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BOOKS AND LIBRARIES AND
OTHER PAPERS

BY

JAMES

RUSSELL

WITH

LOWELL

NOTES

HOUGHTON", MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
Boston: 4 Park Street; New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street
Wot Rtoerjftfce $ree& <£amfcrit»0e
1889

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY are the only authorised publishers
of the works of LONGFELLOW, WHITTIER, LOWELL, HOLMES, EMER-

SON, THOREAU, and HAWTHORNE. All editions which lack the
imprint or authorization of Houghton Mifflin Company are issued
without the consent and contrary to the wishes of the authors or
their heirs.

Copyright, 1871,1876, and 1886,
BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
Copyright, 1891 and 1899,
BY MABEL LOWELL BURNETT.
Copyright, 1888 and 1898,
BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.

All rights reserved.

BOOKS AND LIBRARIES
AND OTHER PAPERS

CONTENTS
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PAGE

BOOKS AND LIBRARIES
EMERSON, THE LECTURER
KEATS
DON QUIXOTE

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63

NOTE, Since this number of the Riverside LUeraiure Series appeals to persons
of somewhat mature taste and knowledge, attention has been called to points
which invite investigation and comparison. Editorial notes are distinguished from
the author's by an enclosure in brackets [ ].

BOOKS AND L I B R A E I E S .

AN ADDRESS GIVEN AT THE OPENING OF THE FREE PUBLIC
LIBRARY IN CHELSEA, MASS., 2 2 DECEMBER, 1 8 8 5 .

A FEW years ago my friend, Mr. Alexander Ireland, published a very interesting volume which he
called The Book-Lover's
Enchiridion, the handbook,1 that is to say, of those who love books. I t
was made up of extracts from the writings of a great
variety of distinguished men, ancient and modern, in,
praise of books. It was a chorus of many voices in
many tongues, a hymn of gratitude and praise, full
of such piety and fervor as can be paralleled only in
songs dedicated to the supreme Power, the supreme
Wisdom, and the supreme Love. Nay, there is a glow
of enthusiasm and sincerity in it which is often painfully wanting in those other too commonly mechanical compositions. We feel at once that here it is
out of the fulness of the heart, yes, and of the head
too, that the mouth speaketh. Here was none of that
compulsory commonplace which is wont to characterize those " testimonials of celebrated authors," by
means of which publishers sometimes strive to linger
out the passage of a hopeless book toward its requiescat2 in oblivion. These utterances which Mr.
f1 Handbook is a translation of the Greek word enchiridion.]
[2 It was once more common than now to place upon tomb-stones
the Latin words Bequiescat in pace: May he rest in peace.]

4

BOOKS AND

LIBRARIES.

Ireland has gathered lovingly together are stamped
with that spontaneousness which is the mint-mark of
all sterling speech. It is true that they are mostly,
as is only natural, the utterances of literary men, and
there is a well-founded proverbial distrust of herring
that bear only the brand of the packer, and not that
of the sworn inspector. But to this objection a cynic
might answer with the question, " Are authors so
prone, then, to praise the works of other people that
"we^are to doubt them when they do it unasked?"
Perhaps the wisest thing I could have done to-night
would have been to put upon the stand some of the
more weighty of this cloud of witnesses. But since
your invitation implied that I should myself say
something, I will endeavor to set before you a few of
the commonplaces of the occasion, as they may be
modified by passing through my own mind, or by
having made themselves felt in my own experience.
The greater part of Mr. Ireland's witnesses testify
to the comfort and consolation they owe to books, to
the refuge they have found in them from sorrow or
misfortune, to their friendship, never estranged and
outliving all others. This testimony they volunteered. Had they been asked, they would have borne
evidence as willingly to the higher and more general
uses of books in their service to the commonwealth,
as well as to the individual man. Consider, for
example, how a single page of Burke may emancipate the young student of politics from narrow views
and merely contemporaneous judgments. 1 Our English ancestors, with that common-sense which is one
f1 An interesting1 reference to Burke as a political thinker will be
found in Mr. Lowell's paper, The Place of the Independent in Politics,
in his volume of Political Essays.]

BOOKS

AND

LIBRARIES.

5

of the most useful, though not one of the most engaging, properties of the race, made a rhyming proverb, which says that —
When land and goods are gone and spent,
Then learning is most excellent;

and this is true so far as it goes, though it goes perhaps hardly far enough. The law also calls only the
earth and what is immovably attached to it real1
property, but I am of opinion that those only are real
possessions which abide with a man after he has been
stripped of those others falsely so called, and which
alone save him from seeming and from being the miserable forked radish to which the bitter scorn of Lear
degraded every child of Adam. 2 The riches of scholarship, the benignities of literature, defy fortune and
outlive calamity. They are beyond the reach of thief
or moth or rust. As they cannot be inherited, so
they cannot be alienated. But they may be shared,
they may be distributed, and it is the object and office
of a free public library to perform these beneficent
functions.
" Books," says Wordsworth, " are a real world," 3
and he was thinking, doubtless, of such books as are
not merely the triumphs of pure intellect, however
supreme, but of those in which intellect infused with
the sense of beauty aims rather to produce delight
than conviction, or, if conviction, then through intuition rather than formal logic, and, leaving what Donne
wisely calls —
f1 What is personal property or estate, as distinguished from real ?]
[2 See King Lear, Act III. sc. 4 ; but see King Henry IV., Part II,
Act III. sc. 2.]
[3 In what poem ?]

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LIBRARIES.

Unconcerning things matters of f a c t l

to science and the understanding, seeks to give ideal
expression to those abiding realities of the spiritual
world for which the outward and visible world serves
at best but as the husk and symbol. Am I wrong in
using the word realities? wrong in insisting on the
distinction between the real and the actual ? in assuming for the ideal an existence as absolute and selfsubsistent as that which appeals to our senses, nay,
so pften cheats them, in the matter of fact? How
very small a part of the world we truly live in is
represented by what speaks to us through the senses
when compared with that vast realm of the mind
which is peopled by memory and imagination, and
with such shining inhabitants! These walls, these
faces, what are they in comparison with the countless
images, the innumerable population which every one
of us can summon up to the tiny show-box of the
brain, in material breadth scarce a span, yet infinite
as space and time ? and in what, I pray, are those we
gravely call historical characters, of which each new
historian strains his neck to get a new and different
view, in any sense more real than the personages of
fiction ? Do not serious and earnest men discuss
\} A line in the poem Of the Progress of the Soul. The passage
should be read in full.
" We see in authors, too stiff to recant,
A hundred controversies of an ant;
And yet one watches, starves, freezes, and sweats,
To know but catechisms and alphabets
Of unconcerning things, matters of fact,
How others on our stage their parts did act,
What Caesar did, yea, and what Cicero said;
Why grass is green, or why our blood is red,
Are mysteries which none have reached unto ;
In this low form, poor soul, what wilt thou do ?
Oh! when wilt thou shake off this pedantry,
Of being taught by sense and fantasy ? ,? 3

BOOKS AND

LIBRARIES.

1

Hamlet as they would Cromwell or Lincoln ? Does
Caesar, does Alaric, hold existence by any other or
stronger tenure than the Christian of Bunyan, or the
Don Quixote of Cervantes, or the Antigone of Sophocles ? Is not the history which is luminous because
of an indwelling and perennial truth to nature,
because of that light which never was on land or
sea,1 really more true, in the highest sense, than
many a weary chronicle with names and date and
place in which " an Amurath to Amurath succeeds " ?
Do we know as much of any authentic Danish prince
as of Hamlet ?
But to come back a little nearer to Chelsea and the
occasion that has called us together. The founders
of New England, if sometimes, when they found it
needful, an impracticable, were always a practical
people. Their first care, no doubt, was for an adequate supply of powder, and they encouraged the
manufacture of musket bullets by enacting that they
should pass as currency at a farthing each, — a coinage
nearer to its nominal value and not heavier than some
with which we are familiar. Their second care was
that " good learning shoidd not perish from among
us," and to this end they at once established the
Grammar (Latin) School2 in Boston, and soon after
the college at Cambridge. Th& nucleus of this was,
as you all know, the bequest in money by John Harvard. Hardly less important, however, was the legacy
of his library, a collection of good books, inconsider\} See Wordsworth's poem, Elegiac Stanzas suggested by a Picture
of Peele Castle in a Storm.]
[2 An interesting account of this school may be read in The Oldest
School in America, containing a notable historical address by Phillips
Brooks.]

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AND

LIBRABIES.

able measured by the standard of to-day, but very
considerable then as the possession of a private person. From that little acorn what an oak has sprung,
and from its acorns again what a vocal forest, as old
Howell would have called i t ! — old Howell, whom I
love to cite, because his name gave their title to the
Essays of Elia^ and is borne with slight variation
by one of the most delightful of modern authors. It
was, in my judgment, those two foundations, more
than anything else, which gave to New England
character its bent, and to Boston that literary supremacy which, I am told, she is in danger of losing,
but which she will not lose till she and all the world
lose Holmes.
The opening of a free public library, 2 then, is a
most important event in the history of any town. A
college training is an excellent thing ; but, after all,
the better part of every man's education is that which
he gives himself, and it is for this that a good library
should furnish the opportunity and the means. I have
sometimes thought that our public schools undertook
to teach too much, and that the older system, which
taught merely the three R's, and taught them well,
leaving natural selection to decide who should go
farther, was the better. However this may be, all
[l Mr. Lowell here conjectures t h a t L a m b , who was at home in
quaint English literature, adopted his signature of JElia from the
Epistolce Ho-Eliance of J a m e s Howell, a writer of the former half of
t h e seventeenth century; b u t L a m b himself, in a letter to his publishers, states t h a t he took the name of Elia, which he tells them to pronounce Ellia, from a former fellow-clerk of his at the India House, an
Italian named Elia.]
[ 2 I t would be an interesting study for any one to trace the rise
and gTowth of public libraries in the United States.
Abundant
material will be found in a Special Beport issued b y the B u r e a u of
Education a t Washington in 1876.]

BOOKS AND

LIBRARIES.

9

that is primarily needful in order to use a library is
the ability to read. I say primarily, for there must
also be the inclination, and, after that, some guidance
in reading well. Formerly the duty of a librarian
was considered too much that of a watch-dog, to keep
people as much as possible away from the books, and
to hand these over to his successor as little worn by
use as he could. Librarians now, it is pleasant to see,
have a different notion of their trust, and are in the
habit of preparing, for the direction of the inexperienced, lists of such books as they think best worth
reading. Cataloguing has also, thanks in great
measure to American librarians, become a science,
and catalogues, ceasing to be labyrinths without a
clew, are furnished with finger-posts at every turn.
Subject catalogues again save the beginner a vast
deal of time and trouble by supplying him for nothing with one at least of the results of thorough
scholarship, the knowing where to look for what he
wants. I do not mean by this that there is or can
be any short cut to learning, but that there may be,
and is, such a short cut to information that will make
learning more easily accessible.
But have you ever rightly considered what the
mere ability to read means ? That it is the key which
admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy
and imagination ? to the company of saint and sage,,
of the wisest and the wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moment ? That it enables us to see with the
keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to
the sweetest voices of all time ? More than that, it
annihilates time and space for us ; it revives for us
without a miracle the Age of Wonder, endowing us
with the shoes of swiftness and the cap of darkness,

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so that we walk invisible like fern-seed,1 and witness
unharmed the plague 2 at Athens or Florence or London ; accompany Caesar on his marches, or look in on
Catiline in council with his fellow-conspirators, or
Guy Fawkes in the cellar of St. Stephen's. W e
often hear of people who will descend to any servilityd
submit to any insult, for the sake of getting themselves or their children into what is euphemistically
called good society. Did it ever occur to them that
thera is a select society of all the centuries to which
they and theirs can be admitted for the asking, a
society, too, which will not involve them in ruinous
expense, and still more ruinous waste of time and
health and faculties ?
Southey tells us that, in his walk one stormy day,
he met an old woman, to whom, by way of greeting,
he made the rather obvious remark that it was dreadful weather. She answered, philosophically, that, in
her opinion, "any weather was better than none ! "
I should be half inclined to say that any reading was
better than none, allaying the crudeness of the statement by the Yankee proverb, which tells us that,
though " all deacons are good, there 's odds in deacons." Among books, certainly, there is much variety
of company, ranging from the best to the worst, from
Plato to Zola; and the first lesson in reading well is
that which teaches us to distinguish between literature and merely printed matter. The choice lies
wholly with ourselves. W e have the key put into
P Any good collection of fairy tales will enable one to recount the
stories which make use of the shoes, the cap, and the fern-seed.]
[2 Thucydides describes the plague at Athens ; Defoe, the plague
at London. What Italian writer made the plague at Florence an
excuse for his stories ? If one is in doubt, let him consult the notes
in Tales of a Wayside Inn, published in this series.]

BOOKS AND LIBRARIES.

11

our hands; shall we unlock the pantry or the oratory? There is a Wallachian legend which, like
most of the figments of popular fancy, has a moral in
it. One Bakala, a good-for-nothing kind of fellow in
his way, having had the luck to offer a sacrifice especially well pleasing to God, is taken up into heaven.
He finds the Almighty sitting in something like the
best room of a Wallachian peasant's cottage — there
is always a profound pathos in the homeliness of the
popular imagination, forced, like the princess in the
fairy tale, to weave its semblance of gold tissue out
of straw. On being asked what reward he desires
for the good service he has done, Bakala, who had
always passionately longed to be the owner of a bagpipe, seeing a half worn-out one lying among some
rubbish in a corner of the room, begs eagerly that it
may be bestowed on him. The Lord, with a smile of
pity at the meanness of his choice, grants him his
boon, and Bakala goes back to earth delighted with
his prize. With an infinite possibility within his
reach, with the choice of wisdom, of power, of beauty
at his tongue's end, he asked according to his kind,
and his sordid wish is answered with a gift as sordid.
Yes, there is a choice in books as in friends, and the
mind sinks or rises to the level of its habitual society,
is subdued, as Shakespeare says of the dyer's hand,
to what it works in.1 Cato's advice, cum bonis
ambula (consort with the good), is quite as true if we
extend it to books, for they, too; insensibly give away
their own nature to the mind that converses with
them. They either beckon upwards or drag down.
Du gleichst dem- Geist den du begreifst? says the
J

I1 Sonnet cxi.]
[2 Thou 'rt like the Spirit whom thou conceivest.]

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World Spirit to Faust, and this is true of the ascending no less than of the descending scale. Every
book we read may be made a round in the ever-lengthening ladder by which we climb to knowledge, and to
that temperance and serenity of mind which, as it is
the ripest fruit of Wisdom, is also the sweetest. But
this can only be if we read such books as make us
think, and read them in such a way as helps them to
do so, that is, by endeavoring to judge them, and thus
to make them an exercise rather than a relaxation of
the mind. Desultory reading, except as conscious
pastime, hebetates the brain and slackens the bowstring of Will. It communicates as little intelligence
as the messages that run along the telegraph wire to
the birds that perch on it. Few men learn the highest use of books. After lifelong study many a man
discovers too late that to have had the philosopher's
stone availed nothing without the philosopher to use
it. Many a scholarly life, stretched like a talking
wire to bring the wisdom of antiquity into communion with the present, can at last yield us no better
news than the true accent of a Greek verse, or the
translation of some filthy nothing scrawled on the
walls of a brothel by some Pompeian idler. And it
is certainly true that the material of thought reacts
upon the thought itself. Shakespeare himself would
have been commonplace had he been paddocked in a
thinly-shaven vocabulary, and Phidias, had he worked
in wax, only a more inspired Mrs. Jarley. A man is
known, says the proverb, by the company he keeps,
and not only so, but made by it. Milton makes his
fallen angels grow small to enter the infernal council
room,1 but the soul, which God meant to be the spacious
I1 See Paradise Lost, Book I. lines 775-798J

BOOKS AND

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13

chamber where high thoughts and generous aspirations might commune together, shrinks a n d narrows
itself to the measure of the meaner company t h a t is
wont to gather there, hatching conspiracies against
our better selves. W e are apt to wonder at t h e
scholarship of the men of three centuries ago, and a t
a certain dignity of phrase that characterizes them.
They were scholars because they did not read so many
things as we. They had fewer books, but these were
of the best. T h e i r speech was noble, because they
lunched with P l u t a r c h and supped with P l a t o . W e
spend as much time over print as they did, but instead of communing with the choice thought? of
choice spirits, a n d unconsciously acquiring the g r a n d
manner of that supreme society, we diligently inform
ourselves, and cover the continent with a cobweb of
telegraphs to inform us, of such inspiring facts as
that a horse belonging to M r . Smith r a n away on
Wednesday, seriously damaging a valuable c a r r y a l l ;
t h a t a son of M r . Brown swallowed a hickory n u t
on T h u r s d a y ; and t h a t a gravel b a n k caved in a n d
buried M r . Robinson alive on F r i d a y . Alas, it is we
ourselves t h a t are getting buried alive under this
avalanche of earthy impertinences ! I t is we who,
while we might each in his humble way be helping
our fellows into the right path, or adding one block
to the climbing spire of a fine soul, are willing to
become mere sponges saturated from the stagnant
goose-pond of village gossip.
This is the kind of
news we compass the globe to catch, fresh from
Bungtown Centre, when we might have it fresh from
heaven by the electric lines of poet or p r o p h e t ! * I t is
f1 It might not be uninstructive for one to make such computations as these : How much time does it take to read my customary

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bad enough that we should be compelled to know so
many nothings, but it is downright intolerable that
we must wash so many barrow-loads of gravel to find
a grain of mica after all. And then to be told that
the ability to read makes us all shareholders in the
Bonanza Mine of Universal Intelligence !
One is sometimes asked by young people to recommend a course of reading. My advice would be that
they should confine themselves to the supreme books
in whatever literature, or still better to choose some
one great author, and make themselves thoroughly
familiar with him. For, as all roads lead to Rome,
so do they likewise lead away from it, and you will
find that, in order to understand perfectly and weigh
exactly any vital piece of literature, you will be
gradually and pleasantly persuaded to excursions7and
explorations of which you little dreamed when you
began, and will find yourselves scholars before you
are aware. For remember that there is nothing less
profitable than scholarship for the mere sake of
scholarship, nor anything more wearisome in the attainment. But the moment you have a definite aim,
attention is quickened, the mother of memory, and
all that you acquire groups and arranges itself in an
order that is lucid, because everywhere and always it
is in intelligent relation to a central object of constant and growing interest. This method also forces
upon us the necessity of thinking, which is, after all,
the highest result of all education. For what we
local newspaper ? What is the shortest time I can give to it and get
the really important things out of it ? How many numhers of my
newspaper would correspond in time of reading with Shakespeare's
Tempest ? How much should I rememher of the papers a month afterward ? how much of The Tempest ? But newspapers are not to he
despised ; only we are to study economy in the using of them.]

BOOKS AND

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15

want is not learning, but knowledge; that is, the
power to make learning answer its true end as a
quickener of intelligence and a widener of our intellectual sympathies. I do not mean to say that every
one is fitted by nature or inclination for a definite
course of study, or indeed for serious study in any
sense. 1 am quite willing that these should " browse
in a library," as Dr. Johnson called it, to their hearts'
content. It is, perhaps, the only way in which time
may be profitably wasted. But desultory reading
will not make a " full man," as Bacon understood it,
of one who has not Johnson's memory, his power of
assimilation, and, above all, his comprehensive view of
the relations of things. " Read not," says Lord Bacon
in his Essay of Studies? " to contradict and confute;
nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk
and discourse ; but to weigh and consider. Some books
are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some
few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books
are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but
not curiously [carefully], and some few to be read
wholly and with diligence and attention. Some books
also may be read by deputy"
This is weighty and
well said, and I would call your attention especially
to the wise words with which the passage closes. The
best books are not always those which lend themselves
to discussion and comment, but those (like Montaigne's Essays) which discuss and comment ourselves.
I have been speaking of such books as should be
chosen for profitable reading. A public library, of
]} It is in this essay that the reference to the " full man " occurs,
and as the essay is not long, it would be a. good one to commit to
memory.]

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course, must be far wider in its scope. It should contain something for all tastes, as well as the material
for a thorough grounding in all branches of knowledge.
It should be rich in books of reference, in encyclopaedias,1 where one may learn without cost of research
what things are generally known. For it is far more
useful to know these than to know those that are not
generally known. Not to know them is the defect of
those half-trained and therefore hasty men who find
a mare's nest on every branch of the tree of knowledge. A library should contain ample stores of history, which, if it do not always deserve the. pompous
title which Bolingbroke gave it, of philosophy teaching
by example,2 certainly teaches many things profitable
for us to know and lay to heart; teaches, among
other things, how much of the present is still held in
mortmain by the past; teaches that, if there be no
controlling purpose, there is, at least, a sternly logical sequence in human affairs, and that chance has
but a trifling dominion over them; teaches why things
are and must be so and not otherwise, and that, of all
hopeless contests, the most hopeless is that which
fools are most eager to challenge, — with the Nature
of Things; teaches, perhaps more than anything else,
the value of personal character as a chief factor in
what used to be called destiny, for that cause is
strong which has not a multitude but one strong
f1 A capital subject for discussion -would be on tbe comparative
merits of the many encyclopaedias to be found in a good public library ; not to determine which was the best, but what was the characteristic of each.]
[2 There is another suggestive definition of history made by the
English historian E. A. Freeman, and used as a motto on the titlepage of the various Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical
and Political Science.]

BOOKS AND LIBRARIES.

17

man behind it. History is, indeed, mainly the biography of a few imperial men, and forces home upon
us the useful lesson how infinitesimally important our
own private affairs are to the universe in general.
History is clarified experience, and yet how little do
men profit by i t ; nay, how should we expect it of
those who so seldom are taught anything by their
own! Delusions, especially economical delusions,
seem the only things that have any chance of an
earthly immortality. I would have plenty of biography. It is no insignificant fact that eminent men
have always loved their Plutarch, since example,
whether for emulation or avoidance, is never so
poignant as when presented to us in a striking personality. Autobiographies are also instructive reading to the student of human nature, though generally
written by men who are more interesting to themselves than to their fellow-men. I have been told
that Emerson and George Eliot agreed in thinking
Rousseau's Confessions the most interesting book
they had ever read.
A public library should also have many and full
shelves of political economy, for the dismal science,
as Carlyle called it, if it prove nothing else, will go
far towards proving that theory is the bird in the
bush, though she sing more sweetly than the nightingale, and that the millennium will not hasten its
coming in deference to the most convincing string of
resolutions that were ever unanimously adopted in
public meeting. It likewise induces in us a profound
and wholesome distrust of social panaceas.
I would have a public library abundant in translations of the best books in all languages, for, though no
work of genius can be adequately translated, because

18

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every word of it is permeated with what Milton calls
" the precious life-blood of a master spirit" which
cannot be transfused into the veins of the best translation, yet some acquaintance with foreign and ancient literatures lias the liberalizing effect of foreign
travel. 1 He who travels by translation travels more
hastily and superficially, but brings home something
that is worth having, nevertheless. Translations properly used, by shortening the labor of acquisition, add
as many years to our lives as they subtract from the
processes of our education. Looked at from any but
the aesthetic point of view, translations retain whatever property was in their originals to enlarge, liberalize, and refine the mind. At the same time I would
have also the originals of these translated books as a
temptation to the study of languages, which has a
special use and importance of its own in teaching us
to understand the niceties of our mother-tongue. The
practice of translation, by making us deliberate in the
choice of the best equivalent of the foreign word in
our own language, has likewise the advantage of continually schooling us in one of the main elements of a
good style, — precision ; and precision of thought is
not only exemplified by precision of language, but is
largely dependent on the habit of it.
In such a library the sciences should be fully represented, that men may at least learn to know in
what a marvellous museum they live, what a wonderworker is giving them an exhibition daily for nothing.
Nor let Art be forgotten in all its many forms, not as
the antithesis of Science, but as her elder or fairer
f1 Emerson, in his essay entitled Books, in the volume Society and
Solitude, has something to say about translations, and his remark
often is quoted.]

BOOKS AND

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19

sister, whom we love all the more that her usefulness
cannot be demonstrated in dollars and cents.
I
should be thankful if every day-laborer among us
could have his mind illumined, as those of Athens
and of Florence had, with some image of what is
best in architecture, painting, and sculpture, to train
his crude perceptions and perhaps call out latent
faculties. I should like to see the works of Ruskin
within the reach of every artisan among us. For I
hope some day that the delicacy of touch and accuracy of eye that have made our mechanics in some
departments the best in the world, may give us the
same supremacy in works of wider range and more
purely ideal scope.
Voyages and travels I would also have, good store,
especially the earlier, when the world was fresh and
unhackneyed and men saw things invisible to the
modern eye. They are fast - sailing ships to waft
away from present trouble to the Fortunate Isles.
To wash down the drier morsels that every library
must necessarily offer at its board, let there be plenty
of imaginative literature, and let its range be not
too narrow to stretch from Dante to the elder Dumas.
The world of the imagination is not the world of
abstraction and nonentity, as some conceive, but a
world formed out of chaos by a sense of the beauty
that is in man and the earth on which he dwells. I t
is the realm of Might-be, our haven of refuge from
the shortcomings and disillusions of life. It is, to
quote Spenser, who knew it well, —
The world's sweet inn from care and wearisome turmoil.

