Chapter XI: Poetry and Prose (3)

“Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman,”

and he replied: “My friendly catechist has certainly put in a fair claim to a speedy answer. Whence that word ‘decuman’ got into my memory I have no notion. It seems to have got embedded there during my eocene period, and hopped out lively as one of those toads we have all heard of the moment it got a chance. And the likeness was the nearer that it had ‘a precious jewel in its head.’ In short, the word was there--it was canorous, and it expressed just what I meant. So I used it unsuspiciously. I did not mean to make a conundrum--I never do, but I had made one. When I was asked for the solution, the answer was ready enough--‘the tenth wave,’ which was thought higher than the rest. But when I was asked for my authority! I thought I had met with it in Ovid. No! In Lucan. No! They both speak of the tenth wave, but not in that absolute way. I looked in my dictionaries. I found it at last in Forcellini. Then I went to my Ducange, and the authority cited was one of the Latin Fathers, I forget which. However, there it was, and with the meaning I had remembered.”

Although the title, “A Day at Chartres,” carries with it a notion of less formality, and has a picturesque quality, there is a fitness in the soberer title that permits the mind to play with the theme. For Lowell here builds upon the foundation of human life a fane for worship, and in the speculations which discriminate between the conventional and the free aspirations of the soul, constructs out of living stones a house of prayer. Nor is there absent that capricious mood which carved grotesques upon the under side of the benches at which the worshippers kneeled, so that when the reader, borne along by the high thought, stumbles over such lines as

“Who, meeting Cæsar’s self, would slap his back,
Call him ‘Old Horse’ and challenge to a drink,”

he may, if he will, console himself with the reflection that the most aspiring Gothic carries like grimacing touches within its majestic walls.

“Imagination’s very self in stone.”

That is the epithet Lowell bestows on Chartres Cathedral, and in the few spirited lines in which he contrasts the Greek with the Goth, and hints at the historic evolution of the latter, he is in a large way reflecting the native constitution of his own mind,

“Still climbing, luring fancy still to climb.”

In the letters which Lowell wrote when “The Cathedral” was stirring his mind one sees most impressively the struggle which was always more or less racking him of an unfulfilled poetic power. The very spontaneity of his nature was in a way an obstacle to expression. He waited for the waters to be troubled, he was critical of his moods, of his opportunities, and when the moment was seized, if he could indeed hold it, he was supremely happy. “How happy I was while I was writing it,” he says just as the poem is to be published; “for weeks it and I were alone in the world till Fanny well-nigh grew jealous.” And yet in the very memory of this bliss he is haunted by the thought of that black care which rides behind. “You don’t know, my dear Charles, what it is to have sordid cares, to be shivering on the steep edge of your bank-book, beyond which lies debt. I am willing to say it to you, because I know I should have written more and better. They say it is good to be obliged to do what we don’t like, but I am sure it is not good for me--it wastes so much time in the mere forethought of what you are to do.” The matter was not made easier by the pride and honorable resolve not to mortgage the future for the sake of some present indulgence. Lowell went without things he wanted rather than get into debt for them, and though he chafed under the conditions which compelled him to the doing of irksome tasks, he would borrow no short-lived ease. In making up an account with Mr. Fields at the close of 1869, when he found himself on the wrong side of the ledger, he wrote: “You must allow me also to clear off the rest ... as soon as I can. There is no earthly reason why I shouldn’t, and a great many why I should. I hate any kind of money obligations between friends. When I have paid this off, the kindness will be left, and the obligation gone. I shall be able to manage it before long. I never could see any reason why poets should claim immunity beyond other folks. It is not wholesome for them.” Even in petty matters he disliked exceedingly to be under pecuniary obligation. His letters to Mr. Godkin, as printed by Mr. Norton, show an unconquerable aversion to being a “deadhead” under any circumstances, and I remember once, when I went with him to the Museum of Fine Arts for some special exhibition, his annoyance at finding it was a free day and he could not pay the ordinary toll.

