and the particular. Bryant's faith expressed in his "To a Waterfowl," even though rather limited in content, is as definite as it is beautifully phrased. Whittier found precisely the stimulus which his gently militant nature needed in championship of the unpopular Abolitionist cause. His muse threatened to prove but puerile and futile until it was converted to the service of fellow-man as well as to the love of God. Longfellow is the most consistently urbane and kindly of the group, moving habitually upon what may be termed the domestic plane. His briefer tales are fitted to their setting in a Wayside Inn; "Hiawatha" and "Evangeline" to the family fireside; while the songs which have sung themselves around the world and made him one of the most popular of poets have just the range of family joys and sorrows. This gentleness, -one might almost call it meekness, which holds the poet in its gracious thrall even when he essays semi-militant themes, has obscured in the eyes of too many critics his real mastery of form. A trace of the bully is inherent in criticism, which loves either to belabour or to patronize those whom it is not forced to praise. Few have had the heart to offer any violence to Longfellow; but the attitude of half-contemptuous patronage has become almost a fashion. In point of fact he was an exceptionally deft craftsman, whose imagination supplied him with material of high quality and whose purity of heart gave to his work the odour of a genuine sweetness and sanctity. "Hiawatha" is a very notable achievement, in spite of the dreadful facility of its metre; and there is enough of the divine afflatus in "Evangeline" to assure it a good old age, which is all that anything in English hexameters should dare or wish to ask; since even Kingsley, who had the deftest hand, could make them barely tolerable. Many of his translations are among the best in the language. But after all this has been said, the fact remains that the hiding of Longfellow's power and power he has lies in his discernment of the secrets of the plain man's heart, and his application to them of the appeal of conscience and the comfort of religion. Lowell's speech and perhaps his faith are of a somewhat robuster type. Far inferior to Longfellow in his sense of rhythm and the deftness of his handiwork in verse, like Emerson he was essentially a master of prose, and not quite free at times from the taint of sentimentality, he is upon the whole an admirable exponent of New England shrewdness, humour, and virile right-mindedness. The "Biglow Papers" are unique. Their exaggeration is of the sort which Dickens employed to etch his types Their philosophy and their use of whimsical understatement on the one hand, or grotesque overstatement on the other, to give effect to their humour, are Yankee to the life. And with it all there is the unmistakable moral purpose, neither thrust pugnaciously forward nor allowed to lapse into obliv ion, but as constant in the poet's "Biglow Papers," "Sir Launfal," and the "Commemoration Ode,” as it had ever been in his father's pulpit. This is not for a moment to imply that any element of the mere 'tract' is permitted to obtrude itself. The ethical import of Lowell's poetry is simply the natural expression of his convictions. He was, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has finely said, " in courage, in truthfulness, in everything, the type of the Puritan idea in its most bracing expression." His brother poet, Whittier, voiced the same thought in calling him— the New World's child Who in the language of their farm-fields spoke This positive note may sometimes escape the reader's first glance, in view of Lowell's capacity for giving a humourous turn to the most sacred themes. But the negative suggestion of John P. Sez they did n't know everythin' down in Judee, is apparent rather than real. In fact it is a whimsical echo of Christ's own frequent warning lest the forms of one age should fetter the freedom of the Spirit in another. So Hosea Biglow's sapient An' you've gut to git up airly 1 J. G. Whittier, James Russell Lowell. is as sound in its religious and ethical content as it is racy of the soil.1 The secret of the matter was suggested by Lowell himself when he wrote, after a reading of the late Sir Leslie Stephen's "English Thought in the Eighteenth Century," "I am very much in the state of mind of the Bretons who revolted against the revolutionary government, and wrote upon their banners, 'Give us back our God.' I suppose I am an intuitionalist, and there I mean to stick. I accept the challenge of common sense and claim to have another faculty, as I should insist that a peony was red though twenty colourblind men denied it." 2 I am not concerned here to defend the soundness of Lowell's apologetic method. Their philosophical validity apart, however, his words bear significant testimony to the value of faith for the sort of work which he had set himself to do; and in this respect he may without violence be regarded as representative of the whole group of American essayists and poets who have just passed in review. Mr. Andrew Lang expressed this feeling in his article in The Sign of the Ship soon after Lowell's death. "Mr. Lowell's religious faith (if one may mention such matters) had a solidity and fervour which surprised some, and might well convert others of a wavering temper" (Longman's Magazine, vol. xviii, p. 666). 2 Cf. article on "The Outgrown Agnosticism," in Boston Transcript of Feb. 26, 1904. CHAPTER XI THE GREAT TWIN BRETHREN: TENNYSON AND BROWNING "DEATH, death! It is this harping on death I despise so much. . . . This idle and often cowardly as well as ignorant harping! Why should we not change like everything else? In fiction, in poetry, in so much of both French as well as English, and, I am told, in American art and literature, the shadow of death- call it what you will, despair, negation, indifference is upon us. But what fools who talk thus! . . . Without death, which is our crape-like, church-yardy word for change, for growth, there could be no prolongation of that which we call life."1 Mr. William Sharp records the words as uttered by Browning in his presence. They vouch for themselves not less by their brusqueness, involution, and demand upon the reader's breath for transport through the parentheses, than by their wholesome tone and savour of good physical and spiritual digestion. It was the Browning of the familiar portraits who uttered them, though they have a certain verve and sparkle which the composed, eupeptic face scarcely promises. I have set them at the head of 1 William Sharp, Life of Browning, pp. 195–196. |