Do we believe, then, that God gave us in mockery
this splendid faculty of sympathy with things that are

20

BOOKS AND

LIBRARIES.

1

a joy forever ? For my part, I believe that the love
and study of works of imagination is of practical
utility in a country so profoundly material (or, as we
like to call it, practical) in its leading tendencies as
ours. The hunger after purely intellectual delights,
the content with ideal possessions, cannot but be
good for us in maintaining a wholesome balance of the
character and of the faculties. I for one shall never
be persuaded that Shakespeare left a less useful legacy to his countrymen than Watt. We hold all the
deepest, all the highest satisfactions of life as tenants
of imagination. Nature will keep up the supply of
what are called hard-headed people without our help,
and, if it come to that, there are other as good uses
for heads as at the end of battering-rams.
I know that there are many excellent people who
object to the reading of novels as a waste of time, if
not as otherwise harmful. But I think they are trying to outwit nature, who is sure to prove cunninger
than they. Look at children. One boy shall want a
chest of tools, and one a book, and of those who want
books one shall ask for a botany, another for a
romance. They will be sure to get what they want,
and we are doing a grave wrong to their morals by
driving them to do things on the sly, to steal that
food which their constitution craves and which is
wholesome for them, instead of having it freely and
frankly given them as the wisest possible diet. If
we cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, so
neither can we hope to succeed with the opposite
experiment. But we may spoil the silk for its legitimate uses. I can conceive of no healthier reading
for a boy, or girl either, than Scott's novels, or
£l The first line of Keats's poem Endymiori suggested this phrase.]

BOOKS AND LIBRARIES.

21

Cooper's, to speak only of the dead. I have found
them very good reading at least for one young m a n ,
for one middle-aged man, and for one who is growing
old. No, no — banish the Antiquary,
banish Leather
Stocking, and banish all the world ! x L e t us not go
about to make life duller than it is.
But I must shut the doors of my imaginary library
or I shall' never end. I t is left for me to say a few
words of cordial acknowledgment to M r . Fitz for his
judicious and generous gift. I have great pleasure
in believing that the custom of giving away money
during their lifetime ( a n d there is nothing harder for
most men to p a r t with, except prejudice) is more common with Americans than with any other people.
I t is a still greater pleasure to see t h a t the favorite
direction of their beneficence is towards the founding
of colleges and libraries. M y observation has led me
to believe that there is no country in which wealth is
so sensible of its obligations as- our own. A n d , as
most of our rich men have risen from the r a n k s , may
we not fairly attribute this sympathy with their kind
to the benign influence of democracy rightly understood? M y dear and honored friend, George W i l liam Curtis, told me t h a t he was sitting in front of
the late M r . E z r a Cornell in a convention, where one
of the speakers made a L a t i n quotation. M r . Cornell
leaned forward and asked for a translation of it,
which M r . Curtis gave him. M r . Cornell thanked
him, and added, " If I can help it, no young m a n
shall grow up in New York hereafter without the
chance, at least, of knowing what a L a t i n quotation
\} In Shakespeare's King Henry IV., Part I. Act II. sc. 4, will
be found the phrase which was in Mr. Lowell's mind when he wrote
this.]

22

BOOKS AND

LIBRARIES.

means when he hears it." This was the germ of
Cornell University, 1 and it found food for its roots in
that sympathy and thoughtfulness for others of which
I just spoke. This is the healthy side of that good
nature which democracy tends to foster, and which is
so oiten harmful when it has its root in indolence
or indifference ; especially harmful where our public
affairs are concerned, and where it is easiest, because
there we are giving away what belongs to other people. It should be said, however, that in this country
it is as laudably easy to procure signatures to a subscription paper as it is shamefully so to obtain them
for certificates of character and recommendations to
office. And is not this public spirit a national evolution from that frame of mind in which New England
was colonized, and which found expression in these
grave words of Robinson and Brewster,2 " W e are
knit together as a body in a most strict and sacred
bond and covenant of the Lord, of the violation of
which we make great conscience, and by virtue
whereof we hold ourselves strictly tied to all care of
each other's good and of the whole " ? Let us never
forget the deep and solemn import of these words.
The problem before us is to make a whole of our
many discordant parts, our many foreign elements;
and I know of no way in which this can better be
done than by providing a common system of education, and a common door of access to the best books
by which that education may be continued, broadened,
and made fruitful. For it is certain that, whatever
\} The motto about the seal of Cornell University indicates Mr.
Cornell's conception of that institution.]
[2 In a letter signed jointly by them to Sir Edwin Sandys, to be
found in Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation, page 20.]

BOOKS AND

LIBRARIES.

23

we do or leave undone, those discordant parts and
foreign elements are to be, whether we will or no,
members of that body which Robinson and Brewster
had in mind, bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh,
for good or ill. I am happy in believing that democracy has enough vigor of constitution to assimilate
these seemingly indigestible morsels, and transmute
them into strength of muscle and symmetry of limb.1
There is no way in which a man can build so secure
and lasting a monument for himself as in a public
library. Upon that he may confidently allow " Resurgam " 2 to be carved, for, through his good deed,
he will rise again in the grateful remembrance and in
the lifted and broadened minds and fortified characters of generation after generation. The pyramids
may forget their builders, but memorials such as this
have longer memories.
Mr. Fitz has done his part in providing your library
with a dwelling. It will be for the citizens of Chelsea
to provide it with worthy habitants. So shall they,
too, have a share in the noble eulogy of the ancient
wise man: " The teachers shall shine as the firmament, and they jbhat turn many to righteousness as the
stars forever and ever."
[J For a fuller statement of Mr. Lowell's faith, see his address
Democracy, which may be found in No. 123 of the Riverside Literature Series.~]

[2 This Latin word, " I shall rise again," reappears in the word
resurrection.]

EMEESON THE

LECTURER.

[This article in its first form was printed in t h e Atlantic
for February, 1861, as a review of Conduct of Life.]

Monthly

I T is a singular fact, that Mr. Emerson is the most
steadily attractive lecturer in America. Into that
somewhat cold-waterish region adventurers of the sensational kind come down now and then with a splash,
to become disregarded King Logs before the next
season. But Mr. Emerson always draws. A lecturer
now for something like a third of a century, one of
the pioneers of the lecturing system, the charm of his
voice, his manner, and his matter has never lost its
power over his earlier hearers, and continually winds
new ones in its enchanting meshes. What they do
not fully understand they take on trust and listen,
saying to themselves, as the old poet 1 of Sir Philip
Sidney, —
" A sweet, attractive kind of grace,
A full assurance given b y looks,
Continual comfort in a face,
T h e lineaments of gospel b o o k s . "

W e call it a singular fact, because we Yankees are
f1 T h e lines quoted are from An Elegie, or Friend's Passion for
his Astroghill;
written upon the death of the Bight Honorable Sir Phdip
Sydney, Knight, Lord Governour of Flushing, by E d m u n d Spenser.
B u t when Mr. Lowell said " the old p o e t , " he m a y have had in his
mind t h e question raised by an editor of Spenser, whether these J i n e s
were not written by a more obscure poet, M a t t h e w Roy don.]

EMERSON

THE LECTURER.

25

thought to be fond of t h e spread-eagle style, and nothing can be more remote from t h a t than his. W e are
reckoned a practical folk, who would rather hear about
a new air-tight stove t h a n about P l a t o ; yet our favorite teacher's practicality is not in the least of the Poor
Richard variety. 1 If he have any Buncombe 2 constituency, it is that unrealized commonwealth of philosophers which Plotinus 3 proposed to establish ; and if he
were to make an almanac, his directions to farmers
would be something like t h i s : " O C T O B E R :
Indian
Summer ; now is the time to get in your early V e d a s . "
W h a t , then, is his secret? I s it not t h a t he outYankees us all ? that his range includes us all ? t h a t
he is equally at home with the potato-disease a n d original sin, with pegging shoes and the Over-soul ? 4 that,
as we try all trades, so has he tried all cultures ? a n d
above all, t h a t his mysticism gives us a counterpoise
to our super-practicality ?
There is no man living to whom, as a writer, so
many of us feel and thankfully acknowledge so great
an indebtedness for ennobling impulses, — none whom
so many cannot abide. W h a t does he m e a n ? ask
f1 Oddly enough, Dr. Holmes, in his volume on Emerson, in American Men of Letters series, t a k e s particular pleasure in pointing out t h e
sympathy between Emerson and Franklin. See especially pages 184,
189, 231. There is, however, no real conflict of opinion between Mr.
Lowell and Dr. Holmes. T h e likeness and unlikeness of the t w o
philosophers would be a good subject for study.]
[2 See an interesting explanation of the origin of this word in
Webster's Dictionary.']
[3 Mr. Lowell, in his A Fable for Critics, says of E m e r s o n :
" H e seems, t o m y thinking (although I ' m afraid
The comparison must, long ere this, have been made),
A Plotinus-Montaigne, where the Egyptian's gold mist
And t h e Gascon's shrewd wit cheek-by-jowl coexist."

See also his characterization in Agassiz.]
[ 4 See Emerson's essay with this title in Essays, first series.l

26

EMERSON THE

LECTURER.

these last. Where is his system ? What is the use
of it all ? What have we to do with Brahma ? 1 I do
not propose to write an essay on Emerson at this time.
I will only say that one may find grandeur and consolation in a starlit night without caring to ask what
it means save grandeur and consolation; one may
like Montaigne, as some ten generations before us
have done, without thinking him so systematic as
some more eminently tedious (or shall we say tediously
eminent ?) authors; one may think roses as good in
their way as cabbages, though the latter would make
a better show in the witness-box if cross-examined as
to their usefulness ; and as for Brahma, why, he can
take care of himself, and won't bite us at any rate.
The bother with Mr. Emerson is, that, though he
writes in prose, he is essentially a poet. If you undertake to paraphrase what he says, and to reduce it to
words of one syllable for infant minds, you will make
as sad work of it as the good monk with his analysis
of Homer in the Epistolce Obscurorum Virorum?
We look upon him as one of the few men of genius
whom our age has produced, and there needs no better
proof of it than his masculine faculty of fecundating
other minds. Search for his eloquence in his books
and you will perchance miss it, but meanwhile you
will find that it has kindled all your thoughts. For
choice and pith of language he belongs to a better
age than ours, and might rub shoulders with Fuller
and Browne,—though he does use that abominable
word reliable. His eye for a fine, telling phrase that
-**dll carry true is like that of a backwoodsman for a
[Z1 W h e n Mr. Lowell wrote this, Emerson's poem on Brahma, printed
in the first number of the Atlantic Monthly, was still puzzling readers.]
[ 2 Letters of Men Little Known.
A satire ascribed to Ulric von
H u t t e n (1488-1523) and others.] -

EMERSON THE LECTURER.

27

rifle; and he will dredge you up a choice word from
the mud of Cotton Mather himself. A diction at
once so rich and so homely as his I know not where
to match in these days of writing by the page; it is
like homespun cloth-of-gold. The many cannot miss
his meaning, and only the few can find it. It is the
open secret of all true genius. It is wholesome to
angle in those profound pools, though one be rewarded
with nothing more than the leap of a fish that flashes
his freckled side in the sun, and as suddenly absconds
in the dark and dreamy-waters again. There is keen
excitement, though there be no ponderable acquisition.
If we carry nothing home in our baskets, there is
ample gain in dilated lungs and stimulated blood.
What does he mean, quotha? He means inspiring
hints, a divining-rod to your deeper nature. No
doubt Emerson, like all original men, has his peculiar
audience, and yet I know none that can hold a promiscuous crowd in pleased attention so long as he. As
in all original men, there is something for every palate.
"Would you know," says Goethe, " the ripest cherries ?
Ask the boys and the blackbirds."
The announcement that such a pleasure as a new
course of lectures by him is coming, to people as old as
I am, is something like those forebodings of spring that
prepare us every year for a familiar novelty, none the
less novel, when it arrives, because it is familiar. W e
know perfectly well what we are to expect from Mr.
Emerson, and yet what he says always penetrates and
stirs us, as is apt to be the case with genius, in a very
unlooked-for fashion. Perhaps genius is one of the few
things which we gladly allow to repeat itself, — one of
the few that multiply rather than weaken the force of
their impression by iteration. Perhaps some of us hear

28

EMERSON THE

LECTURER.

more than the mere words, are moved by something
deeper than the thoughts. If it be so, we are quite
right, for it is thirty years and more of " plain living
and high thinking" * that speak to us in this altogether unique lay-preacher. We have shared in the
beneficence of this varied culture, this fearless impartiality in criticism and speculation, this masculine sincerity, this sweetness of nature which rather stimulates
than cloys, for a generation long. If ever there was
a standing testimonial to the cumulative power and
value of Character (and we need it sadly in these
days), we have it in this gracious and dignified presence. What an antiseptic is a pure life! At sixtyfive (or two years beyond his grand climacteric, as he
would prefer to call it) he has that privilege of soul
which abolishes the calendar, and presents him to us
always the unwasted contemporary of his own prime.
I do not know if he seem old to his younger hearers,
but we who have known him so long wonder at the
tenacity with which he maintains himself even in the
outposts of youth. I suppose it is not the Emerson of
1868 to whom we listen. For us the whole life of the
man is distilled in the clear drop of every sentence,
and behind each word we divine the force of a noble
character, the weight of a large capital of thinking
and being. We do not go to hear what Emerson says
so much as to hear Emerson. Not that we perceive
any falling off in anything that ever was essential to
the charm of Mr. Emerson's peculiar style of thought
or phrase. The first lecture, to be sure, was more disjointed even than common. I t was as if, after vainly
trying to get his paragraphs into sequence and order, he
had at last tried the desperate expedient of shuffling
t 1 See Wordsworth's Sonnet, written in London^ September, 1802.]

EMERSON THE LECTURER.

29

them. It was chaos come again, but it was a chaos full
of shooting-stars, a jumble of creative forces. The
second lecture, on Criticism and Poetry\ was quite up
to the level of old times, full of that power of strangely
subtle association whose indirect approaches startle the
mind into almost painful attention, of those flashes of
mutual understanding between speaker and hearer that
are gone ere one can say it lightens. The vice of Emerson's criticism seems to be, that while no man is so
sensitive to what is poetical, few men are less sensible
than he of what makes a poem. He values the solid
meaning of thought above the subtler meaning of style.
He would prefer Donne, I suspect, to Spenser, and sometimes mistakes the queer for the original.
To be young is surely the best, if the most precarious,
gift of life; yet there are some of us who would hardly
consent to be young again, if it were at the cost of our
recollection of Mr. Emerson's first lectures during the
consulate of Van Buren. We used to walk in from the
country to the Masonic Temple 1 ( I think it was),
through the crisp winter night, and listen to that
thrilling voice of his, so charged with subtle meaning
and subtle music, as shipwrecked men on a raft to the
hail of a ship that came with unhoped-for food and
rescue. Cynics might say what they liked. Did our
own imaginations transfigure dry remainder-biscuit 2
P T h e Masonic Temple stood at the corner of T e m p l e Place and
Tremont Street, Boston. I t was afterward the huilding occupied b y
the United States courts, and since h a s been transformed into a store.
Mr. Lowell g r a d u a t e d a t H a r v a r d College in the class of 1838.
By
a reference to the period of Mr. V a n B u r e n ' s presidency and to t h e
appendix of Mr. J . Elliot Cabot's A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
the student can guess pretty nearly what lecture Mr. Lowell, either
as a college student or as a graduate living in Cambridge, heard. H e
walked in, he tells us, and in his poem Agassiz he gives a picture of
what impressed him and his companions once as he walked out.]
[2 See As You Like It. A c t I I . sc. 7.1

30

EMERSON

THE

LECTURER.

into ambrosia? At any rate, he brought us life,
which, on the whole, is no bad thing. Was it all
transcendentalism? magic-lantern pictures on mist?
As you will. Those, then, were just what we wanted.
But it was not so. The delight and the benefit were
that he put us in communication with a larger style
of thought, sharpened our wits with a more pungent
phrase, gave us ravishing glimpses of an ideal under
the dry husk of our New England ; made us conscious
of the supreme and everlasting originality of whatever bit of soul might be in any of u s ; freed us, in
short, from the stocks of prose in which we had sat so
long that we had grown wellnigh contented in our
cramps. And who that saw the audience will ever
forget it, where every one still capable of fire, or longing to renew in them the half-forgotten sense of it, was
gathered ? Those faces, young and old, agleam with
pale intellectual light, eager with pleased attention,
flash upon me once more from the deep recesses of
the years with an exquisite pathos. Ah, beautiful
young eyes, brimming with love and hope, wholly
vanished now in that other world we call the Past, or
peering doubtfully through the pensive gloaming of
memory, your light impoverishes these cheaper days!
I hear again that rustle of sensation, as they turned to
exchange glances over some pithier thought, some
keener flash of that humor which always played about
the horizon of his mind like heat-lightning, and it
seems now like the sad whisper of the autumn leaves
that are whirling around me. But would my picture
be complete if I forgot that ample and vegete countenance of Mr. E
of W
,—how, from its regular post at the corner of the front bench, it turned
in ruddy triumph to the profaner audience as if ho

EMERSON THE LECTURER.

31

were the inexplicably appointed fugleman of appreciation ? I was reminded of him by those hearty
cherubs in Titian's Assumption that look at you as
who should say, u Did you ever see a Madonna like
that? Did you ever behold one hundred and fifty
pounds of womanhood mount heavenward before like
a rocket ? "
To some of us that long past experience remains as
the most marvellous and fruitful we have ever had.
Emerson awakened us, saved us from the body of this
death. It is the sound of the trumpet that the young
soul longs for, careless what breath may fill it. Sidney l heard it in the ballad of Chevy Chase, and we
in Emerson. Nor did it blow retreat, but called to us
with assurance of victory. Did they say he was disconnected ? So were the stars, that seemed larger to
our eyes, still keen with that excitement, as we walked
homeward with prouder stride over the creaking snow..
And were they not knit together by a higher logic than
our mere sense could master ? Were we enthusiasts ?
I hope and believe we were, and am thankful to the
man who made us worth something for once in our
lives. If asked what was left ? what we carried home ?
we should not have been careful for an answer. I t
would have been enough if we had said that something
beautiful had passed that way. Or we might have
asked in return what one brought away from a symphony of Beethoven ? Enough that he had set that
ferment of wholesome discontent at work in us. There
is one, at least, of those old hearers, so many of whom
are now in the fruition of that intellectual beauty of
f1 See his Defence of Poetry. See also Addison's papers in The
Spectator, numbers 70 and 74, and the introduction to Chevy Chase in
F. J. Child's English and Scottish Ballads, vol. vii.]

32

EMERSON THE

LECTURER.

which Emerson gave them both the desire and the
foretaste, who will always love to repeat:
" Che in l a mente m ' e fitta, ed or m ' aecuora
L a cara e buona immagine paterna
Di voi, quando nel mondo ad ora ad ora
M' insegnavaste come 1' uom s' e t e r n a . " 1

I am unconsciously thinking, as I write, of the third
lecture of the present course, in which Mr. Emerson
gave some delightful reminiscences of the intellectual
influences in whose movement he had shared. It was
like hearing Goethe read some passages of the Wahrheit aus seinem Leben? Not that there was not a
little Dichtung, too, here and there, as the lecturer
built up so lofty a pedestal under certain figures as to
lift them into a prominence of obscurity, and seem to
masthead them there. Everybody was asking his
neighbor who this or that recondite great man was, in
the faint hope that somebody might once have heard
of him. There are those who call Mr. Emerson cold.
Let them revise their judgment in presence of this
loyalty of his that can keep warm for half a century,
that never forgets a friendship, or fails to pay even a
fancied obligation to the uttermost farthing. This
substantiation of shadows was but incidental, and
pleasantly characteristic of the man to those who know
and love him. The greater part of the lecture was
devoted to reminiscences of things substantial in themP From Dante's "Divina Gommedia, Inferno,
Englished by Mr. Longfellow:
44

xv. lines 82-85, t h u s

For in my mind is fixed, and touches now
My heart, the dear and good paternal image
Of you, when in the world from hour to hour
You taught me how a man becomes eternal."]

f2 T h e exact title of Goethe's autobiographical work is AusMeinem
Ziehen, Wahrheit und Dichtung, — T r u t h and Poetry from m y Life.]

EMERSON

THE LECTURER.

33

selves. 1 H e spoke of Everett, fresh from Greece a n d
G e r m a n y ; of C h a n n i n g ; of the translations of M a r garet Fuller, Ripley, and D w i g h t ; of the Dial and
Brook F a r m . To what he said of the latter an u n dertone of good-humored irony gave special zest. B u t
what every one of his hearers felt was that the protagonist in the drama was left out. The lecturer was
no i E n e a s to babble the quorum magna pars
fui?
and, as one of his listeners, I cannot help wishing to
say how each of them was commenting the story as it
went along, and filling up the necessary gaps in it
from his own private store of memories. H i s younger
hearers could not know how much they owed to t h e
benign impersonality, the quiet scorn of everything
ignoble, the never sated hunger of self-culture, t h a t
were personified in the man before them. B u t t h e
older knew how much the country's intellectual emancipation was due to the stimulus of his teaching and
example, how constantly he had kept b u r n i n g the
beacon of an ideal life above our lower region of turmoil. To him more than to all other causes together
did the young martyrs of our civil war owe the sustaining strength of thoughtful heroism t h a t is so
touching in every record of their lives. Those who
are grateful to Mr. Emerson, as many of us are, for
what they feel to be most valuable in their culture, or
perhaps I should say their impulse, are grateful not so
much for any direct teachings of his as for t h a t inspiring lift which only genius can give, and without
which all doctrine is chaff.
f1 Probably the lecture to which Mr. Lowell refers was substantially that entitled Historic Notes of Life and Letters ir- New England.
printed in the tenth volume of Emerson's Works, Riverside edition.]
[2 I n Virgil's JEneid, where the hero tells the story of a g r e a t war,
prefacing his tale with " in these affairs I had a great s h a r e . " ]

<54

EMERSON THE

LECTURER.

This was something like the caret1 which some of.
us older boys wished to fill up on the margin of the
master's lecture. Few men have been so much to so
many, and through so large a range of aptitudes and
temperaments, and this simply because all of us value
manhood beyond any or all other qualities of character. We may suspect in him, here and there, a certain thinness and vagueness of quality, but let the
waters go over him as they list, this masculine fibre
of Eis will keep its lively color and its toughness of
texture. I have heard some great speakers and some
accomplished orators, but never any that so moved
and persuaded men as he. There is a kind of undertow in that rich baritone of his that sweeps our minds
from their foothold into deeper waters with a drift we
cannot and would not resist. And how artfully (for
Emerson is a long-studied artist in these things) does
the deliberate utterance, that seems waiting for the
fit word, appear to admit us partners in the labor of
thought, and make us feel as if the glance of humor
were a sudden suggestion, as if the perfect phrase
lying written there on the desk were as unexpected to
him as to us! I n that closely-filed speech of his at
the Burns centenary dinner 2 every word seemed to
have just dropped down to him from the clouds. He
looked far away over the heads of his hearers, with a
vague kind of expectation, as into some private heaven
of invention, and the winged period came at last obedient to his spell. " My dainty Ariel! " 3 he seemed
murmuring to himself as he cast down his eyes as if
in deprecation of the frenzy of approval, and caught
\} See Webster's Dictionary.~\
[2 January 25, 1859. See the speech in Emerson's Works, vol. xi.J
[8 See The Tempest, Act V. s c 1.]

EMERSON

THE LECTURER.

35

another sentence from the Sibylline leaves that lay
before him ambushed behind a dish of fruit and seen
only by nearest neighbors. EveiT sentence brought
down the house, as I never saw one brought down before, — and it is not so easy to hit Scotsmen with a
sentiment that has no hint of native brogue in it. I
watched, for it was an interesting study, how the quick
sympathy ran flashing from face to face down the
long tables, like an electric spark thrilling as it went,
and then exploded in a thunder of plaudits. I watched
till tables and faces vanished, for I, too, found myself
caught up in the common enthusiasm, and my excited
fancy set me under the bema listening to him who
fulmined over Greece. I can never help applying to
him what Ben Jonson said of Bacon : " There happened in my time one noble speaker, who was full of
gravity in his speaking. His language was nobly
censorious. No man ever spake more neatly, more
pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less
idleness, in what he uttered. No member of his
speech but consisted of his own graces. His hearers
could not cough, or look aside from him, without loss.
He commanded where he spoke." Those who heard
him while their natures were yet plastic, and their
mental nerves trembled under the slightest breath of
divine air, will never cease to feel and say :
" Was never eye did see that face,
Was never ear did hear that tongue,
Was never mind did mind his grace,
That ever thought the travail long;
But eyes, and ears, and every thought,
Were with his sweet perfections caught."