His prose work, in 1869, included his papers on Chaucer and Pope, and his “Good Word for Winter,” and at the end of the year he issued a selection from what he had already written, in the first series of “Among My Books.” But his slowly growing collection of published writings did not add materially to his income, and he continued to be embarrassed by the poverty of a landholder who had heavy taxes to pay and only the meagrest return from the productive part of his estate. The only relief he could foresee was in the possible sale of some of his land.

The point to be noted, however, is that with all this pressure of need, Lowell knew himself so well that he would not, even when a golden bait was dangled before him, accept invitations to write which required of him the diligence and the punctuality of the hack workman. No. He would attend to his college duties, do what he could for the _North American_, and accept the occasional opportunity which offered for reading a lecture. He honored his art, and he refused to make it a perfunctory task. His old friend Robert Carter was now editor of _Appleton’s Journal_, and very naturally sought contributions from Lowell, but Lowell replied in a letter written 11 March, 1870:

“Many thanks for your _Journal_, which I have looked through with a great deal of pleasure, and which I should think likely to do good in raising the public taste.

“I am much obliged to you also for your proposal, though I cannot accept it. I have not time. I have not that happy gift of inspired knowledge so common in this country, and work more and more slowly toward conclusions as I get older. I give on an average twelve hours a day to study (after my own fashion), but I find real knowledge slow of accumulation. Moreover, I shall be too busy in the college for a year or two yet. It is not the career I should have chosen, and I half think I was made for better things--but I must make the best of it. Between ourselves, I declined lately an offer of $4000 a year from ---- to write four pages monthly in----.

“It takes me a good while to be sure I am right. A five or six page notice in the next N. A. R.[45] will have cost me a fortnight’s work of a microscopic kind. My pay must be in a sense of honest thoroughness.”

Lowell lectured in the spring of 1870 at Baltimore, and before the students of Cornell University. In the summer he enjoyed much making the personal acquaintance of Thomas Hughes, who visited America at this time. Lowell had known him by correspondence, and Hughes, who was an ardent admirer of Lowell and had introduced the “Biglow Papers” to the English public, somewhat embarrassed the author of those poems by quoting from them on all occasions. For his work he gave himself to the reading of old French metrical romances, but the year saw scarcely any product, though at its close he brought together a group of indoor and outdoor studies under the title of “My Study Windows.” “I long to give myself to poetry again,” he writes in October to Miss Norton, “before I am so old that I have only thought and no music left. I can’t say as Milton did, ‘I am growing my wings.’” There is a phrase noting a curious consciousness he had at this time in a letter to Mr. Norton, written 15 October, 1870: “I wrote Jane yesterday a kind of letter, but you must wait till my ships come in before I can write the real thing. I can’t get rid of myself enough when I am worried as I am a good part of the time. It is curious, when I am in company I watch myself as if I were a third person, and _hear the sound of my own voice_, which I never do in a natural mood. However, I shall come out of it all in good time.”

His old correspondent, Mr. Richard Grant White, published this year his “Words and their Uses,” and wrote to Lowell, asking permission to dedicate the book to him. Lowell replied:--

ELMWOOD, 2 August, 1870.

MY DEAR SIR,--In the midst of my sallow grass and my leaves
crumpled with drought, a little spring seemed to bubble up at my
feet in your letter. How could I feel other than pleased and
honored with your proposal? I wish only I deserved it better--but
anyhow I can’t find it in my heart to wave aside my crown out of
modesty, lest Anthony might not offer it again. So I put it on my
head with many thanks, consoled with the reflection that a wreath
unmerited always avenges itself by looking confoundedly like a
foolscap in the eyes of every one but the wearer. So I bow my head
meekly to your laurels, and thank you very heartily for an honor as
agreeable as it is unexpected. I shall have the satisfaction of
knowing that the deserved popularity of your book will carry my
name into many a pleasant home where it is now unfamiliar, and if
my publisher’s accounts show a better figure hereafter, I shall say
it is your doing.

With a very sincere acknowledgment of the obligation you lay upon
me to do some credit to your second leaf,

I remain, my dear Sir, Very cordially yours, J. R. LOWELL.

