Lectures on English poets

Even while they were yet ringing in the ears of those delighted audiences, Ticknor and Fields were eager to publish them, but Lowell withheld consent. The lectures had been rapidly written, and needed the labor of the file, and this the unexpected duties of the equally unexpected professorship precluded. There were five applicants for the chair vacated by Longfellow, but Lowell was not one of them; both his nomination and his appointment were made without his knowledge. He accepted the chair with the understanding that he should be allowed to spend one year abroad for some necessary study in Germany and Spain. Then his professorial duties engaged him and the “Lectures on English Poets” were left as a waif stranded on the forgotten columns of a newspaper. When at length the opportunity of leisure came Lowell found himself capable of better things, and he was satisfied with absorbing into later essays some fragments of the early lectures. There ended his concern for them; but an enthusiastic hearer had preserved the Boston “Advertiser’s” reports of them in a special scrap-book, which ultimately became the property of the University of Michigan and thus fell into the editor’s hands, who felt the charm thereof, and was desirous of sharing his pleasure with the Rowfant Club.

There is little doubt that Lowell had been too fastidious when he wrote to James T. Fields, in May, 1855: “It has just got through my skull, and made a dint into my sensorium, that you wrote me a note, ever so long ago, about my lectures and the publication of them. I don’t mean to print them yet--nor ever till they are better--but, at any rate, I consider myself one of your flock, though not, perhaps, as lanigerous as some of them.” And when Lowell’s literary executor wrote: “His powers of critical appreciation and reflection were displayed to advantage in these lectures. No such discourses had been heard in America. They added greatly to his reputation as critic, scholar, and poet,”--there could be no hesitation in setting aside Lowell’s modest self-depreciation. After the delivery of his first lecture, he had written to his friend Stillman: “So far as the public are concerned, I have succeeded.” And his words are as true in 1896 as they were in 1855; and although his literary art was not so consummate as it became in his ultimate development, these early lectures will aid and encourage the student by showing his growth: we see the rivulet become the flowing river.

We share, too, in the delight of his first audience on reading:

“The lines of Dante seem to answer his every mood: sometimes they have the compressed implacability of his lips, sometimes they ring like an angry gauntlet thrown down in defiance, and sometimes they soften or tremble as if that stern nature would let its depth of pity show itself only in a quiver of the voice.”

“So in ‘Paradise Lost’ not only is there the pomp of long passages that move with the stately glitter of Milton’s own angelic squadrons, but if you meet anywhere a single verse, that, too, is obstinately epic, and you recognize it by its march as certainly as you know a friend by his walk.”

“Who can doubt the innate charm of rhyme whose eye has ever been delighted by the visible consonance of a tree growing at once toward an upward and a downward heaven, on the edge of the unrippled river; or as the kingfisher flits from shore to shore, his silent echo flies under him and completes the vanishing couplet in the visionary world below.”

“Every desire of the heart finds its gratification in the poet because he always speaks imaginatively and satisfies ideal hungers.”

And see, too, how the “powers of critical appreciation” that Professor Norton has mentioned were bursting into blossom and giving promise of the golden harvest to come:

“Sir Thomas Browne, * a man who gives proof of more imagination than any other Englishman except Shakspeare.”

For subtlety and depth of insight Lowell has never excelled this early example, nor has he ever outdone the critical estimate, so true and so terse, of his final pronouncement upon Pope:

“Measured by any high standard of imagination, he will be found wanting; tried by any test of wit, he is unrivaled.”

And what of such a shining felicity as where he meets Sir Thomas Browne on common ground and the author of “Religio Medici” gravely smiles and acknowledges kinship:

“If a naturalist showed us a toad we should feel indifferent, but if he told us that it had been found in a block of granite we should instantly look with profound interest on a creature that perhaps ate moths in Abel’s garden or hopped out of the path of Lamech.”

Most truly “No such lectures had been heard in America,” and as truly they deserve to be made more than a delightful memory for the early hearers alone.

Lowell wrote to a friend that at his first lecture he had held his audience for an hour and a quarter, but the reporter’s notes of that lecture fall far short of that fullness; nevertheless, compared with Anstey’s shorthand notes of Carlyle’s lectures on the “History of Literature,” we come much nearer to the living voice in the Boston “Advertiser’s” reports of these Lowell lectures. Carlyle spoke without a written text, nor had he any notes save a few bits of paper which in his hyper-nervousness he twisted out of all hope of reportorial decipherment--and without once looking at them; Lowell had his manuscripts (written currente calamo, for the new wine of life was in full ferment and it was no small feat to bottle any of it successfully), and we are assured from internal evidence that the “Advertiser’s” reporter was allowed access to them. His text has a tang as characteristic as Thoreau’s wild apples, and we do not feel the dubiety of the blind patriarch, “The voice is Jacob’s, but the hands are Esau’s.” No; it is James Russell Lowell, his voice, his inimitable mark, and these are his words sounding in our ears after half a century.

The only attempt at “editing” has been as far as possible to reproduce the reporter’s “copy.” To that end Lowell’s profusion of capitals is retained (and the reader will bear in mind that the Transcendental spirit was then in both the air and the alphabet), and even his italics, suggested, as Mr. Underwood says, by the speaker’s emphasis, find their respective places. Here and there a compositor’s error has been corrected and a proof-reader’s oversight adjusted; sometimes this has been conjectural, and again the needful change was obvious. In all else, save the applause, this Rowfant Book may be called a faint echo of the Lowell Institute Lectures.

It is “printed, but not published” in loving fealty to Lowell’s memory, and every Rowfanter has at heart the assurance that his Shade will look upon this literary flotsam without a frown, or with one that will soon fade into forgiveness.

S. A. J.

ANN ARBOR, November 10th, 1896.