1

[* From the Elegie quoted on the first page of this essay, j

KEATS.
BORN, 29 OCTOBER, 1795. — DIED, 23 FEBRUARY,

1821.

[In its first form printed as an Introduction to Keats1 s Poems, in
Professor Child's edition of the British Poets.]

THERE are few poets whose works contain slighter
hints of their personal history than those of Keats;
yet there are, perhaps, even fewer whose real lives, or
rather the conditions upon which they lived, are more
clearly traceable in what they have written. To write
the life of a man was formerly understood to mean
the cataloguing and placing of circumstances, of those
things which stood about the life and were more or
less related to it, but were not the life itself. But
Biography from day to day holds dates cheaper and
facts dearer. A man's life, so far as its outward
events are concerned, may be made for him, as his
clothes are by the tailor, of this cut or that, of finer
or coarser material; but the gait and gesture show
through, and give to trappings, in themselves characterless, an individuality that belongs to the man himself. It is those essential facts which underlie the
life and make the individual man that are of importance, and it is the cropping out of these upon the
surface that gives us indications by which to judge of
the true nature hidden below. Every man has his
block given him, and the figure he cuts will depend

KEA TS.

37

very much upon the shape of that, upon the knots and
twists which existed in it from the beginning. W e
were designed in the cradle, perhaps earlier, and it is
in finding out this design, and shaping ourselves to it,
that our years are spent wisely. It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not that has
strewn history with so many broken purposes and
lives left in the rough.
Keats hardly lived long enough to develop a well
outlined character, for that results commonly from
the resistance made by temperament to the many
influences by which the world, as it may happen then
to be, endeavors to mould every one in its own image.
What his temperament was we can see clearly, and
also that it subordinated itself more and more to the
discipline of art.
J O H N KEATS, the second of four children, like
Chaucer and Spenser, was a Londoner, but, unlike
them, he was certainly not of gentle blood. Lord
Houghton, 1 who seems to have had a kindly wish to
create him gentleman by brevet, says that he was
" born in the upper ranks of the middle class." This
shows a commendable tenderness for the nerves of
English society, and reminds one of Northcote's story
of the violin-player who, wishing to compliment his
pupil, George III., divided all fiddlers into three
classes, — those who could not play at all, those who
played very badly, and those who played very well,
assuring his Majesty that he had made such commendable progress as to have already reached the second
[l Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton, wrote and edited Life,
Letters, and Literary Remains of Keats, in 1848, the first considerable
memoir of the poet J

38

KEA TS.

rank. We shall not be too greatly shocked by knowing that the father of Keats (as Lord Houghton had
told us in an earlier biography) " was employed in
the establishment of Mr. Jennings, the proprietor of
large livery-stables on the Pavement iu Moorfields,
nearly opposite the entrance into Finsbury Circus."
So that, after all, it was not so bad; for, first, Mr.
Jennings was a proprietor; second, he was the proprietor of an establishment; third, he was the proprietor of a large establishment; and fourth, this
large establishment was nearly opposite Finsbury
Circus, a name which vaguely dilates the imagination
with all sorts of potential grandeurs. It is true
Leigh Hunt asserts that Keats " was a little too sensitive on the score of his origin," 1 but we can find no
trace of such a feeling either in his poetry or in such
of his letters as have been printed. W e suspect the
fact to have been that he resented with becoming pride
the vulgar Blackwood and Quarterly standard, which
measured genius by genealogies. It is enough that
his poetical pedigree is of the best, tracing through
Spenser to Chaucer, and that Pegasus does not stand
at livery even in the largest establishments in Moorfields.
As well as we can make out, then, the father of
Keats was a groom in the service of Mr. Jennings,
and married the daughter of his master. Thus, on
the mother's side at least, we find a grandfather; on
the father's there is no hint of such an ancestor, and
we must charitably take him for granted. I t is of
more importance that the elder Keats was a man of
sense and energy, and that his wife was a " lively and
intelligent woman." . . . Lord Houghton describes
1

Hunt's Autobiography (Am. ed.), vol. ii. p. 36.

KEA TS.

39

her as " tall, with a large oval face, and a somewhat
saturnine demeanor." This last circumstance does not
agree very well with what he had just before told us
of her liveliness, but he consoles us by adding that
"she succeeded, however, in inspiring her children
with the profoundest affection." This was particularly true of John, who once, when between four and
five years old, mounted guard at her chamber-door
with an old sword, when she was ill and the doctor
had ordered her not to be disturbed. 1
In 1804, Keats being in his ninth year, his father
was killed by a fall from his horse. His mother seems
to have been ambitious for her children, and there was
some talk of sending John to Harrow. Fortunately
this plan was thought too expensive, and he was sent
instead to the school of Mr. Clarke at Enfield with
his brothers. A maternal uncle, who had distinguished himself by his courage under Duncan at Camperdown,2 was the hero of his nephews, and they went
to school resolved to maintain the family reputation
for courage. John was always fighting, and was
chiefly noted among his school-fellows as a strange
compound of pluck and sensibility. He attacked an
usher who had boxed his brother's ears; and when
his; mother died, in 1810, was moodily inconsolable,
hiding himself for several days in a nook under the
master's desk, and refusing all comfort from teacher
or friend.
He was popular at school, as boys of spirit always
are, and impressed his companions with a sense of his
1

Haydon tells the story differently, but I think Lord Houghton's
version the hest.
[2 In the war with the Dutch. The battle of Camperdown, October
11, 1797, was a great naval victory in which Admiral Duncan both
outwitted and out-generalled the Dutch.]

40

KEA TS.

power. They thought he would one day be a famous
soldier. This may have been owing to the stories he
told them of the heroic uncle, whose deeds, we may
be sure, were properly famoused by the boy Homer,
and whom they probably took for an admiral at the
least, as it would have been well for Keats's literary
prosperity if he had been. At any rate, they thought
John would be a great man, which is the main thing,
for the public opinion of the playground is truer and
more discerning than that of the world, and if you tell
us what the boy was, we will tell you what the man
longs to be, however he may be repressed by necessity
or fear of the police reports.
Lord Houghton has failed to discover anything else
especially worthy of record in the school-life of Keats.
He translated the twelve books of the -ZEneid, read
Eobinson Crusoe and the Incas of Peru, and looked
into Shakespeare. He left school in 1810, with little
Latin and no Greek; but he had studied Spence's
Poly"metis, Tooke's Pantheon, and Lempriere's Did
tionary, and knew gods, nymphs, and heroes, which
were quite as good company perhaps for him as aorists and aspirates. It is pleasant to fancy the horror
of those respectable writers if their pages could suddenly have become alive under their pens with all
that the young poet saw in them. 1
1
There is always some one willing- to m a k e himself a sort of accessory after the fact in any success; always an old woman or two, ready
to remember omens of all quantities and qualities in the childhood
of persons who have become distinguished. Accordingly, a certain
" M r s . Grafty, of Craven Street, F i n s b u r y , " assures Mr. George
Keats, when he tells her t h a t J o h n is determined to be a poet, ' ' t h a t
this was very odd, because when he could just speak, instead of
answering questions p u t t o him, he would always m a k e a rhyme to
the last word people said, and then l a u g h . " T h e early histories of
heroes, like those of nations, are always more or less mythical, and

KEA

TS.

41

On leaving school he was apprenticed for five years
to a surgeon at Edmonton. His master was a Mr.
Hammond, " of some eminence " in his profession, as
Lord Houghton takes care to assure us. The place
was of more importance than the master, for its
neighborhood to Enfield enabled him to keep up his
intimacy with the family of his former teacher, Mr.
Clarke, and to borrow books of them. In 1812, when
he was in his seventeenth year, Mr. Charles Cowden
Clarke lent him the Faerie Queene. Nothing that
is told of Orpheus or Amphion is more wonderful
than this miracle of Spenser's, transforming a surgeon's apprentice into a great poet. Keats learned at
once the secret of his birth, and henceforward his
indentures ran to Apollo instead of Mr. Hammond.
Thus could the Muse defend her son. It is the old
story, the lost heir discovered by his aptitude for what
is gentle and knightly. Haydon tells us " that he used
.sometimes to say to his brother he feared he should
never be a poet, and if he was not he would destroy
himself." This was perhaps a half-conscious reminiscence of Chatterton, with whose genius and fate he
had an intense sympathy, it may be from an inward
foreboding of the shortness of his own career.1
I give the story for w h a t it is worth. Doubtless there is a gleam of
intelligence in it, for t h e old lady pronounces it odd t h a t any one
should determine t o be a poet, and seems to have wished to hint t h a t
the m a t t e r was determined earlier and by a higher disposing power.
T h e r e are few children who do not soon discover the charm of r h y m e ,
and perhaps fewer who can resist m a k i n g fun of the Mrs. Graftys, of
Craven Street, Finsbury, when they have the chance. See H a y d o n ' s
Autobiography, vol. i. p . 361.
1
" I never saw t h e poet Keats b u t once, b u t he then read some lines
from (I think) t h e Bristowe Tragedy with an enthusiasm of admiration such as could b e felt only by a poet, and which t r u e poetry only
could have e x c i t e d . " — J . H . C , in Notes and Queries, 4th s. x. 157.

42

KEA TS.

Before long we find him studying Chaucer, then
Shakespeare, and afterward Milton. But Chapman's
translations had a more abiding influence on his style
both for good and evil. That he read wisely, his
comments on Paradise Lost1 are enough to prove.
He now also commenced poet himself, but does not
appear to have neglected the study of his profession.
He was a youth of energy and purpose, and though he
no doubt penned many a stanza when he should have
been anatomizing, and walked the hospitals accompanied by the early gods, nevertheless passed a very
creditable examination in 1817. In the spring of
this year, also, he prepared to take his first degree as
poet, and accordingly published a small volume containing a selection of his earlier essays in verse. It
attracted little attention, and the rest of this year
seems to have been occupied with a journey on foot
in Scotland, and the composition of Endymion, which
was published in 1818. Milton's Tetrachordon 2 was
not better abused; but Milton's assailants were unorganized, and were obliged each to print and pay for
his own dingy little quarto, trusting to the natural
laws of demand and supply to furnish him with readers. Keats was arraigned by the constituted authorities of literary justice. They might be, nay, they
were, Jeffrieses and Scroggses, but the sentence was
published, and the penalty inflicted before all England. The difference between his fortune and Milton's was that between being pelted by a mob of perf1 Keats's Notes on Milton were written originally on the margin of
Paradise Lost, were first printed in The Dial, edited by Margaret
Fuller, and reprinted by Lord Houghton in his Life.]
[a The word is a Greek one, and is explained by a phrase in the subtitle Expositions upon the Four Chief Places in Scripture which treat oj
Marriage, or Nullities in Marriage.]

KEA TS.

43

sonal enemies and being set in the pillory. In the
first case, the annoyance brushes off mostly with the
mud; in the last, there is no solace but the consciousness of suffering in a great cause. This solace, to a
certain extent, Keats had; for his ambition was noble,
and he hoped, not to make a great reputation, but to
be a great poet. Haydon says that Wordsworth and
Keats were the only men he had ever seen who looked
conscious of a lofty purpose.
It is curious that men should resent more fiercely
what they suspect to be good verses than what they
know to be bad morals. Is it because they feel thern^
selves incapable of the one and not of the other?
Probably a certain amount of honest loyalty to old
idols in danger of dethronement is to be taken into
account, and quite as much of the cruelty of criticism
is due to want of thought as to deliberate injustice.
However it be, the best poetry has been the most savagely attacked, and men who scrupulously practised
the Ten Commandments as if there were never a not
in any of them, felt every sentiment of their better
nature outraged by the Lyrical Ballads.
I t is idle
to attempt to show that Keats did not suffer keenly
from the vulgarities of Blackwood and the Quarterly.
He suffered in proportion as his ideal was high, and
he was conscious of falling below it. In England,
especially, it is not pleasant to be ridiculous, even if
you are a lord ; but to be ridiculous and an apothecary
at the same time is almost as bad as it was formerly
to be excommunicated. A priori, there was something absurd in poetry written by the son of an assistant in the livery-stables of Mr. Jennings, even
though they were an establishment, and a large establishment, and nearly opposite Finsbury Circus. Mr.

44

KEATS.

Gifford, the ex-cobbler, thought so in the Quarterly,
and Mr. Terry, the actor, 1 thought so even more distinctly in Blackwood, bidding the young apothecary
" b a c k to his g a l l i p o t s ! " I t is not pleasant to be
talked down upon by your inferiors who happen to
have the advantage of position, nor to be drenched
with ditch-water, though you know it to be thrown by
a scullion in a garret.
Keats, as his was a temperament in which sensibility was excessive, could not but be galled by this
treatment. H e was galled the more t h a t he was also
a man of strong sense, and capable of understanding
clearly how hard it is to make men acknowledge solid
value in a person whom they have once heartily laughed
at. Reputation is in itself only a farthing-candle, of
wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out,
b u t it is the light by which the world looks for and
finds merit. Keats longed for fame, but longed above
all to deserve it. To his friend Taylor he writes,
" There is but one way for me. The road lies through
study, application, and thought." Thrilling with the
electric touch of sacred leaves, he saw in vision, like
Dante, 2 that small procession of the elder poets to
which only elect centuries can add another laurelled
head. Might he, too, deserve from posterity the love
and reverence which he paid to those antique glories ?
I t was no unworthy ambition, but everything was
against h i m , — b i r t h , health, even friends, since it
was partly on their account t h a t he was sneered at.
1
Haydon (Autobiography, vol. i. p. 379) says that he " strongly
suspects " Terry to have written the articles in Blackwood. [Terry
will he rememhered hy readers of Lockhart's Life of Scott as associated with the great novelist in dramatizing" his novels.]
[2 See the Inferno, canto iv.]

KEA

TS.

45

His very name stood in his way, for Fame loves best
such syllables as are sweet and sonorous on the tongue,
like Spenserian, Shakespearian. In spite of Juliet,
there is a great deal in names,1 and when the fairies
come with their gifts to the cradle of the selected
child, let one, wiser than the rest, choose a name for
him from which well-sounding derivatives can be made,
and, best of all, with a termination in on. Men judge
the current coin of opinion by the ring, and are
readier to take without question whatever is Platonic,
Baconian, Newtonian, Johnsonian, Washingtonian,
Jeffersonian, Napoleonic, and all the rest. You cannot make a good adjective out of Keats, — the more
pity, — and to say a thing is Keatsy is to contemn it.
Fortune likes fine names.
Haydon tells us that Keats was very much depressed by the fortunes of his book. This was natural enough, but he took it all in a manly way, and
determined to revenge himself by writing better
poetry. He knew that activity, and not despondency,
is the true counterpoise to misfortune. Haydon is
sure of the change in his spirits, because he would
come to the painting-room and sit silent for hours.
Bat we rather think that the conversation, where Mr.
Haydon was, resembled that in a young author's first
play, where the other interlocutors are only brought
in as convenient points for the hero to hitch the interminable web of his monologue upon. Besides, Keats
had been continuing his education this year by a
course of Elgin marbles 2 and pictures by the great
f1 See Borneo and Juliet, A c t I I . sc. 2.]
J2 T h e Elgin marbles were sculptures from the Parthenon at Athens,
brought to England in 1801 by Lord Elgin, then ambassador a t the
Turkish c o u r t : the marbles are in the British Museum.]

*6

KEA

TS.

Italians, and might very naturally have found little
to say about Mr. Haydon's extensive works that he
would have cared to hear. Lord Houghton, on the
other hand, in his eagerness to prove that Keats was
not killed by the article in the Quarterly, 1 is carried
too far toward the opposite extreme, and more than
hints that he was not even hurt by it. This would
have been true of Wordsworth, who, by a constant
companionship with mountains, had acquired something of their manners, but was simply impossible to
a man of Keats's temperament.
On the whole, perhaps, we need not respect Keats
the less for having been gifted with sensibility, and
may even say what we believe to be true, that his
health was injured by the failure of his book. A man
cannot have a sensuous nature and be pachydermatous
at the same time, and if he be imaginative as well as
sensuous, he suffers just in proportion to the amount
of his imagination. It is perfectly true that what we
call the world, in these affairs, is nothing more than
a mere Brocken 2 spectre, the projected shadow of
ourselves ; but as long as we do not know it, it is a
very passable giant. W e are not without experience
of natures so purely intellectual that their bodies had
no more concern in their mental doings and sufferings
than a house has with the good or ill fortune of its
occupant. But poets are not built on this plan, and
especially poets like Keats, in whom the moral seems
I1 It was commonly said that Gilford's severe criticism in the
Quarterly Review caused the decline which ended in death, and there
Was a parody of Who killed Cock Robin, which read:
" Who killed John Keats ?
' I,r said the Quarterly,
4
With my article so tartarly
I killed John Keats.'"]

P See Goethe's Faust.]

KEATS.

47

to have so perfectly interfused the physical man that
you might almost say he could feel sorrow with his
hands, so truly did his body, like that of Donne's
Mistress Boulstred, think and remember and forebode. The healthiest poet 1 of whom our civilization
has been capable says that when he beholds
" desert a beggar born,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,"

alluding, plainly enough, to the Giffords of his day,
" A n d simple truth miscalled simplicity,"

as it was long afterward in Wordsworth's case,
" And captive Good attending Captain 111,"

that then even he, the poet to whom, of all others,
life seems to have been dearest, as it was also the fullest of enjoyment, "tired of all these," had nothing
for it but to cry for " restful Death."
Keats, to all appearance, accepted his ill-fortune
courageously. He certainly did not overestimate JEndymion, and perhaps a sense of humor which was not
wanting in him may have served as a buffer against
the too importunate shock of disappointment. " He
made Ritchie promise," says Haydon, " he would carry
his JEndymion to the great desert of Sahara and
fling it in the midst." On the 9th October, 1818, he
writes to his publisher, Mr. Hessey: " I cannot but
feel indebted to those gentlemen who have taken my
part. As for the rest, I begin to get acquainted
with my own strength and weakness. Praise or
blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose
love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe
critic of his own works. My own domestic criticism
P Shakespeare, in his Sonnet lxvi.]

48

KEATS.

has given me pain without comparison beyond what
Blackwood or the Quarterly could inflict; and also,
when I feel I am right, no external praise can give
me such a glow as my own solitary reperception and
ratification of what is fine. J . S. is perfectly right
in regard to ' t h e slipshod Endymion?
That it is so
is no fault of mine. No ! though it may sound a little
paradoxical, it is as good as I had power to make it
by myself. Had I been nervous about its being a
perfect piece, and with that view asked advice and
trembled over every page, it would not have been
written ; for it is not in my nature to fumble. 1 will
write independently. I have written independently
without judgment; I may write independently and
with judgment, hereafter.
The Genius of Poetry
must work out its own salvation in a man. I t cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation
and watchfulness in itself. That which is creative
must create itself. In Endymion I leaped headlong
into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the
rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and
piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable
advice. I was never afraid of failure; for I would
sooner fail than not be among the greatest."
This was undoubtedly true, and it was naturally
the side which a large-minded person would display
to a friend. This is what he thought, but whether it
was what he felt, I think doubtful. I look upon it
rather as one of the phenomena of that multanimous
nature of the poet, which makes him for the moment
that of which he has an intellectual perception. Elsewhere he says something which seems to hint at the
true state of the case. 'A I must think that difficul-

KEATS.

49

ties nerve the spirit of a man: they make our prime,
objects a refuge as well as a passion"
One cannot
help contrasting Keats with Wordsworth, — the one
altogether poet; the other essentially a Wordsworth,
with the poetic faculty added,—the one shifting from
form to form, and from style to style, and pouring his
hot throbbing life into every mould ; the other remaining always the individual, producing works, and not so
much living in his poems as memorially recording his
life in them. When Wordsworth alludes to the foolish criticisms on his writings, he speaks serenely and
generously of Wordsworth the poet, as if he were an
unbiased third person, who takes up the argument
merely in the interest of literature. He towers into
a bald egotism which is quite above and beyond selfishness. Poesy was his employment; it was Keats's
very existence, and he felt the rough treatment of his
Verses as if it had been the wounding of a limb. To
Wordsworth, composing was a healthy exercise; his
slow pulse and imperturbable self-trust gave him assurance of a life so long that he could wait; and when
we read his poems we should never suspect the existence in him of any sense but that of observation, as
if Wordsworth the poet were a half-mad land-sur*
veyor, accompanied by Mr. Wordsworth the distributor of stamps, as a kind of keeper. But every one
of Keats's poems was a sacrifice of vitality; a virtue
went away from him into every one of them; even
yet, as we turn the leaves, they seem to warm and
thrill our fingers with the flush of his fine senses, and
the flutter of his electrical nerves, and we do not wonder he felt that what he did was to be done swiftly.
In the mean time his younger brother languished
and died; his elder seems to have been in some way

50

KEATS.

unfortunate and had gone to America,1 and Keats himself showed symptoms of the hereditary disease which
caused his death at last. It is in October, 1818, that
we find the first allusion to a passion which was, erelong, to consume him. It is plain enough beforehand,
that those were not moral or mental graces that should
attract a man like Keats. His intellect was satisfied
and absorbed by his art, his books, and his friends. He
could have companionship and appreciation from men;
what he craved of woman was only repose. That luxuri6us nature, which would have tossed uneasily on a
crumpled rose-leaf, must have something softer to rest
upon than intellect, something less ethereal than culture. It was his body that needed to have its equilibrium restored, the waste of his nervous energy that
must be repaired by deep draughts of the overflowing
life and drowsy tropical force of an abundant and
healthily poised womanhood. Writing to his sister-inlaw, he says of this nameless person: " She is not a
Cleopatra, but is, at least, a Charmian ; she has a rich
Eastern look; she has fine eyes and fine manners.
When she comes into a room she makes the same impression as the beauty of a leopardess. She is too fine
and too conscious of herself to repulse any man who
may address her. From habit, she thinks-that nothing
particular. I always find myself at ease with such a
woman ; the picture before me always gives me a life
and animation which I cannot possibly feel with anything inferior. I am at such times too much occupied
in admiring to be awkward or in a tremble. I forget
myself entirely, because I live in her. You will by this
time think I am in love with her, so, before I go any
\} George Keats lived and died in Louisville, Kentucky. His grandson, John Gilmer Speed, has edited Keats's Letters and Poems.]

KEATS.

51

farther, I will tell you that I am not. She kept me
awake one night, as a tune of Mozart's might do. I
speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement, than
which I can feel none deeper than a conversation with
an imperial woman, the very yes and no of whose life is
to me a banquet. . . . I like her and her like, because
one ha,s no sensation ; what we both are is taken for
granted. . . . She walks across a room in such a manner that a man is drawn toward her with magnetic
power. . . . I believe, though, she has faults, the same
as a Cleopatra or a Charmian might have had. Yet
she is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way; for
there are two distinct tempers of mind in which we
judge of things, — the worldly, theatrical, and pantoinimical ; and the unearthly, spiritual, and ethereal.
In the former, Bonaparte, Lord Byron, and this Charmian hold the first place in our minds; in the latter,
John Howaid, Bishop Hooker rocking his child's cradle, and you, my dear sister, are the conquering feelings. As a man of the world, I love the rich talk of
a Charmian ; as an eternal being, I love the thought
of you. I should like her to ruin me, and I should
like you to save me."
It is pleasant always to see Love hiding his head
with such pains, while his whole body is so clearly
visible; as in this extract. This lady, it seems, is not
a Cleopatra, only a Charmian ; but presently we find
that she is imperial. He does not love her, but he
would just like to be ruined by her, nothing more.
This glimpse of her, with her leopardess beauty, crossing the room and drawing men after her magnetically,
is all we have. She seems to have been still living in
1848, and, as Lord Houghton tells us, kept the memory of the poet sacred. " She is an East-Indian,"

52

KEA TS.

Keats says," and ought to be her grandfather's heir."
Her name we do not know.1 It appears from Dilke's
Papers of a Critic that they were betrothed : " It is
quite a settled thing between John Keats and Miss
. God help them. It is a bad thing for them.
The mother says she cannot prevent it, and that her
only hope is that it will go off. He don't like any
one to look at her or to speak to her." Alas, the
tropical warmth became a consuming fire!
" His passion cruel grown took on a hue
Fierce and sanguineous."

Between this time and the spring of 1820 he seems
to have worked assiduously. Of course, worldly success was of more importance than ever. He began
Hyperion, but had given it up in September, 1819,
because, as he said, " there were too many Miltonic inversions in it." He wrote Lamia after an attentive
study of Dryden's versification. This period also
produced the Eve of St. Agnes, Isabella, and the
odes to the Nightingale and to the Grecian Urn.
He studied Italian, read Ariosto, and wrote part of a
humorous poem, The Cap and Bells. He tried his
hand at tragedy, and Lord Houghton has published,
among his Remains, Otho the Great, and all that
was ever written of King Stephen. W e think he did
unwisely, for a biographer is hardly called upon to
show how ill his hiographee could do anything.
In the winter of 1820 he was chilled in riding on
the top of a stage-coach, and came home in a state of
feverish excitement. He was persuaded to go to bed,
I1 The lady in question was a Miss Cox. Lord Houghton, however^
whom Mr. Lowell followed, confounded two persons. The one to
whom Keats was betrothed was Fanny Brawne, who a few years ago
permitted Keats's letters to her to be published.]