RICHARD GRANT WHITE, ESQ.

After some delays attendant on such business, Lowell was able in the summer of 1871 to make a sale of a portion of the original estate of Elmwood which left him the house and a couple of acres for his home, and an income of four or five thousand dollars a year. It was a modest living, but it cleared his mind of fretting cares. As he wrote to Mr. Stephen: “It is a life-preserver that will keep my head above water, and the swimming I will do for myself.” Of the effect upon his mind he wrote more freely to his friend Mr. Norton: “I cannot tell you how this sense of my regained paradise of Independence enlivens me. It is something I have not felt for years--hardly since I have been a professor. The constant sense of a ball and chain jangling at my heels, and that those who are inexpressibly dear to me were at the risk of my giving satisfaction in an office where what is best in me was too often held in abeyance by an uneasy self-consciousness forced upon me by my position, have been greater hindrances than anybody else can ever know. But now I can draw a full breath of natural air and discarbonate my lungs of the heavy atmosphere of an unnatural confinement. I look forward to my next year’s work with cheerfulness. I am no longer chained to the oar, but a volunteer. Whether I shall recover the wholesome mental unrest which kept me active when I was younger, I know not, but at least I shan’t have to print before I am ready, nor to keep on with the spendthrift habit of splitting up the furniture of my brain to keep the pot boiling.... I mean to come abroad at the end of the next college year, and shall pop in on you some day, bringing a familiar odor, half Cambridge, half pipe. I shall read you my new poem--when it gets written--and bore you with old French in which I am still plunged to the ears. I am become a pretty thorough master of it, and wish I knew the modern lingo half as well.”

“It takes a good while,” he writes to Miss Norton, “to slough off the effect of seventeen years of pedagogy. I am grown learned (after a fashion) and dull. The lead has entered into my soul. But I have great faith in putting the sea between me and the stocks I have been sitting in so long.” He worked steadily at his college duties, with some thought, I suspect, of finishing with his professorial work, the laboriously learned part of his life. The minute, painstaking care to which he gave to the studies which underlay his college work, so evident in the annotation of his books, was after all a severe drain upon a nature that took the greatest delight in imaginative freedom. He seems hardly to have allowed himself any relief. “I have been reading over your book[46] again,” he writes to Mr. Fields, 29 February, 1872, “and found it very interesting and queer. Queer, I say, because it is the first volume I have read for some months later than the XIV. century, and I was a little puzzled at first, like Selkirk when he got back among his own people and heard his own language again. I am glad you have left out the imaginary nephew. One was apt to stumble over him and apologize with a ‘Beg pardon, but really had forgotten you were here.’ These buffers between the reader and the first personal pronoun never lessen the shock, though they are always in the way. But nobody wants them, for egotism does not consist in never so many capital _I’s_. Moreover, I am persuaded that everybody likes it in his secret heart (as he does garlic), and says he doesn’t for appearances.

“Your Dickens letters are a great deal more interesting than Forster’s for some reason or other. I fancy it is because they are more natural. In writing to Forster, Dickens must have felt that he was writing to his biographer, and had the constraint of sitting before a glass. Indeed, I was very much disappointed in Forster’s volume.[47] It doesn’t leave an agreeable impression, which is surely a fault in biography.

“What a dear old affectionate soul Miss Mitford was! I knew nothing about her before. Even her little vanities are rather pleasant than otherwise. It is surely a delightful gift to be made happy as easily as she.

“We are all busy getting ready for Mabel’s departure. I hate to think of it, though I believe she is as safe as human forethought could make her. Burnett is all I could wish.”

Miss Lowell was married 2 April, 1872, to Mr. Edward Burnett, and went with him to Southboro, Massachusetts, where he was carrying on a dairy and stock farm. Miss Rebecca Lowell died in May, so that the household at Elmwood was in a measure dissolved. Lowell was busy up to the last over the long article on Dante which he contributed to the July _North American_. He was released from his college work, having resigned his professorship; he let Elmwood to Mr. Aldrich and sailed 9 July for Europe with Mrs. Lowell, to be absent two years.