Lowell's Temperament

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

LOWELL’S Anti-Slavery Papers seem likely to serve, as the early writings of authors often do, chiefly to confirm the impression we have drawn from his mature and more familiar work. These brief occasional articles, written for a heroic cause long since won, are too slight, for all their fervor and cleverness, to add anything to Lowell’s literary reputation. But they will deepen the impression of him as a man of temperament. They will show where his wealth of nature lay, in opulence of interests and sympathies and moods, in a vivacity almost Gallic in its gayety and tinged with a dash of Gallic skepticism. This must justify the appearance of the papers, — that in their number, range of topics and of illustration, their abundance of allusion, fecundity of ideas, and their flash of epigram and phrase, they corroborate our impressions of the man. Stretching also as they do over the years of his later youth, between twenty-six and thirty-three, they throw some little light on the shaping of Lowell’s character and the growth of his style.

The first five articles, written in 1844, show little grace or lightness and scarcely a gleam of humor, but instead a somewhat labored and hortatory seriousness. With Daniel Webster, however, the first paper contributed, a year later, to the Anti-Slavery Standard, there come flashes of wit and some promise of the ease and flexibility of his mature style. The subject was one that always aroused Lowell, and it calls forth phrases of real, if somewhat imprecatory, eloquence, striking bits of description, and a few trenchant strokes of characterization. With the succeeding papers the play of wit becomes more frequent and more graceful, though it remained, as suited the occasion, for the most part satirical. It was hardly to be supposed that the humor of an antislavery advocate should be of an especially ingratiating sort. The abolitionists were engaged in a struggle with what they conceived to be the greatest of all evils, and they did not expect their spokesman to deal in smooth and mellow phrases. Nor was Lowell, though lacking that intense and unwearying devotion which kept a man like Garrison at his task of reform through thick and thin, mealy-mouthed, or wanting in conviction. There is then plenty of plain speaking here, and no little downright dogmatism, but of careful argument or painstaking exposition not a whit. For this he had no stomach, being possessed, as he said, of “a certain impatience of mind ” which made him “contemptuously indifferent about arguing matters that had once become convictions.” This “ impatience of mind ” was a sign of the elastic and ebullient nature which lightens all his pages with such wit as in the later papers sparkles into frequent epigram, occasionally swelling into irresponsible bubbles of facetiousness, and not always stopping short of puns.

In fact, apart from the patriotism which glows through them, the papers have no quality like this temperamental one. It furnishes indeed the true register of Lowell’s growth during the period of their production. One might even say that his temperament grew at the expense of his character. For though his writing shows gain in sense of proportion, in dexterity of phrase, as well as in the instinct for words that was always alert in him, it shows no like or proportional advance in grasp, in eloquence, or in that “grave exhilaration ” which marks the greater English prose. If we can imagine one of Lowell’s friends, stirred by the promise of his first paper on Webster, looking to find in him another Burke, we may be sure he was disappointed. Power and ease his work often shows, but complete subordination and control of mood never. A careful reading of it will give point anew to the impression which Fredrika Bremer, who visited the Lowells about the time the last of these little essays was being written, has recorded. The young author seemed to her less earnest than she expected to find him, and she thought the effect of his conversation much like that of fireworks.

It was not only Lowell’s conversation that was like fireworks; much also of his writing is pyrotechnic, a series of scintillations, luminous flashes, sudden felicities, jets of improvisation rather than a steady glow or a quiet sustained light. Versatility he had and vivacity, both in a high degree, a love of epigram, too, and a fondness for allusion which with his facility of utterance and play of imagination made him the most delightful of American letter - writers. His style gained in grace and urbanity from year to year, but it never acquired the acceleration and resonance, the deepening inward glow, that is the sign of supreme power. Brilliancy it continued to have in larger abundance as the years passed, but the weighty advance of massed forces, the surging movement that seems inevitable, the flow, unstudied and irresistible, of great prose, such as Raleigh’s and Bunyan’s, or Milton’s and Burke’sat their height, —like lava from the crater, — this it never showed. The heat of Lowell’s mind seemed never to concentrate and rise to such intensity as would fuse his materials into a uniform molten state. It did not melt them, but put them forth too frequently in the unfluid form of epigram and quotation, bearing indeed the stamp of his taste, but not subdued to his purpose and dyed to the color of his mood. This, too, was an effect of his temperament, — a never quite harmonious temperament, but, as he once remarked himself, a mingling of two contradictory dispositions, of mystic and humorist. The union produced a scintillating activity which gave a thousand brilliant effects, and stamped Lowell’s work as the cleverest of all American writing, yet prevented the greater single effect that comes from a mind at one with itself. We could hardly apply to Lowell, as we might to Whittier, Gardiner’s phrase about Cromwell, that he was distinguished by a certain moral unity of nature. Lowell’s work seems often the result of internal insubordination, which we are inclined to think kept him from ever writing a book, and made his longer poems series of fine lines and stanzas complete in themselves rather than parts indistinguishable in a wrought and tempered whole.