KE A TS.

53

and, in getting between the cold sheets, coughed
slightly. " That is blood in my mouth," he said ;
" bring me the candle; let me see this blood." I t
was of a brilliant red, and his medical knowledge
enabled him to interpret the augury. Those narcotic
odors that seem to breathe seaward, and steep in repose the senses of the voyager who is drifting toward
the shore of the mysterious Other World, appeared to
envelop him, and, looking up with sudden calmness,
he said: " I know the color of that blood. It is arterial blood ; I cannot be deceived in that color. That
drop is my death-warrant; I must die."
There was a slight rally during the summer of that
year, but toward autumn he grew worse again, and it
was decided that he should go to Italy. He was accompanied thither by his friend Mr. Severn, an artist, 1
After embarking, he wrote to his friend Mr. Brown.
We give a part of this letter, which is so deeply tragic
that the sentences we take almost seem to break away
from the rest with a cry of anguish, like the branches
of Dante's lamentable wood.
" I wish to write on subjects that will not agitate me
much. There is one I must mention and have done
with it. Even if my body would recover of itself, this
would prevent it. The very thing which I want to live
most for will be a great occasion of my death. I cannot help it. Who can help it ? Were I in health it
would make me ill, and how can I bear it in my state ?
I dare say you will be able to guess on what subject I
am harping, — you know what was my greatest pain
during the first part of my illness at your house. I
wish for death every day and night to deliver me from
f1 The Atlantic Monthly for April, 1863, contains a paper by Mr.
Joseph Severn, entitled On the Vicissitudes of Keats's Fame.]

54

KEA TS.

these pains, and then I wish death away, for death
would destroy even those pains, which are better than
nothing. Land and sea, weakness and decline, are
great separators, but Death is the great divorcer forever. When the pang of this thought has passed
through my mind, I may say the bitterness of death is
passed. I often wish for you, that you might flatter
me with the best. I think, without my mentioning it,
for my sake, you would be a friend to Miss
when
I am dead. You think she has many faults, but for
my sake think she has not one. If there is anything
you can do for her by word or deed, I know you will
do it. I am in a state at present in which woman,
merely as woman, can have no more power over me
than stocks and stones, and yet the difference of my
sensations with respect to Miss
and my sister is
amazing, — the one seems to absorb the other to a
degree incredible. I seldom think of my brother and
sister in America; the thought of leaving Miss
is beyond everything horrible, — the sense of darkness
coming over me, — I eternally see her figure eternally
vanishing; some of the phrases she was in the habit
of using during my last nursing at Wentworth Place
ring in my ears. Is there another life ? Shall I awake
and find all this a dream ? There must be ; we cannot be created for this sort of suffering."
To the same friend he writes again from Naples, 1st
November, 1820 :
" The persuasion that I shall see her no more will
kill me. My dear Brown, I should have had her when
I was in health, and I should have remained well. I
can bear to die, — I cannot bear to leave her. O
God ! God ! God ! Everything I have in my trunks
that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.

KEA

TS.

55

The silk lining she put in my travelling-cap scalds my
head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her, —
I see her, I hear her. There is nothing in the world
of sufficient interest to divert me from her a moment.
This was the case when I was in England ; I cannot
recollect, without shuddering, the time that I was a
prisoner at Hunt's, and used to keep my eyes fixed on
Hampstead all day. Then there was a good hope of
seeing her again, — now! — O that I could be buried
near where she lives! I am afraid to write to her, to
receive a letter from her, — to see her handwriting
would break my heart. Even to hear of her anyhow,
to see her name written, would be more than I can
bear. My dear Brown, what am I to do? Where
can I look for consolation or ease ? If I had any
chance of recovery, this passion would kill me. Indeed, through the whole of my illness, both at your
house and at Kentish Town, this fever has never
ceased wearing me out."
The two friends went almost immediately from
Naples to Rome, where Keats was treated with, great
kindness by the distinguished physician Dr. (afterward Sir James) Clark. 1 But there was no hope
from the first. His disease was beyond remedy, as his
heart was beyond comfort. The very fact that life
might be happy deepened his despair. He might not
have sunk so soon, but the waves in which he was
struggling looked only the blacker that they were
shone upon by the signal-torch that promised safety
and love and rest.
1
T h e lodging of K e a t s was on the Piazza di Spagna, in t h e first
house on the r i g h t hand in going u p t h e Scalinata. Mr. Severn's
studio is said to have been in the Cancello over the garden gate of t h e
Villa Negroni, pleasantly familiar to all Americans as the R o m a n
home of their countryman Crawford.

56

KEA

TS.

It is good to know that one of Keats's last pleasures
was in hearing Severn read aloud from a volume of
Jeremy Taylor. On first coming to Rome, he had
bought a copy of Alfieri, but, finding on the second
page these lines,
' l Misera m e ! sollievo a me non resta
Altro eke il p i a n t o ; ed il pianto e d e l i t t o , "

1

he laid down the book and opened it no more. On
the 14th February, 1821, Severn speaks of a change
that had taken place in him toward greater quietness
and peace. He talked much, and fell at last into a
sweet sleep, in which he seemed to have happy dreams.
Perhaps he heard the soft footfall of the angel of
Death, pacing to and fro under his window, to be his
Valentine. That night he asked to have this epitaph
inscribed upon his gravestone :
" H E R E LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN W A T E R . "

On the 23d he died, without pain and as if falling
asleep. His last words were, " I am dying; I shall
die easy ; don't be frightened, be firm and thank God
it has come! "
He was buried in the Protestant burial-ground at
Eome, in that part of it which is now disused and
secluded from the rest. A short time before his death
he told Severn that he thought his intensest pleasure
in life had been to watch the growth of flowers ; and
once, after lying peacefully a while, he said, " I feel
the flowers growing over me." His grave is marked
by a little headstone on which are carved somewhat
rudely his name and age, and the epitaph dictated by
himself. No tree or shrub has been planted near it,
I1 F r o m Ariosto's Filippo, A c t I . sc. 1 :
" Wretch that I am! My only solace left
Are tears; and mine, alas! are tears of guilt."]

KEATS.

57

but the daisies, faithful to their buried lover, crowd
his small mound with a galaxy of their innocent stars,
more prosperous than those under which he lived.1
In person, Keats was below the middle height, with
a head small in proportion to the breadth of his shoulders. His hair was brown and fine, falling in natural
ringlets about a face in which energy and sensibility
were remarkably mixed. Every feature was delicately cut; the chin was bold ; and about the mouth
something of a pugnacious expression. His eyes were
mellow and glowing, large, dark, and sensitive. At
the recital of a noble action or a beautiful thought
they would suffuse with tears, and his mouth trembled. 2
Hay don says that his eyes had an inward Delphian
look that was perfectly divine.
The faults of Keats's poetry are obvious enough, but
it should be remembered that he died at twenty-five,
and that he offends by superabundance and not poverty.
That he was overlanguaged at first there can be no
doubt, and in this was implied the possibility of falling back to the perfect mean of diction. I t is only by
the rich that the costly plainness, which at once satisfies the taste and the imagination, is attainable.
Whether Keats was original or not, I do not think
it useful to discuss until it has been settled what originality is. Lord Houghton tells us that this merit
(whatever it is) has been denied to Keats, because his
1
Written in 1856. 0 irony of Time ! T e n years after t h e p o e t ' s
death the woman he had so loved wrote to his friend Mr. Dilke, t h a t
" the kindest act would he to let him rest forever in the ohscurity t o
which circumstances had condemned him " ! (Papers of a Critic, i.
11.) 0 Time t h e atoner! In 1874 I found t h e grave planted with
shrubs and flowers, the pious homage of t h e d a u g h t e r of our most
eminent American sculptor.
2
Leigh H u n t ' s Autobiography, ii. 4 3 .

58

KEA TS.

poems take the color of the authors he happened to
be reading at the time he wrote them. But men have
their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of some
one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the
features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of
several generations. In the parliament of the present
every man represents a constituency of the past. It
is true that Keats has the accent of the men from whom
he learned to speak, but this is to make originality a
mere question of externals, and in this sense the author
of a dictionary might bring an action of trover against
every author who used his words. It is the man behind the words that gives them value; and if Shakespeare help himself to a verse or a phrase, it is with
ears that have learned of him to listen that we feel the
harmony of the one, and it is the mass of his intellect
that makes the other weighty with meaning. Enough
that we recognize in Keats that indefinable newness
and unexpectedness which we call genius. The sunset is original every evening, though for thousands of
years it has built out of the same light and vapor its
visionary cities with domes and pinnacles, and its delectable mountains which night shall utterly abase and
destroy.
Three men, almost contemporaneous with each
other, — Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron, — were the
great means of bringing back English poetry from
the sandy deserts of rhetoric, and recovering for her
her triple inheritance of simplicity, sensuousness, and
passion. Of these, Wordsworth was the only conscious reformer, and his hostility to the existing formalism injured his earlier poems by tingeing them
with something of iconoclastic extravagance. He was
the deepest thinker, Keats the most essentially a poet,

KEATS.

59

and Byron the most keenly intellectual of the three.
Keats had the broadest mind, or at least his mind was
open on more sides, and he was able to understand
Wordsworth and judge Byron, equally conscious,
through his artistic sense, of the greatnesses of the
one and the many littlenesses of the other; while
Wordsworth was isolated in a feeling of his prophetic
character, and Byron had only an uneasy and jealous
instinct of contemporary merit.
The poems of
Wordsworth, as he was the most individual, accordingly reflect the moods of his own nature; those of
Keats, from sensitiveness of organization, the moods
of his own taste and feeling; and those of Byron, who
was impressible chiefly through the understanding,
the intellectual and moral wants of the time in which
he lived. Wordsworth has influenced most the ideas
of succeeding poets ; Keats, their forms ; and Byron,
interesting to men of imagination less for his writings
than for what his writings indicate, reappears no more
in poetry, but presents an ideal to youth made restless
with vague desires not yet regulated by experience,
nor supplied with motives by the duties of life.
Keats certainly had more of the penetrative and
sympathetic imagination which belongs to the poet,
of that imagination which identifies itself with the
momentary object of its contemplation, than any man
of these later days. It is not merely that he has
studied the Elizabethans and caught their turn of
thought, but that he really sees things with their
sovereign eye, and feels them with their electrified
senses. His imagination was his bliss and bane.
Was he cheerful, he " hops about the gravel with the
sparrows;" was he morbid, he " would reject a Petrarcal coronation, —on account of my dying-day, and

60

KEATS.

because women have cancers." So impressible was
he as to say that he " had no nature," meaning character. But he knew what the faculty was worth, and
says finely, a The imagination may be compared to
Adam's dream: he awoke and found it truth." He
had an unerring instinct for the poetic uses of things,
and for him they had no other use. W e are apt to
talk of the classic renaissance as of a phenomenon
long past, nor ever to be renewed, and to think the
Greeks and Romans alone had the mighty magic to
work such a miracle. To me one of the most interesting aspects of Keats is that in him we have an
example of the renaissance going on almost under our
own eyes, and that the intellectual ferment was in him
kindled by a purely English leaven. He had properly
no scholarship, any more than Shakespeare had, but
like him he assimilated at a touch whatever could
serve his purpose. His delicate senses absorbed culture at every pore. Of the self-denial to which he
trained himself (unexampled in one so young) the
second draft of Hyperion as compared with the first
is a conclusive proof. And far indeed is his Lamia
from the lavish indiscrimination of Undymion.
In
his Odes he showed a sense of form and proportion
which we seek vainly in almost any other English
poet, and some of his sonnets (taking all qualities into
consideration) are the most perfect in our language.,
No doubt there is something tropical and of strange
overgrowth in his sudden maturity, but it was maturity nevertheless. Happy the young poet who has the
saving fault of exuberance, if he have also the shaping
faculty that sooner or later will amend it!
As every young person goes through all the worldold experiences, fancying them something peculiar and

KEA TS.

61

personal to himself, so it is with every new generation,
whose youth always finds its representatives in its
poets. Keats rediscovered the delight and wonder
that lay enchanted in the dictionary. Wordsworth
revolted at the poetic diction which he found in vogue,
but his own language rarely rises above it, except
when it is upborne by the thought. Keats had an
instinct for fine words, which are in themselves pictures and ideas, and had more of the power of poetic
expression than any modern English poet. And by
poetic expression I do not mean merely a vividness in
particulars, but the right feeling which heightens or
subdues a passage or a whole poem to the proper tone,
and gives entireness to the effect. There is a great
dear more than is commonly supposed in this choice
of words. Men's thoughts and opinions are in a great
degree vassals of him who invents a new phrase or
reapplies an old epithet. The thought or feeling a
thousand times repeated becomes his at last who utters
it best. This power of language is veiled in the old
legends which make the invisible powers the servants
of some word. As soon as we. have discovered the
word for our joy or sorrow we are no longer its serfs,
but its lords. We reward the discoverer of an anaesthetic for the body and make him member of all the
societies, but him who finds a nepenthe for the soul
we elect into the small academy of the immortals.
The poems of Keats mark an epoch in English
poetry; for, however often we may find traces of it in
others, in them found its most unconscious expression
that reaction against the barrel-organ style which had
been reigning by a kind of sleepy divine right for
half a century. The lowest point was indicated when
there was such an utter confounding of the common

62

KEATS.

and the uncommon sense that Dr. Johnson wrote
verse and Burke prose. The most profound gospel
of criticism was, that nothing was good poetry that
could not be translated into good prose, as if one
should say that the test of sufficient moonlight was
that tallow-candles could be made of it. W e find
Keats at first going to the other extreme, and endeavoring to extract green cucumbers from the rays of
tallow; but we see also incontestable proof of the
greatness and purity of his poetic gift in the constant
return toward equilibrium and repose in his later
poems. And it is a repose always lofty and clearaired, like that of the eagle balanced in incommunicable sunshine. In him a vigorous understanding developed itself in equal measure with the divine faculty ;
thought emancipated itself from expression without
becoming its tyrant; and music and meaning floated
together, accordant as swan and shadow, on the smooth
element of his verse. Without losing its sensuousness,
his poetry refined itself and grew more inward, and
the sensational was elevated into the typical by the
control of that finer sense which underlies the senses
and is the spirit of them.

DON Q U I X O T E .

NOTES READ AT THE WORKINGMEN'S COLLEGE, GREAT ORMOND
STREET, LONDON.

I N every literature which can be in any sense called
national there is a flavor of the soil from which it
sprang, in which it grew, and from which its roots
drew nourishment. This flavor, at first perhaps the
cause of distaste, gives a peculiar relish when we have
once learned to like it. It is a limitation, no doubt,
and when artificially communicated, or in excess, incurs the reproach of provincialism, just as there are
certain national dishes that are repugnant to every
foreign palate. But it has the advantage of giving
even to second-class writers in a foreign language
that strangeness which in our own tongue is possible
only to originality either of thought or style. When
this savor of nationality is combined with original
genius, as in such a writer as Calderon 1 for example,
the charm is incalculably heightened.
Spanish literature, if it have nothing that for
height and depth can be compared with the Divina
Commedia of Dante (as, indeed, what other modern
literature has?), is rich in works that will repay
study, and evolved itself by natural processes out of
\} Archbishop Trench translated and published translations from
Calderon.]

64

DON

QUIXOTE.

the native genius, the history, and the mingled races
of the country more evidently, perhaps, than that of
any other modern people. It was of course more or
less modified from time to time by foreign, especially
by French, influences in its earlier period, by Italian
in the sixteenth century, and in later times again by
French and German influences more or less plainly
marked, but through all and in spite of all, by virtue
of the vigor of its native impulse, it has given an
essentially Spanish character to all its productions*
Its earliest monument, the Song of the Cid, is in
form a reproduction of the French Chanson de Geste,
a song of action or of what has been acted, but the
spirit which animates it is very different from that
which animates the Song of Roland,1 its nearest
French parallel in subject and form. The Spanish
Romances, very much misrepresented in the spirited
and facile reproductions of Lockhart, 2 are beyond
question the most original and fascinating popular
poetry of which we know anything. Their influence
upon the form of Heine's verse is unmistakable. In
the Drama, also, Spain has been especially abundant
and inventive. She has supplied all Europe with
plots, and has produced at least one dramatist who
takes natural rank with the greatest in-any language
by his depth of imagination and fertility of resource.
For fascination of style and profound suggestion, it
would be hard to name another author superior to
Calderon, if indeed equal to him. His charm was
equally felt by two minds as unlike each other as
\} The reader will find convenient accounts of these works in the
first volume, Outre-Mer and Driftwood, of Longfellow's prose works.]
[2 Ancient Spanish B^Uads. Lockhart married Walter Scott's
daughter.]

DON

QUIXOTE.

65

those of Goethe and Shelley. These in themselves
are sufficient achievements, and the intellectual life
of a nation could maintain itself on the unearned
increment of these without further addition to its
resources. But Spain has also had the good fortune to
produce one book which, by the happiness of its conception, by the variety of its invention, and the charm
of its style, has been adopted into the literature of
mankind, and has occupied a place in their affection
to which few other books have been admitted.
We have no word in English so comprehensive as
the Dichtung of the Germans, which includes every
exercise of the creative faculty, whether in the line
of pathos or humor, whether in the higher region of
imagination or on the lower levels of fancy where the
average man draws easier breath. It is about a work
whose scene lies on this inferior plane, but whose
vividness of intuition and breadth of treatment rank
it among the highest achievements of imaginative literature, that I shall say a few words this evening,
and I trust that I shall see nothing in it that in the
author's intention, at least, is not honestly to be found
there; certainly that I shall not pretend to see anything which others have professed to discover there,
but to which nature has made me color-blind.
I ask your attention this evening, not to an essay
on Don Quixote, still less to an essay on Cervantes,
but rather to a few illustrative comments on his one
immortal book (drawn almost wholly from notes written on its margin in repeated readings), which may
tend to throw a stronger light on what I shall not
scruple to call its incomparable originality both as a
conception and a study of character. It is one of the
few books that can lay undisputed claim to the dis-

66

DON

QUIXOTE.

tinction of being universal and cosmopolitan, equally
at home in all languages and welcome to all kindreds
and conditions of men; a human book in the fullest
sense of the word; a kindly book, whether we take
that adjective in its original meaning of natural, or
in its present acceptation, which would seem to imply
that at some time or other, not too precisely specified
in history, to be kindly and to be natural had been
equivalent terms. I can think of no book so thoroughly good-natured and good-humored, and this is
the more remarkable because it shows that the optimism of its author had survived more misfortune and
disenchantment than have fallen to the lot of many
men, even the least successful. I suspect that Cervantes, with his varied experience, maimed at the
battle of Lepanto, a captive in Algiers, pinched with
poverty all his life, and writing his great book in a
debtors' prison, might have formed as just an estimate of the vanity of vanities as the author of the
Book of Ecclesiastes. But the notion cf Weltsclim.erz,
or the misery of living and acting in this beautiful
world, seems never to have occurred to him, or, if it
did, never to have embittered him. Had anybody
suggested the thought to him, he would probably
have answered: " Well, perhaps it is not the best of
all possible worlds, but it is the best we have, or are
likely to get in my time. Had I been present at its
creation, I might, perhaps, as Alfonso. the learned
thought he might, have given some useful advice for
its improvement, and, were I consulted even now,
could suggest some amendments in my own condition
therein. But, after all, it is not a bad world, as
worlds go, and the wisest plan, if the luck go against
us,s is to follow the advice of Durandarte in the Cave

DON

QUIXOTE.

67

of Montesinos, 'Patience, and shuffle the cards.'"
His sense of humor kept his nature sweet and fresh,
and made him capable of seeing that there are two
sides to every question, even to a question in which
his own personal interest was directly involved. In
his dedication of the Second Part of Don Quixote
to the Conde de Lemos, written in old age and infirmity, he smiles cheerfully on Poverty as on an old
friend and lifelong companion. St. Francis could not
have looked with more benignity on her whom he
chose, as Dante tells us, for his bride.
I have called Don Quixote a cosmopolitan book,
and I know of none other that can compete with it in
this respect unless it be Hobinson Crusoe. But Don
Quixote, if less verisimilar as a narrative, and I am
not sure that it is, appeals to far higher qualities of
mind and demands a far subtler sense of appreciation
than the masterpiece of Defoe. If the latter represent in simplest prose what interests us because it
might happen to any man, the other, while seeming
never to leave the low level of fact and possibility,
constantly suggests the loftier region of symbol, and
sets before us that eternal contrast between the ideal
and the real, between the world as it might be and
the world as it is, between the fervid completeness of
conception and the chill inadequacy of fulfilment,
which life sooner or later, directly or indirectly, forces
upon the consciousness of every man who is more
than a patent digester. There is a moral in Don
Quixote, and a very profound one, whether Cervantes
consciously put it there or not, and it is this: that
whoever quarrels with the Nature of Things, wittingly
or unwittingly, is certain to get the worst of it. The
great difficulty lies in finding out what theNature of

68

DON

QUIXOTE.

Things really and perdurably is, and the great wisdom, after we have made this discovery, or persuaded
ourselves that we have made it, is in accommodating
our lives and actions to it as best we may or can.
And yet, though all this be true, there is another and
deeper moral in the book than this. The pathos
which underlies its seemingly farcical turmoil, the
tears which sometimes tremble under our lids after its
most poignant touches of humor, the sympathy with
its hero which survives all his most ludicrous defeats
and humiliations and is only deepened by them, the
feeling that he is after all the one noble and heroic
figure in a world incapable of comprehending him,
and to whose inhabitants he is distorted and caricatured by the crooked panes in those windows of custom and convention through which they see him, — all
this seems to hint that only he who has the imagination to conceive and the courage to attempt a trial of
strength with what foists itself on our senses as the
Order of Nature for the time being can achieve great
results, or kindle the cooperative and efficient enthusiasm of his fellow-men. The Don Quixote of one
generation may live to hear himself called the savior
of society by the next. How exalted was Don Quixote's own conception of his mission is clear from what
is said of his first sight of the inn, that " it was as if
he had seen a star which guided him, not to the portals, but to the fortress of his redemption," where the
allusion were too daring were he not persuaded that
he is going forth to redeem the world. Cervantes, of
course, is not so much speaking in his own person as
telling what passed in the mind of his hero.
Am I forcing upon Cervantes a meaning alien to
the purpose of his story, and anachronistic to the age

DON

QUIXOTE.

69

in which he lived ? I do not think so, and if I err I
do so in good company. I admit that there is a kind
of what is called constructive criticism, which is sometimes pushed so far beyond its proper limits as to
deserve rather the name of destructive, as sometimes,
in the so-called restoration of an ancient building,
the materials of the original architect are used in
the erection of a new edifice of which he had never
dreamed, or, if he had dreamed of it, would have fancied himself the victim of some horrible nightmare. I
would not willingly lay myself open to the imputation
of applying this method to Cervantes, and attribute to
him a depth of intention which, could he be asked
about it, would call up in his eyes the meditative
smile that must habitually have flickered there. Spaniards have not been wanting who protested against
what they consider to be the German fashion of interpreting their national author. Don Juan Valera, in
particular, one of the best of contemporary Spanish
men of letters, both as critic and novelist, has argued
the negative side of the question with force and acumen in a discourse pronounced on his admission to
the Spanish Academy. But I must confess that,
while he interested, he did not convince me. I could
quite understand his impatience at what he considered
the supersubtleties of interpretation to which our
Teutonic cousins, who have taught us so much, are
certainly somewhat prone. W e have felt it ourselves
when the obvious meaning of Shakespeare has been
rewritten into Hegelese,1 by some Doctor of Philosophy desperate with the task of saying something when
everything had been already said, and eager to apply
P That is, into the language proper to the German subtle philosopher Hegel.]

70

DON

QUIXOTE.

his new theory of fog as an illuminating medium.
But I do not think that transcendental criticism can
be charged with indiscretion in the case of Don Quixote. After reading all that can be said against the
justice of its deductions, or divinations if you choose
to call them so, I am inclined to say, as Turner did
to the lady who, after looking at one of his pictures,
declared that she could not see all this in nature,
" Madam, don't you wish to heaven you could ? " I
believe that in all really great imaginative work we
are aware, as in nature, of something far more deeply
interfused with our consciousness, underlying the
obvious and familiar, as the living spirit of them, and
accessible only to a heightened sense and a more passionate sympathy. He reads most wisely who thinks
everything into a book that it is capable of holding,
and it is the stamp and token of a great book so to
incorporate itself with our own being, so to quicken
our insight and stimulate our thought, as to make us
feel as if we helped to create it while we read. Whatever we can find in a book that aids us in the conduct
of life, or to a truer interpretation of it, or to a franker
reconcilement with it, we may with a good conscience
believe is not there by accident, hut that the author
meant that we should find it there. Cervantes certainly intended something of far wider scope than a
mere parody on the Romances of Chivalry, which before his day had ceased to have any vitality as motives of human conduct, or even as pictures of a life
that anybody believed to have ever existed except
in, dreamland. That he did intend his book as a
good-humored criticism on doctrinaire reformers who
insist, in spite of all history and experience, on beLieving that society is a device of human wit or an

DON

QUIXOTE.

