My Study Windows
By , A. M., Professor of Belles-Lettres in Harvard College. Boston : James R. Osgood & Co.
THIS complement of the charming volume “Among my Books” has the same general character, in being a collection of essays and criticisms hitherto published ; but it has a wider outlook, as one may say, and opens not only upon the landscape near by, but the world of affairs and men beyond. In some sort, Mr. Lowell’s books always do this, of course; they always treat of literature and of life in their inseparability ; poets he always recognizes as a part of out doors, and the sun and air get into his talk of them ; but here in two papers there is a frank invitation to look with him from the study windows, and enjoy the things he likes in summer and winter ; while in others he touches themes related to political and national more than to literary interests.
We believe that we have read with more interest than anything else in the book the essay on Pope, which is not the best thing there. We like it as an illustration of what we think the highest and rarest spirit of criticism ; for with all our modern talk of liberality, we have scarcely a true appreciation of wide-mindedness. We do not mean to attribute to Mr. Lowell any remarkable softness in judgment or tenderness in sentence ; but we do mean to recognize in him a very extraordinary justice to all kinds of excellence. So very few critics are able to allow the existence of virtues and powers which they do not like, that Mr. Lowell is almost unique in his readiness to do so. He is singularly able to declare if a thing is good in its way, without regard to whether ii is his way or not; and his criticism on Pope in this volume is a triumph of fairness and generosity. No two men by instinct and by training could well be more different than the poet and this critic of Ins, yet we doubt if Pope has ever had so much justice done him before; has ever had his faults so clearly separated from his good qualities, and the balance in favor of his being a poet so accurately and frankly stated. It is no easy thing nowadays to say that Pope is a poet ; for Mr. Lowell it must have been a very hard thing ; but he does say it, and very conclusively, we think. We praise the verdict and its spirit; as for the manner of the essay, or its management in parts, it does not seem so successful as others in the book. But as you read it you feel that so might some liberal contemporary of Pope, who disliked Pope and his method, have written of him ; so might Addison have written if, with an equal graciousness, he had had all our critic’s wit and subtlety.
The same liberality is observable in the notices of Swinburne and Thoreau, both affected, in their widely different ways, as well as Pope, yet having each his peculiar excellence. We are not sure, though, after all, that Carlyle did not afford Mr. Lowell a more signal triumph than either of the others. In addition to Carlyle’s overweening mannerism and perversity, along with which it is so hard to allow that greatness can exist, there is an outstanding account for damages to the national feeling to settle, only a little less enormous than that on the score of the Alabama; and many of us would like to make him pay with his fame for errors of his head and heart, if we honestly might. Yet Mr. Lowell succeeds in doing him perfect justice, with a leaning to mercy’s side. But we doubt if those who have begun to read Carlyle too late to know his value as a liberator will ever be able to rid themselves of the feeling that he has a spice of real malignity in him, and, so far as a man may be, is a misanthrope.
In writing of at least two characters in this book we can conceive that Mr. Lowell had entire and unmixed pleasure. He seems, to be sure, to enjoy the trial and sentence of poor Percival, but still has a conjecturable regret that poor Percival should have existed at all ; though we fear that no one else will have the magnanimity to share this after reading the essay which he has occasioned. It is the delight of writing of Emerson and of Chaucer which nothing alloys, and the treatment of both these is responsively fine. The brief paper on “Emerson the Lecturer” is not an examination of his genius, but rather an expression of the common sense of it, the general gratitude, the universal regard ; and with what surpassing delicacy is the tribute paid ! With what sweetness and warmth is the poet assured of the affection which is in the honor rendered him ! The essay lights up even his foibles so tenderly that a palliation of them would seem unfriendly.
Chaucer is an old and favorite subject with Mr. Lowell, first treated nearly thirty years ago in the “Conversations on some of the old Poets,” and again in his lectures on English poets delivered before the Lowell Institute. It is probably as well felt and as well thought out, therefore, as anything that he has written ; it is at least one of his most characteristic criticisms. Its form is that into which his more elaborate critical work preferably casts itself. His approach to the Chaucerian peculiarities, virtues, or beauties is wide and discursive; many things by the way arrest him or turn him aside ; and when he comes to what Chaucer actually wrote, he has not much to say. He does not give many “ striking passages,” and his affair seems to have been rather with what Chaucer was than what he wrote ; yet somehow you have gained a clear impression of cheerfulness, ease, tolerance, fineness, humor, and tenderness greatly and singularly combined, which form the Chaucer of literature, and which you are glad to believe showed themselves in the Chaucer of history. Reviewing the ground gone over, you see how constantly your steps have tended towards Chaucer, and how those pauses were merely occasions for letting him present himself in better lights. This is the effect ; we do not say the design. We are made to know Chaucer in his essential and imperishable modernness, and to realize how much more he is our contemporary than any poet of the last century, or perhaps since Shakespeare ; how much more than many men of our own time. He is rescued from the antiquarians and the lovers of the quaint, and set fairly before us in his integrity as a poet.
We have scarcely left ourselves room to speak particularly of the delightfulness of the papers “My Garden Acquaintance” and “A Good Word for Winter,” though we regret this the less because they are things that will readily commend themselves. “On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners ” is exquisite in its way, and it is none the less true because it betrays that we are still sensitive to European patronage and despite, however little reason there may be to care for such things. Mr. Lowell’s paper is full of well-bred satire and goodhumored amusement at the impertinences we suffer ; but one still feels that the most effective return made for them was Hawthorne’s less admirable soufflet full in the condescending and admiring face of Bull.