448 



LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL. 



ton, has been safe for two hundred years in the im- 

 pregnable stronghold of the grave. Malice domestic, 

 treason, interviews, nothing can touch him further. 

 The sanctities of his life cannot be hawked about the 

 streets or capitalized in posters as a whet to the latest 

 edition of "The Peeping Tom." If it be the triumph 

 of an historian to make the great highways of the olden 

 times populous and noisy, or even vulgar with their 

 old life again, it is nevertheless a consolation that we 

 may still find by-paths there, dumb as those through 

 a pine forest, sacred to meditation and to grateful 

 thoughts. 



If Mr. Lowell was fortunate in his ancestry, 

 if his nature was formed from the blending of 

 traits and talents that made the sure foundation 

 of a republic of government and a republic of 

 letters, he was also happy in the language that 

 was to be the medium of his thoughts. It was 

 the speech of men who had preserved their 

 language, as they had kept their principles, 

 pure from early times, and this had been strength- 

 ened and expanded by the necessity of using 

 words to express the grandeur, the pathos, the 

 tragedy, the courtliness, the imagination, the 

 reverence, the tender affections, that naturally 

 accompanied the settlement by men and women, 

 exiled patriots and Christians, of a wild and 

 picturesque country amid savages ; the attempt 

 to transfer monarchical forms and leave behind 

 the monarchical spirit, to preserve liberty and 

 to prevent license, to defend dignity and to 

 show due respect, to maintain the home upon 

 love, the church upon godly fear, the state upon 

 a blending of honor for dignitaries and in- 

 dividual rights. The destiny that led them con- 

 querors through two wars with their mother- 

 country one of the most powerful on the globe 

 to the founding of a nation that has survived 

 the greatest civil war of modern times, and 

 made the words and acts and personnel of 

 its government and representatives respected 

 throughout the world, made a language not 

 only fit for the great poet or orator, but one 

 that might go far to the production of orator or 

 poet. The part that the growth and formation 

 of language play in the making of a country's 

 literature is characteristically and suggestively 

 set forth by Lowell in his essay on Shakespeare : 



Shakespeare was doubly fortunate. Saxon by the 

 father and Norman by the mother, he was a repre- 

 sentative Englishman. A country boy, he learned 

 first the rough-and-ready English of his rustic mates, 

 who knew how to make nice verbs and adjectives 

 courtesy to their needs. Going up to London, he ac- 

 quired the lingua Aulica precisely at the happiest 

 moment, just as it was becoming, in the strictest 

 sense of the word, modern. Shakespeare, then, found 

 a language already to a certain extent established, 

 but not yet fetlocked by dictionary and grammar- 

 mongers ; a versification harmonized, but which had 

 not yet exhausted all its modulations, nor been set in 

 the stocks by critics who deal judgment on refractory 

 feet that will dance to Orphean measures of which 

 their judges are insensible. What was of greater im- 

 port, no arbitrary line had been drawn between high 

 words and low ; vulgar then meant simply what was 

 common ; poetry had not been aliened from the 

 people by the establishment of an upper house of 

 vocables, alone entitled to move in the stately cere- 

 monials of Verse and privileged from arrest, while 

 they forever keep the promise of meaning to the ear 

 and break it to the sense. The hot conception of the 

 poet had no time to rove while he was debating the 

 comparative respectability of this phrase or that; 

 but he snatched what word his instinct prompted, 



and saw no indiscretion in making a king speak as 

 his country nurse might have taught him. 



Much of the same advantage of stability, 

 purity combined with freshness, terseness, and 

 idiomatic strength Lowell found ready for his 

 use when he began to wield the poetic pen. 

 What he said of Lincoln in his " Commemora- 

 tion Ode" might have been said of the language 

 in which Lincoln spoke, and through which 

 Lowell's praise of him found its way to the 

 hearts of his countrymen. 



Nothing of Europe here, 

 Or, then, of Europe fronting mornward still, 



Ere any names of serf or peer 

 Could Nature's equal scheme deface 

 And thwart her genial will. 



New birth of our new soil, the first American. 



Mr. Lowell has set forth in characteristic 

 fashion his knowledge and appreciation of the 

 nature and life of which his own genius was one 

 of the finest products. In the introduction to 

 the " Biglow Papers " he puts into the mouth of 

 Parson Wilbur the following description of 

 Yankee character : 



A strange hybrid, indeed, did circumstances beget, 

 here in the New "World, upon the old Puritan stock, 

 and the earth nevei before saw such mystic-practi- 

 calism. such niggard-geniality, such calculating-fanat- 

 icism, such cast-iron enthusiasm, such sour-faced 

 humor, such close-fisted generosity. Yet, after all, 

 thin, speculative Jonathan is more like the Eng- 

 lishman of two centuries ago than John Bull him- 

 self is. ... He feels more at home with Fulke 

 Greville, Herbert ot Cherburg, Quarles, George Her- 

 bert, and Browne than with his modern English 

 cousins. He is nearer than John by at least a 

 hundred years to Naseby, Marston Moor, Worcester, 

 and the time when, if ever, there were true Eng- 

 lishmen. John Bull has suffered the idea of the 

 invisible to be very much fattened out of him. To 

 move John, you must make your fulcrum of solid 

 beef and pudding; an abstract idea will do for 

 Jonathan. It remains to speak of the Yankee dia- 

 lect. Shakespeare stands less in need of a glossary to 

 most New Englanders than to many a native of the 

 Old Country. The English have complained of us 

 for coining new words ; many of those so stigmatized 

 were old ones by them forgotten, and all make now 

 an unquestioned part of the currency wherever Eng- 

 lish is spoken. Undoubtedly, we have a right to 

 make new words, as they are needed by the fresh 

 aspects under which life presents itself here in the 

 New World; and, indeed, wherever a language is 

 alive it grows. 



As no writer in our country has done more 

 than Lowell to make and keep pure the treas- 

 ure of our noble tongue, it seems appropriate to 

 dwell a little at length upon his notion of a 

 writer's duty toward the words that are his 

 thoughts ; for, as he says, " we think in words." 

 " The language of the people in the mouth of a 

 scholar" was his ideal of literary excellence. In 

 the introduction to the second series of the " Big- 

 low Papers," he writes : 



I imagined to myself such an up-country man as I 

 had often seen at antislavery gatherings, capable 

 of district-school English, but always instinctively 

 falling back into the national stronghold of his home- 

 ly dialect when heated to the point of self- forgetful - 

 ness. In choosing the Yankee dialect, 1 did not act 

 'without forethought. It had long seemed to me that 

 the vice of American writing and speaking was a 

 studied want of simplicity ; that we were in danger 

 of looking on our mother-tongue as a dead language, 