71

imposture of human cunning, and not a growth, an
evolution from natural causes, is clear enough in more
than one passage to the thoughtful reader. It is also
a satire on all attempts to remake the world by the
means and methods of the past, and on the humanity
of impulse which looks on each fact that rouses its
pity or its sense of wrong as if it was or could be
complete in itself, and were not indissolubly bound up
with myriads of other facts both in the past and the
present. When we say that we are all of us the result of the entire past, we perhaps are not paying the
past a very high compliment; but it is no less true
that whatever happens is in some sense,, more or less
strict, the result of all that has happened before. As
with all men of heated imaginations, a near object of
compassion occupies the whole mind of Don Quixote;
the figure of the present sufferer looms gigantic, and
shuts out all perception of remoter and more general
considerations. Don Quixote's quarrel is with the
structure of society, and it is only by degrees, through
much mistake and consequent suffering, that lie tinds
out how strong that structure is; nay, how strong it
must be in order that the world may go smoothly and
the course of events not be broken by a series of cataclysms. The French Revolutionists with the sincerest
good intentions set about reforming in Don Quixote's
style, and France has been in commotion ever since.
They carefully grubbed up every root that drew its
sustenance from the past, and have been finding out
ever since to their sorrow that nothing with roots can
be made to order. " Do right though the heavens
fall" is an admirable precept so long as the heavens
do not take you at your word and come down about
your ears,— still worse, about those of your neighbors

72

DON

QUIXOTE.

It is a rule rather of private than public obligation,
for indeed it is the doing of right that keeps the
heavens from falling. After Don Quixote's temporary rescue of the boy Andre's from his master's beating, the manner in which he rides off and discharges
his mind of consequences is especially characteristic
of reform by theory without study of circumstances.
It is a profound stroke of humor that the reformer
Don Quixote should caution Sancho not to attempt
making the world over again, and to adapt himself to
circumstances.
In one of his adventures, it is in perfect keeping
that he should call on all the world to stop " till he
was satisfied." I t is to be noted that in both Don
Quixote's attempts at the redress of particular wrong
(Andres and the galley-slaves) the objects ( I might
call them victims) of his benevolence come back
again to his discomfiture. In the case of Andre's,
Don Quixote can only blush, but Sancho (the practical man without theories) gives the poor fellow a
hunch of bread and a few pennies, which are very
much to the purpose. Cervantes gives us a plain hint
here that all our mistakes sooner or later surely come
home to roost. I t is remarkable how independent of
time and circumstance the satire of the great humorists always is. Aristophanes, Rabelais, Shakespeare,
MoIiSre, seem to furnish side-lights to what we read
in our morning paper. As another instance of this
in Cervantes, who is continually illustrating it, read
the whole scene of the liberation of the galley-slaves.
How perfectly does it fit those humanitarians who
cannot see the crime because the person of the criminal comes between them and it! That Cervantes
knew perfectly well what he was about in his satire,

DON

QUIXOTE.

73

and saw beneath the surface of things, is shown by
the apparition of the police, and of the landlord with
the bill in his hand, for it was these that brought the
Good Old Times to their forlorn Hie Jacet.1
Coleridge, who in reach and range of intelligence,
in penetration of insight, and in comprehensiveness
of sympathy ranks among the first of critics, says:
" Don Quixote is not a man out of his senses, but
a man in whom the imagination and the pure reason are so powerful as to make him disregard the
evidence of sense when it opposed their conclusions.
Sancho is the common sense of the social man-animal
unenlightened and unsanctified by the reason. You
see how he reverences his master at the very time he
is cheating him." W . S. Landor thought that Coleridge took the hint for this enlargement of the scope
of the book from him, but if I remember rightly it
was Bouterwek who first pointed criticism in the right
direction. Down to his time Don Quixote had been
regarded as a burlesque, a farcical satire on the
Romances of Chivalry, just as Shy lock was so long
considered a character of low comedy.
But Don Quixote, whatever its deeper meanings
may be, has a literary importance almost without
parallel, and it is time that we , should consider it
briefly. I t would be hard to find a book more purely
original and without precedent. Cervantes himself
says in the preface to the First Part that he knows not
what book he is following in it. Indeed, he follows
none, though we find traces of his. having read the
Golden Ass 2 and Greek Romances. It was the first
[l The first words of the old style of epitaphs, beginning " Here
lies."]
[2 The Golden Ass of Apuleius was a romance written in the second century. It was a favorite story, and was drawn from by Boccaccio and others.]

74

DON

QUIXOTE.

time that characters had been drawn from real life
with such nicety and discrimination of touch, with
such minuteness in particulars, and yet with such
careful elimination of whatever was unessential, that
the personages are idealized to a proper artistic distance from mere actuality. With all this, how perfectly lifelike they are! As Don Quixote tells us
that he was almost ready to say he had seen Amadis,
and proceeds to describe his personal appearance minutely, so we could affirm of the Knight of la Mancha
and his Squire. They are real, not because they are
portraits, not because they are drawn from actual
personages, but rather because of their very abstraction and generalization. They are not so much taken
from life as informed with it. They are conceptions,
not copies from any model; creations, as no other
characters but those of Shakespeare are in so full
and adequate a manner; developed out of a seminal
idea like the creatures of nature, not the matter-offact work of a detective's watchfulness; products of
a quick eye and a faithful memory, but the true children of the imaginative faculty from which all the
dregs of observation and memory have been distilled
away, leaving only what is elementary and universal.
I confess that in the productions of what is called the
realistic school, I generally find myself in company
that is little to my taste, dragged back into a world
from which I am only too willing to escape, and set
to grind in the prison-house of the Philistines. 1 I
walk about in a nightmare, the supreme horror of
which is that my coat is all buttonholes for bores to
thrust their fingers through and bait me to their
hearts' content. Give me the writers who take me
\} See tlie Book of Judges, chapter 16.]

DON

QUIXOTE.

75

for a while out of myself and (with pardon be it
spoken) away from my neighbors ! I do not ask that
characters should be real; I need but go into the
street to find such in abundance. I ask only that
they should be possible, that they should be typical,
because these I find in myself and with these can
sympathize. Hector and Achilles, Glytemnestra and
Antigone, Roland and Oliver, Macbeth and Lear, 1
move about, if not in worlds not realized, at least in
worlds not realized to any eye but that of imagination, a world far from the police reports, a world into
which it is a privilege, I might almost call it an
achievement, to enter. Don Quixote and his Squire
are inhabitants of this world, in spite of the prosaic
and often vulgar stage on which their tragi-comedy is
acted, because they are symbolical, because they represent the two great factors of human character and
springs of human action — the Imagination and the
Understanding. . If you would convince yourself how
true this is, compare them with Sir Hudibras and
Ralpho, or, still better, with Roderick Random and
Strap.. There can be no better proof that Cervantes
meant to contrast the ideal with the matter-of-fact in
the two characters than his setting side by side images of the same woman as reflected in the eyes of
Sancho and his master; in other words, of common
sense and passion.
I shall not trouble you with any labored analysis of
humor. If you wish to know what humor is, I should
say read Don Quixote. It is the element in which
the whole story lives and moves and has its being, and
it wakens and flashes round the course of the narrative like a phosphorescent sea in the track of a shipc
[l In what works are these characters found ?]

76

DON

QUIXOTE.

I t is nowhere absent; it is nowhere obtrusive; it
lightens and plays about the surface for a moment and
is gone. It is everywhere by suggestion, it is nowhere
with emphasis and insistence. There is infinite variety, yet always in harmony with the characters and
the purpose of the fable. The impression it produces
is cumulative, not sudden or startling. I t is unobtrusive as the tone of good conversation. I am not
speaking of the fun of the book, of which there is
plenty, and sometimes boisterous enough, but of that
deeper and more delicate quality, suggestive of remote
analogies and essential incongruities, which alone deserves the name of humor.
This quality is so diffused in Don Quixote, so thoroughly permeates every pore and fibre of the book,
that it is difficult to exemplify it by citation. Take
as examples the scene with the goatherds, where Don
Quixote, after having amply supped, discourses so
eloquently of that Golden Age which was happy in
having nothing to eat but acorns, or to drink but
water; where, while insisting that Sancho should assume equality as a man, he denies it to him as Sancho
by reminding him that it is granted by one who is his
natural lord and master, — there is such a difference,
alas, between universal and particular Brotherhood!
Take the debate of Don Quixote (already mad) as to
what form of madness he should assume ; the quarrel
of the two madmen, Don Quixote and Cardenio, about
the good fame of Queen Madasima, a purely imaginary being; the resolution of Don Quixote, when forced
to renounce knight-errantry, that he will become a
shepherd of the kind known to poets, thus exchanging
one unreality for another. Nay, take the whole book,
if you would learn what humor is, whether in its most

DON

QUIXOTE.

77

obvious or its most subtle manifestations. The highest and most complete illustration is the principal
character of the story. I do not believe that a character so absolutely perfect in conception and delineation,
so psychologically true, so full of whimsical inconsistencies, all combining to produce an impression of
perfect coherence, is to be found in fiction. He was
a monomaniac,1 all of whose faculties, his very senses
themselves, are subjected by one overmastering prepossession, and at last conspire with it, almost against
their will, in spite of daily disillusion and of the uniform testimony of facts and events to the contrary.
The key to Don Quixote's character is given in the
first chapter, where he is piecing out his imperfect helmet with a new visor. He makes one of pasteboard,
and then, testing it with his sword, shatters it to
pieces. He proceeds to make another strengthened
with strips of iron, and u without caring to make a
further trial of it, commissioned and held it for the
finest possible visor." Don Quixote always sees what
he wishes to see ; indeed, always sees things as they are,
unless the necessities of his hallucination compel him
to see them otherwise, and it is wonderful with what
ingenuity he makes everything bend to those necessities. Cervantes calls him the sanest madman and the
maddest reasonable man in the world. Sancho says
that he was fitter to be preacher than knight-errant.
He makes facts courtesy to his prepossessions. At the
same time, with exact truth to nature, he is never perfectly convinced himself except in moments of exaltation, and when the bee in his bonnet buzzes so loudly
as to prevent his hearing the voice of reason. Cer1

That Cervantes had made a study of madness is evident from the
Introduction to the Second Part.

78

DON

QUIXOTE.

vantes takes care to tell us t h a t he was never convinced t h a t he was really a knight-errant till his ceremonious reception at the castle of the D u k e .
Sancho, on the other hand, sees everything in t h e
d r y light of common sense, except when beguiled by
cupidity, or under the immediate spell of his master's
imagination. G r a n t the imagination its premises, a n d
its logic is irresistible. Don Quixote always takes
these premises for granted, and Sancho, despite his
n a t u r a l shrewdness, is more t h a n half tempted to admit them, or at any rate to r u n the risk of their being
sound, on the chance of the reward which his master
perpetually dangled before him. This reward was
t h a t island of which Don Quixote confesses he cannot
tell the name because it is not down on any m a p .
"With delightful humor, it begins as some island, then
becomes the island, and then one of those islands.
A n d how much more probable does this vagueness
render the fulfilment of the promise t h a n if D o n Quixote had locked himself u p in a specific one ! A line
of retreat is t h u s always kept open, while Sancho's
eagerness is held at bay b y this seemingly chance
suggestion of a choice in these hypothetical lordships.
This vague potentiality of islands eludes the thrust of
any definite objection. A n d when Sancho is inclined
to grumble, his master consoles him by s a y i n g , " I have
already told thee, Sancho, to give thyself no care about
i t ; for even should the island fail us, there are the
kingdoms of D i n a m a r c a and Sobradisa t h a t would fik
you as the ring fits the finger, and since they are on
terra firma, you should rejoice the more." All his
terrafirma was in dreamland. I t should seem t h a t
Sancho was too shrewd for such a bait, and that
here at least was an exception to t h a t probability for

DON

QUIXOTE.

79

which I have praised the story. But I think it rather
a justification of it. We must remember how near
the epoch of the story was to that of the Conquistadores, when men's fancies were still glowing with the
splendid potentialities of adventure. And when Don
Quixote suggests the possibility of creating Sancho a
marquis, it is remarkable that he mentions the title
conferred upon Cortes. The conscience of Don Quixote is in loyalty to his ideal; he prizes desert as an
inalienable possession of the soul. The conscience of
Sancho is in the eyes of his neighbors, and he values
repute for its worldly advantages. When Sancho
tries to divert his master from the adventure of the
Fulling Mills by arguing that it was night, and that
none could see them, so that they might well turn out
of the way to avoid the danger, and begs him rather to
take a little sleep, Don Quixote answers indignantly:
" Sleep thou, who wast born for sleep. As for me,
I shall do whatever I see to be most becoming to
my profession." With equal truth to nature in both
cases, Sancho is represented as inclined to believe the
extravagant delusions of his master because he has
seen and known him all his life, while he obstinately
refuses to believe that a barber's basin is the helmet
of Mambrino because he sees and knows that it is a
basin. Don Quixote says of him to, the Duke, " He
doubts everything and believes everything." Cervantes was too good an artist to make him wholly vulgar and greedy and selfish, though he makes him all
these. He is witty, wise according to his lights, affectionate, and faithful. When he takes leave of his
imaginary governorship he is not without a certain
manly dignity that is almost pathetic.
The ingenuity of the story, the probability of its

80

DON

QUIXOTE.

adventures, the unwearied fecundity of invention
shown in devising and interlacing them, in giving
variety to a single theme and to a plot so perfectly
simple in its conception, are all wonderful. The narrative flows on as if unconsciously, and our fancies
float along with it. It is noticeable, too, in passing,
what a hypsethral story it is, how much of it passes
in the open air, how the sun shines, the birds sing,
the brooks dance, and the leaves murmur in it. This
is peculiarly touching when we recollect that it was
written in prison. In the First Part Cervantes made
the mistake (as he himself afterwards practically
admits) of introducing unprofitable digressions; and
in respect to the propriety and congruousness of the
adventures which befall Don Quixote I must also
make one exception. I mean the practical jokes
played upon him at the Duke's castle, in which his
delusion is forced upon him instead of adapting circumstances to itself or itself to circumstances, according to the necessity of the occasion. These tend to
degrade him in the eyes of the reader, who resents
rather than enjoys them, and feels the essential vulgarity of his tormentors through all their fine clothes.
It is quite otherwise with the cheats put upon Sancho,
for we feel that either he will be shrewd enough to
be more than even with the f ramers of them, or that
he is of too coarse a fibre to feel them keenly. But
Don Quixote is a gentleman and a monomaniac, —
qualities, the one of which renders such rudeness incongruous, and the other unfeeling. He is, moreover,
a guest. It is curious that Shakespeare makes the
same mistake with Falstaff in the Merry Wives of
Windsor, and Fielding with Parson Adams, and in
both cases to our discomfort. The late Mr. Edward

DON

QUIXOTE.

81

Fitzgerald l (quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus tarn
cari capitis! 2 ) preferred the Second Part to the
First, and, but for these scenes, which always pain
and anger me, I should agree with him. For it is
plain that Cervantes became slowly conscious as he
went on how rich was the vein he had hit upon, how
full of various and profound suggestion the two characters he had conceived, and who together make a
complete man. No doubt he at first proposed to himself a parody of the Romances of Chivalry, but his
genius soon broke away from the leading-strings of a
plot that denied free scope to his deeper conception
of life and men.
Cervantes is the father of the modern novel, in so
far as it has become a study and delineation of character instead of being a narrative seeking to interest
by situation and incident. He has also more or less
directly given impulse and direction to all humoristic
literature since his time. We see traces of him in
Moliere, in Swift, and still more clearly in Sterne
and Richter.
Fielding assimilated and Smollett
copied him. Scott was his disciple in the Antiquary',
that most delightful of his delightful novels. Irving
imitated him in his Knickerbocker, and Dickens in
his Pickwick Papers?
I do not mention this as
detracting from their originality, but only as showing
the wonderful virility of his. The pedigrees of books
f1 Mr. Fitzgerald, who is hest known "by his version of the Rubdiydt of Omar Khayyam, also translated six dramas from Calderon.]
[2 Who would be ashamed or would tire of grieving" for that dear
worthy!]
[3 By these several hints Mr. Lowell enahles the student to make
most interesting study of the influence of Don Quixote on modern
literature. To trace the likeness in any case would he a capital
exercise.]

82

DON QUIXOTE.

are as interesting and instructive as those oi men. I t
is also good for us to remember that this man, whose
life was outwardly a failure, restored to Spain the
universal empire she had lost.

DEMOCRACY
AND OTHER PAPERS

CONTENTS
PAGE
DEMOCRACY .
O N A CERTAIN
THE

STUDY

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CONDESCENSION

OF MODERN

.

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«

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.

IN FOREIGNERS

.

.

LANGUAGES

,

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1
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33

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. 6 8

NOTE. Mr. Lowell's notes are distinguished from those of the editor by the
initials J. R. L.

DEMOCRACY AND OTHER PAPERS.
DEMOCRACY.
In 1880 Mr. Lowell was appointed American Minister
to the Court of St. James, being transferred from Madrid,
where he had represented the United States for three years.
Before going to Spain he had held no office, and had served
his country publicly only as a delegate to the national convention which nominated Hayes for the presidency, and as
a presidential elector. The feeling that he was essentially
a man of letters, and not a diplomat, was wittily expressed
by the London Spectator, which, -on his arrival in that city,
announced him as " His Excellency the Ambassador of
American Literature to the Court of Shakespeare. ,, But
although he lacked practical experience in politics and diplomacy, he had been a keen observer of public affairs, as
his writings had amply proved ; and his well-trained mind,
his sound judgment, and his unerring sagacity served him
in such good stead that his career abroad was perhaps a
surprise to many who had been inclined to regard him as a
dilettante in statesmanship. Rarely has our country been
so ably represented.
The English were not slow to perceive Mr. Lowell's
worth, and he was made the recipient of many honors, both
social and official. He was much in request as a public
speaker, and gave some notable addresses during his residence in England. The most significant of these was Democracy, which he delivered at Birmingham on assuming
the presidency of the Birmingham and Midland Institute,

2

JAMES

RUSSELL

LOWELL.

October 6, 1884. I t was felt at once, on both sides of the
water, to be a noble confession of political faith. In a letter to his friend, Charles Eliot Norton, Mr. Lowell says:
" I send you a copy of my address at B. It has made
a kind of (mildish) sensation, greatly to my surprise. I
could n't conceive . . . that I had made so great a splash
with so small a pebble."
Some months after the poet's death, George William Curtis gave an address in his honor before the Brooklyn Institute, from which we quote the following passage : —
M
During his official residence in England, Lowell seemed
to have the fitting word for every occasion, and to speak it
with memorable distinction. . . . His discourse on democracy at Birmingham, in October, 1884, was not only an
event, but an event without a precedent. He was the minister of the American republic to the British monarchy, and,
as that minister, publicly to declare in England the most
radical democratic principles as the ultimate logical result
of the British Constitution, and to do it with a temper,
an urbanity, a moderation, a precision of statement, and a
courteous grace of humor which charmed doubt into acquiescence and amazement into unfeigned admiration and acknowledgment of a great service to political thought greatly
done — this was an event unknown in the annals of diplomacy, and this is what Lowell did at Birmingham.
" No American orator has made so clear and comprehensive a declaration of the essential American principle, or so
simple a statement of its ethical character. Yet not a word
of this republican to whom Algernon Sydney would have
bowed, and whom Milton would have blessed, would have
jarred the Tory nerves of Sir Roger de Coverley, although
no English radical was ever more radical than he."

H E must be a born leader or misleader of men, or
must have been sent into the world unfurnished with
$hat modulating and restraining balance-wheel which

DEMOCRACY.

3

we call a sense of humor, who, in old age, has as strong
a confidence in his opinions and in the necessity of
bringing the universe into conformity with them as he
had in youth. In a world the very condition of whose
being is that it should be in perpetual flux, where all
seems mirage, and the one abiding thing is the effort
to distinguish realities from appearances, the elderly
man 2 must be indeed of a singularly tough and valid
fibre who is certain that he has any clarified residuum
of experience, any assured verdict of reflection, that
deserves to be called an opinion, or who, even if he
had, feels that he is justified in holding mankind by
the button while he is expounding it. And in a world
of daily — nay, almost hourly — journalism, where
every clever man, every man who thinks himself
clever, or whom anybody else thinks clever, is called
upon to deliver his judgment point-blank and at the
word of command on every conceivable subject of
human thought, or, on what sometimes seems to him
very much the same thing, on every inconceivable display of human want of thought, there is such a spendthrift waste of all those commonplaces which furnish
the permitted staple of public discourse that there is
little chance of beguiling a new tune out of the onestringed instrument on which we have been thrumming so long. In this desperate necessity one is
often tempted to think that, if all the words of the
dictionary were tumbled down in a heap and then all
those fortuitous juxtapositions and combinations that
made tolerable sense were picked out and pieced together, we might find among them some poignant
suggestions towards novelty of thought or expression.
But, alas! it is only the great poets who seem to have
1

Lowell was in his sixty-sixth year at this time.

4

JAMES

RUSSELL

LOWELL.

this unsolicited profusion of unexpected and incalculable phrase, this infinite variety of topic. For everybody else everything has been said before, and said
over again after. He who has read his Aristotle will
be apt to think that observation has on most points
of general applicability said its last word, and he who
has mounted the tower of Plato to look abroad from
it will never hope to climb another with so lofty a
vantage of speculation. Where it is so simple if not
so easy a thing to hold one's peace, why add to the
general confusion of tongues? There is something
disheartening, too, in being expected to fill up not
less than a certain measure of time, as if the mind
were an hour-glass, that need only be shaken and set
on one end or the other, as the case may be, to run
its allotted sixty minutes with decorous exactitude. I
recollect being once told by the late eminent naturalist, Agassiz, that when he was to deliver his first lecture as professor (at Zurich, I believe) he had grave
doubts of his ability to occupy the prescribed three
quarters of an hour. He was speaking without notes,
and glancing anxiously from time to time at the
watch that lay before him on the desk. " When I
had spoken a half hour," he said, " I had told them
everything I knew in the world, everything! Then
I began to repeat myself,", he added, roguishly, " and
I have done nothing else ever since." Beneath the
humorous exaggeration of the story I seemed to see
the face of a very serious and improving moral. And
yet if one were to say only what he had to say and
then stopped, his audience would feel defrauded of
their honest measure. Let us take courage by the example of the French, whose exportation of Bordeaux
wines increases as the area of their land in vineyards
is diminished.

DEMOCRACY.

5

To me, somewhat hopelessly revolving these things,
the undelayable year has rolled round, and I find myself called upon to say something in this place, where
so many wiser men have spoken before me. Precluded, in my quality of national guest, by motives of
taste and discretion, from dealing with any question
of immediate and domestic concern, it seemed to me
wisest, or at any rate most prudent, to choose a topic
of comparatively abstract interest, and to ask your
indulgence for a few somewhat generalized remarks
on a matter concerning which I had some experimental knowledge, derived from the use of such eyes
and ears as Nature had been pleased to endow me
withal, and such report as I had been able to win
from them. The subject which most readily suggested itself was the spirit and the working of those
conceptions of life and polity which are lumped
together, whether for reproach or commendation,
under the name of Democracy. By temperament
and education of a conservative turn, I saw the last
years of that quaint Arcadia which French travellers
saw with delighted amazement a century ago, and
have watched the change (to me a sad one) from an
agricultural to a proletary population. 1 The testi1
The participation of Frenchmen in the American Revolutionary War naturally led to considerable intercourse between
the United States and France, and with the oncoming of the
Revolution in the latter country interest there became especially
keen as to the success of the new republic across the Atlantic.
For these and other reasons, many French travellers visited our
shores in the last part of the eighteenth and the first part of the
nineteenth centuries, and owing to the political unrest at home,
they were quite generally predisposed to favorable views of our
institutions.
Brissot de Warville, who travelled in the United States in 1788,
says, in the preface to the book which he published in 1 7 9 1 :

6

JAMES

RUSSELL

LOWELL.

