr. Underwood, with three big letters. Take him altogether, he was certainly a very attractive one, both from his public and his private side. Not willingly will the world let Hosea Biglow die.
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