1

mony of Balaam should carry some conviction. I
have grown to manhood and am now growing old with
the growth of this system of government in my native
land; have watched its advances, or what some would
call its encroachments, gradual and irresistible as those
of a glacier; have been an ear-witness to the forebodings of wise and good and timid men, and have
lived to see those forebodings belied by the course of
events, which is apt to show itself humorously careless of the reputation of prophets. I recollect hearing
a sagacious old gentleman say in 1840 that the doing
away with the property qualification for suffrage twenty
years before had been the ruin of the State of Massachusetts ; that it had put public credit and private
estate alike at the mercy of demagogues. I lived to
see that Commonwealth twenty odd years later paying
the interest on her bonds in gold, though it cost her
sometimes nearly three for one to keep her faith, and
that while suffering an unparalleled drain of men and
treasure in helping to sustain the unity and selfrespect of the nation.
If universal suffrage has worked ill in our larger
cities, as it certainly has, this has been mainly because
the hands that wielded it were untrained to its use.
There the election of a majority of the trustees of the
" I s it not evident that private morals associate naturally with a
rural life ? . . . The reason why the Americans possess such
pure morals is because nine tenths of them live dispersed in
the country. . . . O Frenchmen ! Study the Americans of the
present day. Open this book : you will here see to what degree
of prosperity the blessings of freedom can elevate the industry
of man."
1
That is, the testimony of one whose message is not what his
hearers would most gladly receive, but who speaks the truth as
it has been shown to him. See Numbers xxii-xxiv.

DEMOCRACY.

7

public money is controlled by the most ignorant and
vicious of a population which has come to us from
abroad, wholly unpracticed in self-government and incapable of assimilation by American habits and methods. But the finances of our towns, where the native
tradition is still dominant and whose affairs are discussed and settled in a public assembly of the people,
have been in general honestly and prudently administered. Even in manufacturing towns, where a majority of the voters live by their daily wages, it is not
so often the recklessness as the moderation of public
expenditure that surprises an old-fashioned observer.
" The beggar is in the saddle at last," cries Proverbial
Wisdom. 1 " Why, in the name of all former experience, does n't he ride to the Devil? " Because in the
very act of mounting he ceased to be a beggar and
became part owner of the piece of property he bestrides. The last thing we need be anxious about is
property. It always has friends or the means of making them. If riches have wings to fly away from their
owner, they have wings also to escape danger.
I hear America sometimes playfully accused of sending you all your storms, and am in the habit of parrying the charge by alleging that we are enabled to do
this because, in virtue of our protective system, we
can afford to make better bad weather than anybody
else. And what wiser use could we make of it than
to export it in return for the paupers which some
European countries are good enough to send over to
us who have not attained to the same skill in the manufacture of them ? But bad weather is not the worst
thing that is laid at our door. A French gentleman,
not long ago, forgetting Burke's monition of how uni « Beggars mounted run their horses to death."— Old Proverb.

8

JAMES

RUSSELL

LOWELL.

wise it is to draw an indictment against a whole people,1 has charged us with the responsibility of whatever
he finds disagreeable in the morals or manners of his
countrymen. If M. Zola or some other competent
witness would only go into the box and tell us what
those morals and manners were before our example
corrupted them! But I confess that I find little to
interest and less to edify me in these international
bandyings of " You 're another."
a I shall address myself to a single point only in the
long list of offences of which we are more or less
gravely accused, because that really includes all the
rest. It is that we are infecting the Old .World with
what seems to be thought the entirely new disease of
Democracy. It is generally people who are in what
are called easy circumstances who can afford the leisure to treat themselves to a handsome complaint, and
these experience an immediate alleviation when once
they have found a sonorous Greek name to abuse it
by. There is something consolatory also, something
flattering to their sense of personal dignity,, and to
that conceit of singularity which is the natural recoil
from our uneasy consciousness of being commonplace,
in thinking ourselves victims of a malady by which
no one had ever suffered before. Accordingly they
find it simpler to class under one comprehensive heading whatever they find offensive to their nerves, their
tastes, their interests, or what they suppose to be their
opinions, and christen it Democracy, much as physicians label every obscure disease gout, or as crossgrained fellows lay their ill-temper to the weather.
1

I n his speech on moving his resolution for conciliation with
the American Colonies, in the House of Commons, March 22,
1775. See Riverside Literature Series, No. 100, p. 36.

DEMOCRACY.

9

But is it really a new ailment, and, if it be, is America
answerable for it? Even if she were, would it account for the phylloxera, and hoof-and-mouth disease,
and bad harvests, and bad English, and the German
bands, and the Boers,1 and all the other discomforts
with which these later days have vexed the souls of
them that go in chariots ? Yet I have seen the evil
example of Democracy in America cited as the source
and origin of things quite as heterogeneous and quite
-as little connected with it by any sequence of cause
and effect. Surely this ferment is nothing new. I t
has been at work for centuries, and we are more conscious of it only because in this age of publicity, where
the newspapers offer a rostrum to whoever has a grievance, or fancies that he has, the bubbles and scum
thrown up by it are more noticeable on the surface
than in those dumb ages when there was a cover of
silence and suppression on the cauldron. Bernardo
Navagero, speaking of the Provinces of Lower Austria
in 1546, tells us that " in them there are five sorts of
persbns, Clergy, Barons, Nobles, Burghers, and Peasants. Of these last no account is made, because they
have no voice in the Diet." 2
Nor was it among the people that subversive or
1

A reference to the unsuccessful attempt of the English in
1880 to reduce the Boers of the Transvaal to submission.
2
Below the Peasants, it should he remembered, was still another even more helpless class, the servile farm-laborers. The
same witness informs us that of the extraordinary imposts the
Peasants paid nearly twice as much in proportion to their estimated property as the Barons, Nobles, and Burghers together.
Moreover, the upper classes were assessed at their own valuation, while they arbitrarily fixed that of the Peasants, who had no
voice. (Relazioni degli Ambasciatori Veneti, Serie I., tomo i.,pp«
378, 379, 389.) — J. R. L.

10

JAMES

RUSSELL

LOWELL.

mistaken doctrines had their rise. A Father of the
Church 1 said that property was theft many centuries
before Proudhon was born. 2 Bourdaloue reaffirmed
it. Montesquieu was the inventor of national workshops, and of the theory that the State owed every
man a living. Nay, was not the Church herself the
first organized Democracy ? A few centuries ago the
chief end of man was to keep his soul alive, and then
the little kernel of leaven that sets the gases at work
was religious, and produced the Reformation. Even
in that, far-sighted persons like the Emperor Charles
V. saw the germ of political and social revolution.
Now that the chief end of man seems to have become
the keeping of the body alive* and as comfortably
alive as possible, the leaven also has become wholly
political and social. But there had also been social
upheavals before the Eeformation and contemporaneously with it, especially among men of Teutonic race.
The Eeformation gave outlet and direction to an unrest already existing. Formerly the immense majority
of men — our brothers — knew only their sufferings,
their wants, and their desires. They are beginning
now to know their opportunity and their power. All
persons who see deeper than their plates are rather
inclined to thank God for it than to bewail it, for the
1
St. Ambrose said : " F o r nature has given all things to all
men in common ; for God has ordained that all things shall be
so produced that food shall be common to all, and the earth as
it were the common possession of all. Nature therefore is the
mother of common right, usurpation of private."
2
Pierre Joseph Proudhon, a French publicist and a speculator on social and political subjects, published in 1840 his first
book, " Qu'est-ce que la Proprie'te' ? " And his own answer was,
u
La proprie'te* c'est le vol." (What is property ? Property is

theft.)

DEMOCRACY.

11

sores of Lazarus have a poison in them against which
Dives has no antidote.
There can be no doubt that the spectacle of a great
and prosperous Democracy on the other side of the
Atlantic must react powerfully on the aspirations and
political theories of men in the Old World who do
not find things to their mind ; but, whether for good
or evil, it should not be overlooked that the acorn
from which it sprang was ripened on the British oak.
Every successive swarm that has gone out from this
officina gentium1 has, when left to its own instincts —
may I not call them hereditary instincts ? — assumed
a more or less thoroughly democratic form. This
would seem to show, what I believe to be the fact, that
the British Constitution, under whatever disguises of
prudence or decorum, is essentially democratic. England, indeed, may be called a monarchy with democratic tendencies, the United States a democracy with
conservative instincts. People are continually saying
that America is in the air, and I am glad to think it
is, since this means only that a clearer conception of
human claims and human duties is beginning to be
prevalent. The discontent with the existing order of
things, however, pervaded the atmosphere wherever
the conditions were favorable, long before Columbus,
seeking the back door of Asia, found himself knocking at the front door of America. I say wherever the
conditions were favorable, for it is certain that the
germs of disease do not stick or find a prosperous
field for their development and noxious activity unless
where the simplest sanitary precautions have been
neglected. " For this effect defective comes by cause,"
as Polonius said long ago.2 It. is only by instigation
1

Workshop of the world.

2

See Hamlet, Act II. Scene 2.

12

JAMES RUSSELL

LOWELL.

of the wrongs of men that what are called the Eights
of Man become turbulent and dangerous. It is then
only that they syllogize unwelcome truths. It is not
the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but
the revolts of intelligence: —
" T h e wicked and the weak rebel in vain,
Slaves by their own compulsion."

Had the governing classes in France during the last
century paid as much heed to their proper business
as to their pleasures or manners, the guillotine need
never have severed that spinal marrow of orderly and
secular tradition through which in a normally constituted state the brain sympathizes with the extremities
and sends will and impulsion thither. I t is only when
the reasonable and practicable are denied that men
demand the unreasonable and impracticable; only
when the possible is made difficult that they fancy
the impossible to be easy. Fairy tales are made out
of the dreams of the poor. No; the sentiment which
lies at the root of democracy is nothing new. I am
speaking always of a sentiment, a spirit, and not of a
form of government; for this was but' the outgrowth
of the other and not its cause. This sentiment is
merely an expression of the natural wish of people
to have a hand, if need be a controlling hand, in the
management of their own affairs. What is new is
that they are more and more gaining that control,
and learning more and more how to be worthy of it.
What we used to call the tendency or drift — what
we are being taught to call more wisely the evolution
of things — has for some time been setting steadily in
this direction. There is no good in arguing with the
inevitable. The only argument available with an east
wind is to put on your overcoat. And in this case,

DEMOCRACY.

13

also, the prudent will prepare themselves to encounter
what they cannot prevent. Some people advise us to
put on the brakes, as if the movement of which we
are conscious were that of a railway train running
down an incline. But a metaphor is no argument,
though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one
home and imbed it in. the memory. Our disquiet
comes of what nurses and other experienced persons
call growing-pains, and need not seriously alarm us.
They are what every generation before us — certainly
every generation since the invention of printing — has
gone through with more or less good fortune. To the
door of every generation there comes a knocking, and
unless the household, like the Thane of Cawdor 1 and
his wife, have been doing some deed without a name,
they need not shudder. It turns out at worst to be a
poor relation who wishes to come in out of the cold.
The porter always grumbles and is slow to open.
" Who's there, in the name of Beelzebub ? " he mutters. Not a change for the better in our human house1
keeping has ever taken place that wise and good men
have not opposed it, — have not prophesied with the
alderman that the world would wake up to find its
throat cut in consequence of it. The world, on the
contrary, wakes up, rubs its eyes, yawns, stretches
itself, and goes about its business as if nothing had
happened. Suppression of the slave trade, abolition
of slavery, trade unions, — at all of these excellent
people shook their heads despondingly, and murmured
"Ichabod." 2 But the trade unions are now debating instead of conspiring, and we all read their dis1

.See Macbeth, Act II., Scene 2.
" And she named the child Ichabod, saying, * The glory ii
departed from Israel.' " 1 Sam. iv. 21.
2

14

JAMES RUSSELL

LOWELL.

cussions with comfort and hope, sure that they are
learning the business of citizenship and the difficulties
of practical legislation.
One of the most curious of these frenzies of exclusion was that against the emancipation of the Jews.
All share in the government of the world was denied
for centuries to perhaps the ablest, certainly the most
tenacious, race that had ever lived in it — the race to
whom we owed our religion and the purest spiritual
stimulus and consolation to be found in all literature
— a race in which ability seems as natural and hereditary as the curve of their noses, and whose blood,
furtively mingling with the bluest bloods in Europe,
has quickened them with its own indomitable impulsion. We drove them into a corner, but they had
their revenge, as the wronged are always sure to have
it sooner or later. They made their corn,er the counter and banking-house of the world, and thence they
rule it and us with the ignobler sceptre of finance.
Your grandfathers mobbed Priestley x only that you
1
Rev. Dr. Joseph Priestley, an English Dissenting minister
who was also a scientist of repute, noted as the discoverer of
oxygen. At the time of the French Revolution he was settled
in Birmingham, where he became so unpopular on account of his
theological and political doctrines that his church and dwellinghouse were destroyed by a mob. He tells the story with much
calmness in his Memoirs : —
" On occasion of the celebration of the French Revolution on
July 14, 1791, by several of my friends, but with which I had
little to do, a mob, encouraged by some persons in power, first
burned the meeting-house in which I preached, then another
meeting-house in the town, and then my dwelling-house, demolishing my library, apparatus, and, as far as they could, everything belonging to me. They also burned, or much damaged,
the houses of many Dissenters, chiefly my friends. . . . Being
in some personal danger on this occasion, I went to London;

DEMOCRACY

15

might set up his statue and make Birmingham the
headquarters of English Unitarianism. W e hear it
said sometimes that this is an age of transition, as if
that made matters clearer; but can any one point us
to an age that was not? If he could, he would show
us an age of stagnation. The question for us, as it
has been for all before us, is to make the transition
gradual and easy, to see that our points are right so
that the train may not come to grief. For we should
remember that nothing is more natural for people
whose education has been neglected than to spell evolution with an initial " r.'* A great man struggling
with the storms of fate has been called a sublime
spectacle ; but surely a great man wrestling with these
new forces that have come into the world, mastering
them and controlling them to beneficent ends, would
be a yet sublimer. Here is not a danger, and if there
were it would be only a better school of manhood, a
nobler scope for ambition. I have hinted that what
people are afraid of in democracy is less the thing
itself than what they conceive to be its necessary adjuncts and consequences. It is supposed to reduce
all mankind ta a dead level of mediocrity in character and culture, to vulgarize men's conceptions of life,
and therefore their code of morals, manners, and conduct — to endanger the rights of property and possession. But I believe that the real gravamen of the
charges lies in the habit it has of making itself gener*
ally disagreeable by asking the Powers that Be at
the most inconvenient moment whether they are the
and so violent was the spirit of party which then prevailed that
I believe I could hardly have been safe in any other place."
Dr. Priestley spent the last years of his life in the United
States, at Northumberland, Pa., on the Susquehanna River.

16

JAMES

RUSSELL

LOWELL.

powers that ought to be. If the powers that be are
in a condition to give a satisfactory answer to this inevitable question, they need feel in no way discomfited
by it.
Few people take the trouble of trying to find out
what democracy really is. Yet this would be a great
help, for it is our lawless and uncertain thoughts, it
is the indeiiniteness of our impressions, that fill darkness, whether mental or physical, with spectres and
hobgoblins. Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more likely to succeed in a
new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must
stand or fall on its own merits as others have done
before it. For there is no trick of perpetual motion
in politics any more than in mechanics. President
Lincoln defined democracy to be " the government of
the people by the people for the people." This is a
sufficiently compact statement of it as a political arrangement. Theodore Parker said that " Democracy
meant not ' I 'm as good as you are,' but 4 You 're as
good as I am.'" And this is the ethical conception
of it, necessary as a complement of the other; a conception which, could it be made actual and practical,
would easily solve all the riddles that the old sphinx
of political and social economy who sits by the roadside has been proposing to mankind from the beginning, and which mankind have shown such a singular
talent for answering wrongly. In this sense Christ
was the first true democrat that ever breathed, as
the old dramatist Dekker said he was the first true
gentleman. The characters may be easily doubled,
so strong is the likeness between them. A beautiful
and profound parable of the Persian poet Jellaladeen l
1

Jel&l-ed-din, Mohammed er-Rrimf, a famous Persian poet of

DEMOCRACY.

17

tells us that " One knocked at the Beloved's door, and
a voice asked from within ' Who is there ?' and he
answered ' It is L' Then the voice said, 4 This house
will not hold me and t h e e ; ' and the door was not
opened. Then went the lover into the desert and
fasted and prayed in solitude, and after a year he returned and knocked again at the door; and again the
voice asked ' Who is there ?' and he said ' It is thyself ; ' and the door was opened to him." But that is
idealism, you will say, and this is an only too practical world. I grant i t ; but I am one of those who
believe that the real will never find an irremovable
basis till it rests on the ideal. It used to be thought
that a democracy was possible only in a small territory, and this is doubtless true of a democracy strictly
defined, for in such all the citizens decide directly
upon every question of public concern in a general
assembly. - An example still survives in the tiny Swiss
canton of Appenzell. Bat this immediate intervention of the people in their own affairs is not of the
essence of democracy; it is not necessary, nor indeed,
in most cases, practicable. Democracies to which Mr.
Lincoln's definition would fairly enough apply have
existed, and now exist, in which, though the supreme
authority reside in the people, yet they can act only
indirectly on the national policy. This generation has
seen a democracy with an imperial figurehead, and in
all that have ever existed the body politic has never
embraced all the inhabitants included within its territory : the right to share in the direction of affairs has
been confined to citizens, and citizenship has been
further restricted by various limitations, sometimes of
the thirteenth century, who was at the head of a college of mystic theology.

18

JAMES RUSSELL

LOWELL.

property, sometimes of nativity, and always of age and
sex.
The framers of the American Constitution were far
from wishing or intending to found a democracy in
the strict sense of the word, though, as was inevitable,
every expansion of the scheme of government they
elaborated has been in a democratical direction. But
this has been generally the slow result of growth, and
not the sudden innovation of theory; in fact, they had
a profound disbelief in theory, and knew better than
to commit the folly of breaking with the past. They
were not seduced by the French fallacy that a new
system of government could be ordered like a new suit
of clothes.1 They would as soon have thought of ordering a new suit of flesh and skin. It is only on the
roaring loom of time that the stuff is woven for such
a vesture of their thought and experience as they were
meditating. They recognized fully the value of tradition and habit as the great allies of permanence and
stability. They all had that distaste for innovation
which belonged to their race, and many of them a
distrust of human nature derived from their creed.
The day of sentiment was over, and no dithyrambic
affirmations or fine-drawn analyses of the Eights of
Man would serve their present turn. This was a
practical question, and they addressed themselves to
it as men of knowledge and judgment should. Their
problem was how to adapt English principles and
precedents to the new conditions of American life,
and they solved it with singular discretion. They put
as many obstacles as they could contrive, not in the
1
No other nation of importance has ever made such frequent
changes in its form of government as has France since the first
Revolution.

DEMOCRACY.

19

way of the people's will, but of their whim. With
few exceptions they probably admitted the logic of
the then accepted syllogism, — democracy, anarchy,
despotism. But this formula was framed upon the
experience of small cities shut up to stew within their
narrow walls, where the number of citizens made but
an inconsiderable fraction of the inhabitants, where
every passion was reverberated from house to house
and from man to man with gathering rumor till every
impulse became gregarious and therefore inconsiderate, and every popular assembly needed but an infusion of eloquent sophistry to turn it into a mob, all
the more dangerous because sanctified with the formality of law.1
Fortunately their case was wholly different. They
were to legislate for a widely scattered population and
for States already practised in the discipline of a partial independence. They had an unequalled opportunity and enormous advantages. The material they
had to work upon was already democratical by instinct
and habitude. I t was tempered to their hands by
more than a century's schooling in self-government,
They had but to give permanent and conservative
form to a ductile mass. In giving impulse and direction to their new institutions, especially in supplying them with checks and balances, they had a great
help and safeguard in their federal organization. The
different, sometimes conflicting, interests and social
systems of the several States made existence as a
Union and coalescence into a nation conditional on
1
The effect of the electric telegraph in reproducing this trooping of emotion and perhaps of opinion is yet to be measured. The
effect of Darwinism as a disintegrator of humanitarianism is also
to be reckoned with. — J . R. L.

20

JAMES

RUSSELL

LOWELL.

a constant practice of moderation and compromise.
The very elements of disintegration were the best
guides in political training. Their children learned
the lesson of compromise only too well, and it was the
application of it to a question of fundamental morals
that cost us our civil war. We learned once for all
that compromise makes a-good umbrella but a poor
roof ; that it is a temporary expedient, often wise in
party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.
Has not the trial of democracy in America proved,
on the whole, successful ? If it had not, would the
Old World be vexed with any fears of its proving
contagious ? This trial would have been less severe
could it have been made with a people homogeneous
in race, language, and traditions, whereas the United
States have been called on to absorb and assimilate
enormous masses of foreign population, heterogeneous
in all these respects, and drawn mainly from that class
which might fairly say that the world? was not their
friend, nor the world's law. The previous condition
too often justified the traditional Irishman, who, landing in New York and asked what his politics were, inquired if there was a Government there, and on being
told that there was, retorted, " Thin I 'm agin it! "
We have taken from Europe the poorest, the most
ignorant, the most turbulent of her people, and have
made them over into good citizens, who have added to
our wealth, and who are ready to die in defence of
a country and of institutions which they know to be
worth dying for. The exceptions have been (and
they are lamentable exceptions) where these hordes
of ignorance and poverty have coagulated in great
cities. But the social system is yet to seek which has

DEMOCRACY.

21

not to look the same terrible wolf in the eyes. O n
the other hand, at this very moment Irish peasants
are buying ^up the worn-out farms of Massachusetts,
and making them productive again by the same virtues
of industry and thrift that once made them profitable
to the English ancestors of the men who are deserting
them. To have achieved even these prosaic results
(if you choose to call them so), and that out of materials the most discordant, — I might say the most recalcitrant, — argues a certain beneficent virtue in t h e
system that could do it, and is not to be accounted for
by mere luck. Carlyle said scornfully t h a t A m e r i c a
meant only roast turkey every day for everybody.
H e forgot t h a t States, as Bacon said of wars, go on
their bellies. As for the security of property, it should
be tolerably well secured in a country where every
other man hopes to be rich, even though the only property qualification be the ownership of two hands t h a t
add to the general wealth. I s it not the best security
f o r ' a n y t h i n g to interest the largest possible n u m b e r
of persons in its preservation and the smallest in its
division ? I n point of fact, far-seeing men count the
increasing power of wealth and its combinations as
one of the chief dangers with which the institutions
of the U n i t e d States are threatened in the not distant
future. T h e right of individual property is no doubt
the very corner-stone of civilization as hitherto understood, b u t I am a little impatient of being told t h a t
property is entitled to exceptional consideration because it bears all burdens of the State. I t bears those,
indeed, which can most easily be borne, b u t poverty
pays with its person the chief expenses of war, pestilence, and famine. W e a l t h should not forget this,
for poverty is beginning to t h i n k of it now and t h e n .

22

JAMES

RUSSELL

LOWELL.

Let me not be misunderstood. I see as clearly as any
man possibly can, and rate as highly, the value of
wealth, and of hereditary wealth, as the security of refinement, the feeder of all those arts that ennoble and
beautify life, and as making a country worth living
in. Many an ancestral hall here in England has been
a nursery of that culture which has been of example
and benefit to all. Old gold has a civilizing virtue
which new gold must grow old to be capable of secreting.
I should not think of coming before you to defend
or to criticise any form of government. All have
their virtues, all their defects, and all have illustrated
one period or another in the history of the race, with
signal services to humanity and culture. There is not
one that could stand a cynical cross-examination by
an experienced criminal lawyer, except that of a perfectly wise and perfectly good despot, such as the
world has never seen, except in that white-haired king
of Browning's, who
" Lived long ago
In the morning of the world,
When Earth was nearer Heaven than now." 1

The English race, if they did not invent government
by discussion, have at least carried it nearest to perfection in practice. It seems a very safe and reasonable contrivance for occupying the attention of the
country, and is certainly a better way of settling questions than by push of pike. Yet, if one should ask
it why it should not rather be called government by
gabble, it would have to fumble in its pocket a good
while before it found the change for a convincing
1
See Browning's Pippa Passes. These lines occur in one of
Pippa's songs.

DEMOCRACY,

23

reply. As matters stand, too, it is beginning to be
doubtful whether Parliament and Congress sit at
Westminster and Washington or in the editors' rooms
of the leading journals, so thoroughly is everything
debated before the authorized and responsible debaters get on their legs. And what shall we say of government by a majority of voices? To a person who
in the last century would have called himself an Impartial Observer, a numerical preponderance seems,
on the whole, as clumsy a way of arriving at truth as
could well be devised, but experience has apparently
shown it.to be a convenient arrangement for determining what may be expedient or advisable or practicable at any given moment. Truth, after all, wears a
different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious
to wait till, all were agreed. She is said to lie at the
bottom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that
whoever looks down in search of her sees his own
image at the bottom, and is persuaded not only that
he has seen the goddess, but that she is far betterlooking than he had imagined.
vThe arguments against universal suffrage are equally
unanswerable. " What," we exclaim, " shall Tom,
Dick, and Harry have as much weight in the scale as
I ? " Of course, nothing could be more absurd. And
yet universal suffrage has not been the instrument of
greater unwisdom than contrivances of a more select
description. Assemblies could be mentioned composed
entirely of Masters of Arts and Doctors in Divinity
which have sometimes shown traces of human passion
or prejudice in their votes. Have the Serene Highnesses and Enlightened Classes carried on the business of Mankind so^ well, then, that there is no use in
trying a less costly method ? The democratic, theory

24

JAMES RUSSELL

LOWELL.

is that those Constitutions are likely to prove steadiest which have the broadest base, that the right to
vote makes a safety-valve of every voter, and that the
best way of teaching a man how to vote is to give him
the chance of practice. For the question is no longer
the academic one, " Is it wise to give every man the
ballot ? " but rather the practical one, " Is it prudent
to deprive whole classes of it any longer ? " It may
be conjectured that it is cheaper in the long run to
lift men up than to hold them down, and that the
ballot in their hands is less dangerous to society than
a sense of wrong in their heads. At any rate this is
the dilemma to which the drift of opinion has been
for some time sweeping us, and in politics a dilemma
is a more unmanageable thing to hold by the horns
than a wolf by the ears. I t is said that the right of
suffrage is not valued when it is indiscriminately bestowed, and there may be some truth in this, for I
have observed that what men prize most is a privilege, even if it be that of chief mourner at a funeral*
But is there not danger that it will be valued at more
than its worth if denied, and that some illegitimate
way will be sought to make up for the want of it?
Men who have a voice in public affairs are at once
affiliated with one or other of the great parties between which society is divided, merge their individual
hopes and opinions in its safer, because more generalized, hopes and opinions, are disciplined by its tactics,
and acquire, to a certain degree, the orderly qualities
of an army. They no longer belong to a class, but to
a body corporate. Of one thing, at least, we may be
certain, that, under whatever method of helping things
to go wrong man's wit can contrive, those who have
the divine right to govern will be found to govern in

DEMOCRACY.

25

the end, and t h a t the highest privilege to which the
majority of mankind can aspire is t h a t of being governed by those wiser than they. Universal suffrage
has in the United States sometimes been made the
instrument of inconsiderate changes, under the notion
of reform, and this from a misconception of the true
meaning- of popular government. One of these has
been the substitution in many of the States of popular
election for official selection in the choice of judges.
T h e same system applied to military officers was the
source of much evil during our civil war, and, I believe, had to be abandoned.
B u t it has been also
true that on all great questions of national policy a
reserve of prudence and discretion has been brought
out at the critical moment to t u r n the scale in favor
of a wiser decision. A n appeal to the reason of the
people has never been known to fail in the long r u n .
I t is, perhaps, true that, by effacing the* principle of
passive obedience, democracy, ill understood, has slackened the spring of t h a t ductility to discipline which
is essential to " the unity and married calm of States."
B u t I feel assured that experience and necessity will
cure this evil, as they have shown their power to cure
others. A n d under what frame of policy have evils
ever been remedied till they became intolerable, and
shook men out of their indolent indifference through
their fears ?
W e are told that the inevitable result of democracy
is to sap the foundations of personal independence, to
weaken the principle of authority, to lessen the respect
due to eminence, whether in station, virtue, or genius.
If these, things were so, society could not hold together. P e r h a p s the best forcing-house of robust individuality would be where public opinion is inclined to

26

JAMES

RUSSELL

LOWELL.

be most overbearing, as he must be of heroic temper
who should walk along Piccadilly at the height of the
season in a soft hat. As for authority, it is one of
the symptoms of the time that the reHgious reverence
for it is declining everywhere, but this is due partly
to the fact that state-craft is no longer looked upon
as a mystery, but as a business, and partly to the decay
of superstition, by which I mean the habit of respecting what we are told to respect rather than what is
.respectable in itself. There is more rough and tumble in the American democracy than is altogether
agreeable to people of sensitive nerves and refined
habits, and the people take their political duties
lightly and laughingly, as is, perhaps, neither unnatural nor unbecoming in a young giant. Democracies
can no more jump away from their own shadows than
the rest of us can. They no doubt sometimes make
mistakes and pay honor to men who do not deserve it.
But they do this because they believe them worthy of
it, and though it be true that the idol is the measure
of the worshipper, yet the worship has in it the germ
of a nobler religion. But is it democracies alone that
fall into these errors ? I, who have seen it proposed
to erect a statue to Hudson, the railway king,1 and
have heard Louis Napoleon hailed as the saviour of
society by men who certainly had no democratic associations or leanings, am not ready to think so. But
democracies have likewise their finer instincts. I have
1
George Hudson, an English railway director and speculator,
•who was for a time immensely successful in his schemes. At
the height of his prosperity a statue to him was proposed, and
£25,000 were subscribed for it. But before the money could be
collected he had been exposed as dishonorable in his business
affairs, and his fall was more rapid than his rise.

DEMOCRACY.

27

also seen the wisest statesman and most pregnant
speaker of our generation, a man of humble birth and
ungainly manners, of little culture beyond what his
own genius supplied, become more absolute in power
than any monarch of modern times through the reverence of his countrymen for his honesty, his wisdom,
his sincerity, his faith in God and man, and the nobly
humane simplicity of his character. And I remember another whom popular respect enveloped as with
a halo, the least vulgar of men, the most austerely
genial, and the most independent of opinion. Wherever he went he never met a stranger, but everywhere
neighbors and friends proud of him as their ornament
and decoration. Institutions which could bear and
breed such men as Lincoln and Emerson had surely
some energy for good. No, amid all the fruitless
turmoil and miscarriage of the world, if there be one
thing steadfast and of favorable omen, one thing to
make optimism distrust its own obscure distrust, it is
the rooted instinct in men to admire what is better
and more beautiful than themselves. The touchstone
of political and social institutions is their ability to
supply them with worthy objects of this sentiment,
which is the very tap-root of civilization and progress.
There would seem to be no readier way of feeding it
with the elements of growth and vigor than such an
organization of society as will enable men to respect
themselves, and so to justify them in respecting others.
Such a result is quite possible under other conditions than those of an avowedly democratical Constitution. For I take it that the real essence of democracy was fairly enough defined by the First Napoleon
when he said that the French Revolution meant\" la
carriere ouverte aux talents " — a clear pathway fqr

28

JAMES RUSSELL

LOWELL.

merit of whatever kind. I should be inclined to paraphrase this by calling democracy that form of society,
no matter what its political classification, in which
every man had a chance and knew that he had it. If
a man can climb, and feels himself encouraged to
climb, from a coalpit to the highest position for which
he is fitted, he can well afford to be indifferent what
name is given to the government under which he lives.
The Bailli 1 of Mirabeau, uncle of the more famous
tribune of that name, wrote in 1771: " The English
are, in my opinion, a hundred times more agitated
and more unfortunate than the very Algerines themselves, because they do not know and will not know
till the destruction of their over-swollen power, which
I believe very near, whether they are monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy, and wish to play the part of
all three." England has not been obliging enough to
fulfil the Bailli's prophecy, and perhaps it was this
very carelessness about the name, and concern about
the substance of popular government, this skill in getting the best out of things as they are, in utilizing all
the motives which influence men, and in giving one
direction to many impulses, that has been a principal
factor of her greatness and power. Perhaps it is fortunate to have an unwritten Constitution, for men are
prone to be tinkering the work of their own hands,
whereas they are more willing to let time and circumstance mend or modify what time and circumstance
have made. All free governments, whatever their
name, are in reality governments by public opinion,
and it is on the quality of this public opinion that
1
Jean Antoine Mirabeau, Bailli, or Bailiff. The founder of
the family of Mirabeau was Honord Riquete, who bought the
estate of Mirabeau, whence the name.

DEMOCRACY.

29

their prosperity depends. It is, therefore, their first
duty to purify the element from which they draw the
breath of life. With the growth of democracy grows
also the fear, if not the danger, that this atmosphere
may be corrupted with poisonous exhalations from
lower and more malarious levels, and the question of
sanitation becomes more instant and pressing. Democracy in its best sense is merely the letting in of
light and air. Lord Sherbrooke, with his usual epigrammatic terseness, bids you educate your future
rulers. 1 But would this alone be a sufficient safeguard ? To educate the intelligence is to enlarge the
horizon of its desires and wants. And it is well that
this should be so. But the enterprise must go deeper
and prepare the way for satisfying those desires and
wants in so far as they are legitimate. What is really
ominous of danger to the existing order of things is
not democracy (which, properly understood, is a conservative force), but the Socialism which may find a
fulcrum in it. If we cannot equalize conditions and
fortunes any more than we can equalize the brains
of men — and a very sagacious person has said that
"where two men ride of a horse one must ride be1
Kobert Lowe, Viscount Sherbrooke, (1811-1892). An English politician who opposed the movements for the extension of
suffrage. I n an address on education, delivered in 1867, he
said: —
" W e are all aware that the Government of the country, the
voice potential in the Government, is placed in the hands of persons in a lower position of life than has hitherto been the case.
. . . I am most anxious to educate the lower classes of this country, in order to qualify them for the power that has passed, and
perhaps will pass in a still greater degree, into their hands. . . .
The lower classes ought to be educated to discharge the duties
cast upon them."

30

JAMES

RUSSELL

LOWELL.

hind " — we can yet, perhaps, do something to correct
those methods a n d influences t h a t lead to enormous
inequalities, and to prevent their growing more enormous. I t is all very well to pooh-pooh Mr. George 1
a n d to prove him mistaken in his political economy.
I do not believe t h a t land should be divided because
the quantity of it is limited by nature. Of what may
this not be said ? A fortiori, we might on the same
principle insist on a division of human wit, for I have
observed that the quantity of this has been even more
inconveniently limited. M r . George himself has a n
inequitably large share of it. B u t he is right in his
impelling m o t i v e ; right, also, I am convinced, in insisting that humanity makes a part, by far the most
important part, of political economy; and in thinkingman to be of more concern and more convincing
t h a n the longest columns of figures in the world. F o r
unless you include h u m a n nature in your addition,
your total is sure to be wrong and your deductions
from it fallacious. Communism means barbarism, b u t
Socialism means, or wishes to mean, cooperation and
community of interests, sympathy, the giving to the
hands not so large a share as to the brains, but a
larger share than hitherto in the wealth they must
combine to produce — means, in short, the practical
application of Christianity to life, and has in it the
secret of an orderly and benign reconstruction. State
Socialism would cut off the very roots in personal
character -— self - help, forethought, and frugality —
which nourish and sustain the t r u n k and branches of
every vigorous Commonwealth.
I do not believe in violent changes, nor do I expect
them. Things in possession have a very firm g r i p .
1
Henry George (1839-1897), author of Progress and Poverty.

DEMOCRACY.

31

One of the strongest cements of society is the conviction of mankind that the state of things into which
they are born is a part of the order of the universe,
as natural, let us say, as that the sun should go round
the earth. It is a conviction that they will not surrender except on compulsion, and a wise society should
look to it that this compulsion be not put upon them.
For the individual man there is no radical cure, outside of human nature itself, for the evils to which
human nature is heir. The rule will always hold good
that you must
" Be your own palace or the world's your gaol."

But for artificial evils, for evils that spring from want
of thought, thought must find a remedy somewhere.
There has been no period of time in which wealth has
been more sensible of its duties than now. It builds
hospitals, it establishes missions among the poor, it
endows schools. It is one of the advantages of accumulated wealth, and of the leisure it renders possible, that people have time to think of the wants and
sorrows of their fellows. But all these remedies are
partial and palliative merely. It is as if we should
apply plasters to a single pustule of the small-pox
with a view of driving out the disease. The true way
is to discover and to extirpate the germs. As society
is now constituted these are in the air it breathes, in
the water it drinks, in things that seem, and which
it has "always believed, to be the most innocent and
healthful. The evil elements it neglects corrupt these
in their springs and pollute them in their courses.
Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering that
the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never
come. The world has outlived much, and will outlive
a great deal more, and men have contrived to be happy

32

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

in it. I t has shown the strength of its constitution in
nothing more than in surviving the quack medicines
it has tried. In the scales of the destinies brawn will
never weigh so much as brain. Our healing is not in
the storm or in the whirlwind, it is not in monarchies,
or aristocracies, or democracies, but will be revealed
by the still small voice that speaks to the conscience
and the heart, prompting us to a wider and wiser humanity.

ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION
FOREIGNERS. 1

IN

one day toward the Village,2 as we used
to call it in the good old days, when almost every
dweller in the town had been born in it, I was enjoying that delicious sense of disenthralment from the
actual which the deepening twilight brings with it,
giving as it does a sort of obscure novelty to things
familiar. The coolness, the hush, broken only by the
distant bleat of some belated goat, querulous to be
disburthened of her milky load, the few faint stars,
more guessed as yet than seen, the sense that the coming dark would so soon fold me in the secure privacy
of its disguise, — all things combined in a result as
near absolute peace as can be hoped for by a man who
knows that there is a writ out against him in the
hands of the printer's devil. For the moment, I was
enjoying the blessed privilege of thinking without
being called on to stand and deliver what I thought
to the small public who are good enough to take any
interest therein. I love old ways, and the path I was
walking felt kindly to the feet it had known for alWALKING

1
" A specimen of pure irony, keen as a Damascus blade, and
finished to the utmost. I t is doubtful if there is another essay
in modern English superior in power, wit, and adroitness." —

F . H. "UNDERWOOD.
2
Elmwood is situated more than a mile from Harvard Square
in Cambridge, on the way toward Watertown. I n the earlier
part of Lowell's life it was quite in the country, and one might
naturally speak of walking to the "Village " of Cambridge.

34

JAMES

RUSSELL

LOWELL.

most fifty years. How many fleeting impressions it
had shared with me ! How many times I had lingered
to study the shadows of the leaves mezzotinted upon
the turf that edged it by the moon, of the bare boughs
etched with a touch beyond Rembrandt by the same
unconscious artist on the smooth page of snow! If
I turned round, through dusky tree-gaps came the
first twinkle of evening lamps in the dear old homestead. On Corey's hill I could see these tiny pharoses
of love and home and sweet domestic thoughts flash
but one by one across the blackening salt-meadow between. How much has not kerosene added to the
cheerfulness of our evening landscape! A pair of
night-herons flapped heavily over me toward the hidden river. The war was ended. I might walk townward without that aching dread of bulletins that had
darkened the July sunshine and twice made the scarlet leaves of October seem stained with blood. I remembered with a pang, half-proud, half-painful, how,
so many years ago, I had walked over the same path
and felt round my finger the soft pressure of a little
hand that was one day to harden with faithful grip of
sabre. On how many paths, leading to how many
homes where proud Memory does all she can to fill up
the fireside gaps with shining shapes, must not men
be walking in just such pensive mood as I ? Ah,
young heroes,1 safe in immortal youth as those of
1
Lowell lost three nephews, Charles Russell Lowell, James
Jackson Lowell and William Lowell Putnam, in the Civil W a r .
Robert Gould Shaw, who led the assault of Fort Wagner, was a
brother-in-law of Charles Russell Lowell. In honor of Shaw,
Memories Positum was written, the last stanza of which begins,—

" I write of one,
While with dim eyes I think of three."

(Charles Russell Lowell was still living at that time.)

CONDESCENSION

IN FOREIGNERS,

35

Homer, you at least carried your ideal hence untar*
nished ! I t is locked for you beyond moth or rust in
the treasure-chamber of Death.
Is not a country, I thought, that has had such as
they in it, that could give such as they a brave joy in
dying for it, worth something, then ? And as I felt
more and more the soothing magic of evening's cool
palm upon my temples, as my fancy came home from
its revery, and my senses, with reawakened curiosity,
ran to the front windows again from the viewless
closet of abstraction, and felt a strange charm in finding the old tree and shabby fence still there under
the travesty of falling night, nay, were conscious of an
unsuspected newness in familiar stars and the fading
outlines of hills my earliest horizon, I was conscious
of an immortal soul, and could not but rejoice in the
unwaning goodliness of the world into which I had
been born without any merit of my own. I thought
of dear Henry Vaughan's rainbow, 1 " Still young
and fine ! " I remembered people who had to go over
to the Alps to learn what the divine silence of snow
was, who must run to Italy before they were conscious
of the miracle wrought every day under their very
noses by the sunset, who must call upon the Berkshire
hills to teach them what a painter autumn was, while
close at hand the Fresh Pond meadows made all
oriels cheap with hues that showed as if a sunset-cloud
had been wrecked among their maples. One might
be worse off than even in America, I thought,
1
Henry Vaughan, a Welsh poet of the seventeenth century^
wrote a poem, The Rainbow, which begins,—
44

Still young and fine ! but what is still in view
We slight as old and soil'd, though fresh and new.
How bright wert thou when Shem's admiring eye
Thy bunrisht, flaming arch did first descry."

36

JAMES RUSSELL

LOWELL.

There are some things so elastic that even the heavy
roller of democracy cannot flatten them altogether
down. The mind can weave itself warmly in the
cocoon of its own thoughts and dwell a hermit anywhere. A country without traditions, without ennobling associations, a scramble of parvenus, with a
horrible consciousness of shoddy running through
politics, manners, art, literature, nay, religion itself ?
I confess, it did not seem so to me there in that illimitable quiet, that serene self-possession of nature, where
jCollins might have brooded his " Ode to Evening,"
or where those verses on Solitude in Dodsley's Collection, that Hawthorne liked so much, might have been
composed. Traditions ? Granting that we had none,
all that is worth having in them is the common
property of the soul, — an estate in gavelkind for all
the sons of Adam, — and, moreover, if a man cannot
stand on his two feet (the prime quality of whoever
has left any tradition behind him), were it not better
for him to be honest about it at once, and go down on
all fours? And for associations, if one have not the
wit to make them for himself out of native earth, no
ready-made ones of other men will avail much. Lexington is none the worse to me for not being in
Greece, nor Gettysburg that its name is not Marathon.
" Blessed old fields," I was just exclaiming to myself,
like one of Mrs. Eadcliffe's heroes, " dear acres, in'no*
cently secure from history, which these eyes first beheld, may you be also those to which they shall at last
slowly darken ! " when I was interrupted by a voice
which asked me in German whether I was the Herr
Professor, Doctor, So-and-so? The " D o c t o r " was
by brevet or vaticination, to make the grade easier to
my pocket.

CONDESCENSION

IN FOREIGNERS.

37

One feels so intimately assured that one is made
up, in part, of shreds and leavings of the past, in part
of the interpolations of other people, that ah honest
man would be slow in saying yes to such a question.
But " my name is So-and-so " is a safe answer, and I
gave it. While I had been romancing with myself,
the street-lamps had been lighted, and it was under
one of these detectives that have robbed the Old Eoad
of its privilege of sanctuary after nightfall that I was
ambushed by my foe. The inexorable villain had
taken my description, it appears, that I might have
the less chance to escape him. Dr. Holmes tells us
that we change our substance, not every seven years,
as was once believed, but with every breath we draw.
Why had I not the wit to avail myself of the subterfuge, and, like Peter, to renounce my identity, especially, as in certain moods of mind, I have often more
than doubted of it myself? When a man is, as it
were, his own front-door, and is thus knocked at, why
may he not assume the right of that sacred wood to
make every house a castle, by denying himself to all
visitations ? I was truly not at home when the question was put to me, but had to recall myself from all
out-of-doors, and to piece my self-consciousness hastily
together as well as I could before I answered it.
I knew perfectly well what was coming. It is seldom that debtors or good Samaritans waylay people
under gas-lamps in order to force money upon them,,
so far as I have seen or heard. I was also aware,
from considerable experience, that every foreigner is
persuaded that, by doing this country the favor of
coming to it, he has laid every native thereof under
an obligation, pecuniary or other, as the case may be,
whose discharge he is entitled to on demand duly

38

JAMES

RUSSELL

LOWELL.

made in person or by letter. Too much learning (of
this k i n d ) had made me mad in the provincial sense
of the word. I had begun life with the theory of
giving something to every beggar t h a t came along,
though sure of never finding a native-born countryman
among them. I n a small way, I was resolved to emulate H a t e m T a i ' s l tent, with its three hundred a n d
sixty-five entrances, one for every day in the year, —
I know not whether he was astronomer enough to add
another for leap-years. T h e beggars were a kind of
German-silver aristocracy; not real plate, to be sure,
b u t better t h a n nothing. W h e r e everybody was overworked, they supplied the comfortable equipoise of
absolute leisure, so sesthetically needful. Besides, I
was but too conscious of a vagrant fibre in myself,
which too often thrilled me in my solitary walks with
the temptation to wander on into infinite space, and
by a single spasm of resolution to emancipate myself
from the drudgery of prosaic serfdom to respectability and the regular course of things. This prompting
has been at times my familiar demon, and I could not
but feel a k i n d of respectful sympathy for men who
had dared what I had . only sketched out to myself
as a splendid possibility. F o r seven years J helped
maintain one heroic man on an imaginary journey to
P o r t l a n d , — as fine an example as I have ever known
of hopeless loyalty to an ideal. I assisted another
so long in a fruitless a t t e m p t to reach MecklenburgSchwerin, t h a t at last we grinned in each other's faces
when we met, like a couple of augurs. H e was possessed by this harmless mania as some are by the
North Pole, and I shall never forget his look of regretful compassion ( a s for one who was sacrificing his
1
Hatem Tai. A character in the Arabian Nights.

CONDESCENSION

IN FOREIGNERS.

39

higher life to the fleshpots of E g y p t ) when I at last
advised him somewhat strenuously to go to the D
,
whither the road was so much travelled t h a t he could
not miss it. General Banks, in his noble zeal for the
honor of his country, would confer on the Secretary
of State the power of imprisoning, in case of war, all
these seekers of the unattainable, thus by a stroke of
the pen annihilating the single poetic element in our
h u m d r u m life. A l a s ! not everybody has the genius
to be a Bobbin-Boy, 1 or doubtless all these also would
have chosen t h a t more prosperous line of life! B u t
moralists, sociologists, political economists, and taxtes
have slowly convinced me t h a t my beggarly sympathies
were a sin against society. Especially was the Buckle
doctrine of averages 2 (so flattering to our free-will)
persuasive with me ; for as there must be in every
year a certain number who would bestow an alms on
these abridged editions of the W a n d e r i n g J e w , the
withdrawal of my quota could make no possible difference, since some destined proxy must always step
forward to fill my gap. J u s t so many misdirected
1
General N . P . Banks was called the " Bobbin-Boy" from
the fact of his having worked in a cotton factory in his youth.
2
Thomas Henry Buckle, in his History of Civilization in England, declares that the mental laws which regulate the progress
of society cannot be discovered by the introspective study of the
individual, but only by such a comprehensive survey of facts as
will enable us to eliminate disturbances ; that is, by the method
of averages.
" T h e actions of individuals are greatly affected by their
moral feelings and passions ; but these, being antagonistic to
the passions and feelings of other individuals, are balanced by
them, so that their effect is in the great average of human
affairs nowhere to be seen, and the total actions of mankind,
considered as a whole, are left to be regulated by the total
knowledge of which mankind is possessed."

40

JAMES

RUSSELL

LOWELL.

letters every year and no more! Would it were as
easy to reckon up the number of men on whose backs
fate has written the wrong address, so that they arrive
by mistake in Congress and other places where they
do not belong! May not these wanderers of whom
I speak have been sent into the world without any
proper address at all ? Where is our Dead-Letter
Office for such? And if wiser social arrangements
should furnish us with something of the sort, fancy
(horrible thought!) how many a workingman's friend
(a kind of industry in which the labor is light and the
wages heavy) would be sent thither because not called
for in the office where he at present lies !
But I am leaving my new acquaintance too long
under the lamp-post. The same Gano 1 which had
betrayed me to him revealed to me a well-set young
man of about half my own age, as well dressed,"* so
far as I could see, as I was, and with every natural
qualification for getting his own livelihood as good,
if not better, than my own. He had been reduced to
the painful necessity of calling upon me by a series
of crosses beginning with the Baden Revolution 2 (for
which, I own, he seemed rather young, — but perhaps
he referred to a kind of revolution practised every
1

Gano, or Ganelon, betrayed the rear-guard of Charlemagne's
army in the pass of Roncesvalles, and his name has become
proverbial for a traitor. Mr. Lowell seems here to make a play
upon words, associating " lamp-post" with the Greek ganao (or
gano), which means " t o shine."
2
The grand-duchy of Baden did not escape the revolutionary
impulse which emanated from France in 1848. The Republican
leaders, Hecker and Struve, stirred up an insurrection, and the
Grand Duke Leopold fled. A constituent assembly was called
in May, 1849. But by Prussian help, and after several battles,
the grand duke was reestablished on his throne.

CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS.
1

41

season at Baden-Baden), continued by repeated failures in business, *for amounts which must convince me
of his entire respectability, and ending with our Civil
War. During the latter, he had served with distinction as a soldier, taking a main part in every important battle, with a rapid list of which he favored me,
and no doubt would have admitted that, impartial as
Jonathan Wild's great ancestor, he had been on both
sides, had I baited him with a few hints of conservative opinions on a subject so distressing to a gentleman
wishing to profit by one's sympathy and unhappily
doubtful as to which way it might lean. For all these
reasons, and, as he seemed to imply, for his merit in
consenting to be born in Germany, he considered himself my natural creditor to the extent of five dollars,
which he would handsomely consent to accept in greenbacks, though he preferred specie. The offer was certainly a generous one, and the claim presented with an
assurance that carried conviction. But, unhappily, I
had been led to remark a curious natural phenomenon.
If I was ever weak enough to give anything to a petitioner of whatever nationality, it always rained decayed compatriots of his for a month after. Post hoc
ergo propter hoc2 may not always be safe logic, but
here I seemed to perceive a natural connection of cause
and effect. Now, a few days before I had been so
tickled with a paper (professedly written by a benevolent American clergyman) certifying that the bearer,
a hard-working German, had long " sofered with rheumatic paints in his limps," that, after copying the passage into my note-book, I thought it but fair to pay a
trifling honorarium to the author. I had pulled the
1
2

B a d e n - B a d e n is famed as a gambling-place,
After this, therefore on account of this.

<k%

JAMES

RUSSELL

LOWELL.

string of the shower-bath ! I t had been running shipwrecked sailors for some time, but forthwith it began
to pour Teutons, redolent of lager-hier. I could not
help associating the apparition of my new friend with
this series of otherwise unaccountable phenomena. I
accordingly made up my mind to deny the debt, and
modestly did so, pleading a native bias towards impecuniosity to the full as strong as his own. He took

a high tone with me at once, such as an honest man
would naturally take with a confessed repudiator«
He even brought down his proud stomach so far as to
join himself to me for the rest of my townward walk,
that he might give me his views of the American people, and thus inclusively of myself.
I know not whether it is because I am pigeonlivered and lack gall, or whether it is from an overmastering sense of drollery, but I am apt to submit
to such bastings with a patience which afterwards
surprises me, being not without my share of warmth
in the blood. Perhaps it is because I so often meet
with young persons who know vastly more than I do,
and especially with so many foreigners whose knowledge of this country is superior to my own. However
it may be, I listened for some time with tolerable composure as my self-appointed lecturer gave me in detail
his opinions of my country and its people. America,
he informed me, was without arts, science, literature,
culture, or any native hope of -supplying them. W e
were a people wholly given to money-getting, and who,
having got it, knew no other use for it than to hold it
fast. I am fain to confess that I felt a sensible itching of the biceps, and that my fingers closed with such
a grip as he had just informed me was one of the
effects of our unhappy climate. But happening just

CONDESCENSION

IN FOREIGNERS.

43

then to be where I could avoid temptation by dodging
down a by-street, I hastily left him to finish his diatribe to *the lamp-post, which could stand it better
than I. That young man will never know how near
he came to being assaulted by a respectable gentleman
of middle age, at the corner of Church Street. I have
never felt quite satisfied that I did all my duty by him
in not knocking him down. But perhaps he might
have knocked me down, and then ?
The capacity of indignation makes an essential part
of the outfit of every honest man, but I am inclined
to doubt whether he is a wise one who allows himself
to act upon its first hints. It should be rather, I sus*
pect, a latent heat in the, blood, which makes itself
felt in character, a steady reserve for the brain, warm<
ing the ovum of thought to life, rather than cooking
it by a too hasty enthusiasm in reaching the boilingpoint. As my pulse gradually fell back to its normal
beat, I reflected that I had been uncomfortably near
making a fool of myself, — a handy salve of euphuism
for our vanity, though it does not always make a just
allowance to Nature for her, share in the business.
What possible claim had my Teutonic friend to rob
me of my composure ? I am not, I think, specially
thin-skinned as to other people's opinions of myself,
having, as I conceive, later and fuller intelligence on
that point than anybody else can give me. Life is
continually weighing us in very sensitive scales, and
telling every one of us precisely what his real weight
is to the last grain of dust. Whoever at fifty does
not rate himself quite as low as most of his acquaintance would be likely to put him, must be either a fool
or a great man, and I humbly disclaim being either.
But if I was not smarting in person from any scat-

44

JAMES RUSSELL

LOWELL.

tering shot of my late companion's commination, why
should I grow hot at any implication of my country
therein ? Surely her shoulders are broad enough, if
yours or mine are not, to bear up under a considerable
avalanche of this kind. I t is the bit of truth in every
slander, the hint of likeness in every caricature, that
makes us smart. " Art thou there, old Truepenny ? " x
How did your blade know its way so well to that one
loose rivet in our armor ? I wondered whether Americans were over-sensitive in this respect, whether they
were more touchy than other folks. On the whole,
I thought we were not. Plutarch, who at least had
studied philosophy, if he had not mastered it, could
not stomach something Herodotus had said of Bceotia, 2 and devoted an essay to showing up the delightful old traveller's malice and ill-breeding. French
editors leave out of Montaigne's " Travels " some remarks of his about France, for reasons best known
to themselves. Pachydermatous Deutschland, covered
with trophies from every field of letters, still winces
under that question which Pere Bouhours 3 put two
centuries ago, Si un Allemand pent etre belesprit ? 4
John Bull grew apoplectic with angry amazement at
the audacious persiflage of Piickler-Muskau. 5 To be
1
See Hamlet, Act I., Scene 5. Truepenny is derived from the
Greek trupanon, trupao, to bore or penetrate.
2
Plutarch was born at Chseronea in Bceotia.
3
A French Jesuit author and critic.
4
If a German can be a man of wit.
5
Hermann Ludwig Heinrich, prince of Piickler-Muskau, 17851871. A German author who was made a prince by the king of
Prussia in return for the relinquishment of certain privileges.
In his book Briefe eines Verstorbenen, he expresses himself very
freely about England and other countries, and also about many
prominent people,

CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS.

45

sure, he was a prince, — but that was not all of it, for
a chance phrase of gentle Hawthorne sent a spasm
through all the journals of England. Then this tenderness is not peculiar to us f Console yourself, dear
man and brother, whatever else you may be sure of,
be sure at least of this, that you are dreadfully like
other people. Human nature has a much greater
genius for sameness than for originality, or the world
would be at a sad pass shortly. The surprising thing
is that men have such a taste for this somewhat musty
flavor, tKat an Englishman, for example, should feel
himself defrauded, nay, even outraged, when he comes
over here and finds a people speaking what he admits
to be something like English, and yet so very different from (or, as he would say, to) those he left at
home. Nothing, I am sure, equals my thankfulness
when I meet an Englishman who is not like every
other, or; I may add, an American of the same odd
turn.
Certainly it is no shame to a man that he should
be as jiiee about his country as about his sweetheart,
and who ever heard even the friendliest appreciation
of that unexpressive she that did not seem to fall infinitely short ? Yet it would hardly be wise to hold
every one an enemy who could not see her with our
own enchanted eyes. It seems to be the common
opinion of foreigners that Americans are too tender
upon this point. Perhaps we are ; and if so, there
must be a reason for it. Have we had fair play?
Could the eyes of what is called Good Society (though
it is so seldom true either to the adjective or noun)
look upon a nation of democrats with any chance of
receiving an undistorted image ? Were not those,
moreover, who found in the old order of things an

46

JAMES RUSSELL

LOWELL.

earthly paradise, paying them quarterly dividends for
the wisdom of their ancestors, with the punctuality
of the seasons, unconsciously bribed to misunderstand
if not to misrepresent us ? Whether at war or at
peace, there we were, a standing menace to all earthly
paradises of that kind, fatal underminers of the verycredit on which the dividends were based, all the more
hateful and terrible that our destructive agency was
so insidious, working invisible in the elements, as it
seemed, active while they slept, and coming upon them
in the darkness like an armed man. Could Laius
have the proper feelings of a father towards CEdipus,
announced as his destined destroyer by infallible oracles, and felt to be such by every conscious fibre of his
soul ? For more than a century the Dutch were the
laughing-stock of polite Europe. They were butterfirkins, swillers of beer and schnaps, and their vrouws
from whom Holbein painted the ail-but loveliest of
Madonnas, Rembrandt the graceful girl who sits
immortal on his knee in Dresden, 1 and Rubens his
abounding goddesses, were the synonymes of clumsy
vulgarity. Even so late as Irving the ships of the
greatest navigators in the world were represented
as sailing equally well stern-foremost. That the aristocratic Venetians should hz-re
" Riveted with gigantic piles
Thorough the centre their new-catched miles,"

was heroic. But the far more marvellous achievement of the Dutch in the same kind was ludicrous
even to republican Marvell.2 Meanwhile, during that
1
The reference is to a portrait of Rembrandt's wife Saskia,
m the Dresden Gallery.
2
Andrew Marvell, an English poet and an incorruptible politician, of the time of Charles I I .

CONDESCENSION

IN FOREIGNERS.

47

very century of scorn, they were the best artists,
sailors, merchants, bankers, printers, scholars, jurisconsults, and statesmen in Europe, and the genius of
Motley has revealed them to us, earning a right to
themselves by the most heroic struggle in h u m a n
annals. But, alas ! they were not merely simple burghers who had fairly made themselves H i g h Mightinesses, and could treat on equal terms with anointed
kings, but their commonwealth carried in its bosom
the germs of democracy. They even unmuzzled, at
least after dark, that dreadful' mastiff, the P r e s s ,
whose scent is, or ought to be, so keen for wolves in
sheep's clothing and for certain other animals in lions'
skins. They made fun of Sacred Majesty, and, what
was worse, managed uncommonly well without it. 1 I n
an age when periwigs made so large a p a r t of the
natural dignity of man, people with such a t u r n of
mind were dangerous. How could they seem other
than vulgar and hateful ?
I n the natural course of things we succeeded to this
unenviable position of general butt. T h e D u t c h had
thriven under it pretty well, and there was hope t h a t
we could at least contrive to worry along. A n d we
certainly did in a very redoubtable fashion. P e r h a p s
we deserved some of the sarcasm more than our D u t c h
predecessors in office. W e had nothing to boast of in
arts or letters, and were given to bragging overmuch
of our merely material prosperity, due quite as much
to the virtue of our continent as to our own. T h e r e
was some t r u t h in Carlyle's sneer, after all. Till we
had succeeded in some higher way than this, we h a d
only the success of physical growth. O u r greatness,
like t h a t of enormous Russia, was greatness on the
1
See Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic,

48

JAMES

RUSSELL

LOWELL.

map, — barbarian mass only ; but had we gone down,
like that other Atlantis, 1 in some vast cataclysm, we
should have covered but a pin's point on the chart
of memory, compared with those ideal spaces occupied
by tiny Attica and cramped England. At the same
time, our critics somewhat too easily forgot that material must make ready the foundation for ideal triumphs, that the arts have no chance in poor countries.
But it must be allowed that democracy stood for a
great deal in our shortcoming.. The " Edinburgh Review " never would have thought of asking, " W h o
reads a Russian book ? " 2 and England was satisfied
with iron from Sweden without being impertinently
1
An island mentioned by Plato and other classical writers.
The question of its real existence has been much debated.
" The most famous of all the Athenian exploits was the overthrow ox the island Atlantis. This was a continent lying over
against the pillars of Hercules, in extent greater than Libya
and Asia put together, and was the passage to other islands
and to another continent of which the Mediterranean Sea was
only the harbor ; and within the pillars the empire of Atlantis reached to Egypt and Tyrrhenia. This mighty power was
arrayed against Egypt and Hellas and all the countries bordering on the Mediterranean. Then did your city [Athens]
bravely, and won renown over the whole earth. For at the
peril of her own existence, and when the other Hellenes had
deserted her, she repelled the invader, and of her own accord
gave liberty to all the nations within the pillars.
" A little while afterwards there was a great earthquake, and
your warrior race all sank into the earth ; and the great island
of Atlantis also disappeared in the sea." Jowett's Introduction
to the Timceus of Plato.
2
Sydney Smith, in his review of Seybert's Annals of the
United States, published in the Edinburgh Review in 1820, asked,
" I n the four quarters of the globe who reads an American book ?
or goes to an American play ? or looks at an American picture
or statue ? "

CONDESCENSION

IN FOREIGNERS.

49

inquisitive after her painters and statuaries. Was it
that they expected too much from the mere miracle
of Freedom ? Is it not the highest art of a Republic
to make men of flesh and blood, and not the marble
ideals of such ? I t may be fairly doubted whether we
have produced this higher type of man yet. Perhaps
it is the collective, not the individual, humanity that
is to have a chance of nobler development among us.
We shall see. W e have a vast amount of imported
ignorance, and, still worse, of native ready-made knowledge, to digest before even the preliminaries of such
a consummation can be arranged. We have got to
learn that statesmanship is the most complicated of
all arts, and to come back to the apprenticeshipsystem too hastily abandoned. At present, we trust
a man with making constitutions on less proof of competence than we should demand before we gave him
our shoe to patch. We have nearly reached the limit
of the reaction from the old notion, which paid too
much regard to birth and station as qualifications
for office, and have touched the extreme point in the
opposite direction, putting the highest of human functions up at auction to be bid for by any creature capable of going upright on two legs. In some places,
we have arrived at a point at which civil society is
no longer possible, and already another reaction has
begun, not backwards to the old system, but towards
fitness either from natural aptitude or special training. But will it always be safe to let evils work then
own cure by becoming unendurable ? Every one o'
them leaves its taint in the constitution of the body
politic, each in itself, perhaps, trifling, yet all togethe:
powerful for evil.
But whatever we might do or leave undone, w

50

JAMES

RUSSELL

LOWELL.

were not genteel, and it was uncomfortable to be continually reminded that, though we should boast t h a t
we were the G r e a t W e s t till we were black in t h e
face, it did not bring us an inch nearer to the world's
W e s t - E n d . 1 T h a t sacred enclosure of respectability
was tabooed to us. T h e Holy Alliance did not inscribe us on its visiting-list. T h e Old W o r l d of wigs
and orders a n d liveries would shop with us, b u t we
must ring at the area-bell, and not venture to awaken
the more august clamors of the knocker. O u r manners, it must be granted, had "none of those graces
that stamp the caste of Vere de Vere, in whatever
museum of British antiquities they may be hidden.
I n short, we were vulgar.
This was one of those horribly vague accusations,
the victim of which has no defence. A n umbrella is
of no avail against a Scotch mist. I t envelops you, it
penetrates at every pore, it wets you through without
seeming to wet you at all. Vulgarity is an eighth
deadly sin, added to the list in these latter days, a n d
worse than all the others put together, since it perils
your salvation in this world, — far the more important of the two in the minds of most men. I t profits
nothing to draw nice distinctions between essential
and conventional, for the convention in this case is
the essence, and you may b r e a k every command of
the decalogue with perfect good-breeding, nay, if you
are adroit, without losing caste. W e , indeed, had it
not to lose, for we had never gained it. " How am I
v u l g a r ? " asks the culprit, shudderingly. " Because
thou art not like unto U s , " answers Lucifer, Son of
the Morning, and there is no more to be said. T h e
god of this world may be a fallen angel, but he has us
1
The West-End of London is the fashionable part of the city.

CONDESCENSION

IN FOREIGNERS.

51

there ! We were as clean, — so far as my observation
goes, I think we were cleaner, morally and physically,
than the English, and therefore, of course, than everybody else. But we did not pronounce the diphthong
ou as they did, and we said eether and not eyther,
following therein the fashion of our ancestors, who
unhappily could bring over no English better than
Shakespeare's ; 1 and we did not stammer as they
had learned to do from the courtiers, who in this way
flattered the Hanoverian king, a foreigner among the
people he had come to reign over. Worse than all,
we might have the noblest ideas and the finest sentiments in the world, but we vented them through
that organ by which men are led rather than leaders, though some physiologists would persuade us that
Nature furnishes her captains with a fine handle to
their faces that Opportunity may get a good purchase
on them for dragging them to the front.
This state of things was so painful that excellent
people were not wanting who gave their whole genius
to reproducing here the original Bull, whether by
gaiters, the cut of their whiskers, by a factitious brutality in their tone, or by an accent that was forever
tripping and falling flat over the tangled roots of our
common tongue. Martyrs to a false ideal, it never
occurred to them that nothing is more hateful to gods
and men than a second-rate Englishman, and for the
very reason that this planet never produced a more
splendid creature than the first-rate one, witness
Shakespeare and the Indian Mutiny. Witness that
truly sublime self-abnegation of those prisoners lately
1
Some forms of speech which the English of to-day are
pleased to call Americanisms were current in England in the
time of Shakespeare.

52

JAMES RUSSELL

LOWELL.

among the bandits of Greece, where average men
gave an example of quiet fortitude for which all the
stoicism of antiquity can show no match. Witness
the wreck of the Birkenhead, an example of disciplined heroism, perhaps the most precious, as the
rarest, of all. If we could contrive to be not too unobtrusively our simple selves, we should be the most
delightful of human beings, and the most original;
whereas, when the plating of Anglicism rubs off, as it
always will in points that come to much wear, we are
liable to very unpleasing conjectures about the quality of the metal underneath. Perhaps one reason why
the average Briton spreads himself here with such an
easy air of superiority may be owing to the fact that
he meets with so many bad imitations as to conclude
himself the only real thing in a wilderness of shams.
He fancies himself moving through an endless Bloomsbury, 1 where his mere apparition confers honor as an
avatar of the court-end of the universe. Not a Bull
of them all but is persuaded he bears Europa upon
his back. This is the sort of fellow whose patronage
is so divertingly insufferable. Thank Heaven he is
not the only specimen of cater-cousinship from the
dear old Mother Island that is shown to us! Among
genuine things, I know nothing more genuine than
the better men whose limbs were made in England.
So manly-tender, so brave, so true, so warranted to
wear, they make us proud to feel that blood is thicker
than water.
But it is not merely the Englishman; every European candidly admits in himself some right of primogeniture in respect of us, and pats this shaggy continent
on the back with a lively sense of generous unbending.
1

A district of London, once fashionable, but no longer so0

CONDESCENSION

IN FOREIGNERS.

53

The German who plays the bass-viol has a well-founded
contempt, which he is not always nice in concealing,
for a country so few of whose children ever take that
noble instrument between their knees. His cousin,
the Ph. D. from Gofctingen, cannot help despising a
people who do not grow loud and red over Aryans
and Turanians, and are indifferent about their descent
from either. The Frenchman feels an easy mastery
m speaking his mother tongue, and attributes it to
some native superiority of parts that lifts him high
above us barbarians of the West. The Italian prima
donna sweeps a curtsy of careless pity to the overfacile pit which unsexes her with the bravo! innocently meant to show a familiarity with foreign usage.
But all without exception make no secret of regarding
us as the goose bound to deliver them a golden egg in
return for their cackle. Such men as Agassiz, Guyot,
and Gold win Smith come with gifts in their hands;
but since it is commonly European failures who bring
hither their remarkable gifts and acquirements, this
view of the case is sometimes just the least bit in the
world provoking. To think what a delicious seclusion of contempt we enjoyed till California and our
own ostentatious parvenus, flinging gold away in Europe that might have endowed libraries at home, gave
us the ill repute of riches! What a shabby downfall
from the Arcadia 1 which the French officers of our
Revolutionary War fancied they saw here through
Rousseau-tinted spectacles! 2 Something of Arcadia
there really was, something of the Old Age; and that
1

See Democracy, note on p. 5.
Rousseau's book Du Contrat Social, a somewhat visionary
scheme of government, exerted considerable influence during the
period preceding the French Revolution.
2

54
divine

JAMES
provincialism

RUSSELL
w e r e cheaply

LOWELL.
repurchased

could

we have it back again in exchange for the tawdry
upholstery that has taken its place.
For some reason or other, the European has rarely
been able to see America except in caricature. Would
the first Review of the world have printed the niaiseries1 of M. Maurice Sand as a picture of society in
any civilized country? M. Sand, to be sure, has inherited nothing of his famous mother's literary outfit,
except the pseudonym. But since the conductors of
the " Revue " could not have published his story because it was clever, they must have thought it valuable
for its truth. As true as the last-century Englishman's picture of Jean Crapaud ! 2 We do not ask to
be sprinkled with rosewater, but may perhaps fairly
protest against being drenched with the rinsings of
an unclean imagination. The next time the " Revue "
allows such ill-bred persons to throw their slops out of
its first-floor windows, let it honestly preface the discharge with a gave Veau!z that we may run from
under in season. And M. Duvergier de Hauranne, 4
who knows how to be entertaining! I know that le
Franqais est plutbt indiscret que confiant, 6 and the
1

N i a i s e r i e s = nonsense. Mr. Lowell refers to Six Mille
Lieues a Toute Vapeur published in 1862 in the Revue des Deux
Mondes.
2
The name Jean Crapaud is applied to a Frenchman as John
Bull is to an Englishman. Its origin may he found in the device
of the ancient kings of France, three toads erect, saltant. Nostradamus in the sixteenth century called the French " e r a p a u d s " (toads).
3
Take care below. (Literally, Look out for the water.)
4
The reference is to M. Ernest Duvergier de Hauranne's
book, Huit mois en Ameriquej lettres et notes de voyage 1864-65.
6
The Frenchman is indiscreet rather than presumptuous.

CONDESCENSION

IN FOREIGNERS.

55

pen slides too easily when indiscretions will fetch so
much a page; but should we not have been tant-soit<peu more cautious had we been writing about people
on the other side of the Channel? But then it is a
fact in the natural history of the American long familiar to Europeans, that he abhors privacy, knows
not the meaning of reserve, lives in hotels because of
their greater publicity, and is never so pleased as
when his domestic affairs (if he may be said to have
any) are paraded in the newspapers. Barnum, it is
well known, represents perfectly the average national
sentiment in this respect. However it be, we are not
treated like other people, or perhaps I should say like
people who are ever likely to be met with in society.
Is it in the climate ? Either I have a false notion
of European manners, or else the atmosphere affects
them strangely when exported hither. Perhaps they
suffer from the sea-voyage like some of the more delicate wines. During our Civil War an English gentleman of the highest description was kind enough to
call upon me, mainly, as it seemed, to inform me how
entirely he sympathized with the Confederates, and
how sure he felt that we could never subdue them, —
" they were the gentlemen of the country, you know.''
Another, the first greetings hardly over, asked me how
I accounted for the universal meagreness of my countrymen. To a thinner man than I, or from a stouter
man than he, the question might have been offensive.
The Marquis of Hartington 1 wore a secession badge
1

One of Mr. Lincoln's neatest strokes of humor was his treatment of this gentleman when a laudable curiosity induced him to
be presented to the President of the Broken Bubble. Mr. Lincoln persisted in calling him Mr. Partington. Surely the refinement of good-breeding could go no further. Giving the young

56

JAMES

RUSSELL

LOWELL.

at a public ball in New York. In a civilized country
he might have been roughly handled; but here, where
the hienseances are not so well understood, of course
nobody minded it. A French traveller told me he
had been a good deal in the British colonies, and had
been astonished to see how soon the people became
Americanized. He added, with delightful bonhomie^
and as if he were sure it would charm me, that " they
even began to talk through their noses, just like you !"
I was naturally ravished with this testimony to the
assimilating power of democracy, and could only reply
that I hoped they would never adopt our democratic
patent-method of seeming to settle one's honest debts,
for they would find it paying through the nose in the
long-run. I am a man of the New World, and do not
know precisely the present fashion of May-Fair, 1 but
I have a kind of feeling that if an American (mutato
nomine^ de te 2 is always frightfully possible) were to
do this kind of thing under a European roof, it would
induce some disagreeable reflections as to the ethical
results of democracy. I read the other day in print
the remark of a British tourist who had eaten large
quantities of our salt, such as it is ( I grant it has not
the European savor), that the Americans were hospitable, no doubt, but that it was partly because they
longed for foreign visitors to relieve the tedium of
man his real name (already notorious in the newspapers) would
have made his visit an insult. Had Henri IV. done this, it
would have heen famous. — J. B,. L.
1
A district of London so named from a fair which formerly
was held there in May. As it is the abode of the upper class,
the name has come to be the synonym of fashion and exclusiveness.
2
M u t a t o nomine, d e te haec fabula narratur : Change
the name, and this story is told of you.

CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS.

57

their dead-level existence, and partly from ostentation.
What shall we do? Shall we close our doors? Not
I, for one, if I should so have forfeited the friendship
of L. S.,1 most lovable of men. He somehow seems
to find us human, at least, and so did Clough,2 whose
poetry will one of these days, perhaps, be found to
have been the best utterance in verse of this generation. And T. H., 3 the mere grasp of whose manly
hand carries with it the pledge of frankness and
friendship, of an abiding simplicity of nature as affecting as it is rare!
The fine old Tory aversion of former times was not
hard to bear. There was something even refreshing
in it, as in a northeaster to a hardy temperament.
When a British parson, travelling in Newfoundland
while the slash of our separation was still raw, after
prophesying a glorious future for an island that continued to dry its fish under the aegis of Saint George,
glances disdainfully over his spectacles in parting at
the U. S. A., and forebodes for them a " speedy relapse into barbarism," now that they have madly cut
themselves off from the humanizing influences of Britain, I smile with barbarian self-conceit. But this
kind of thing became by degrees an unpleasant anachronism. For meanwhile the young giant was growing, was beginning indeed to feel tight in his clothes,
was obliged to let in a gore here and there in Texas, in
California, in New Mexico, in Alaska, and had the
scissors and needle and thread ready for Canada when
the time came. His shadow loomed like a Brocken1

Leslie Stephen.
Arthur Hugh Clough lived in Cambridge a year during the
fifties, and was Lowell's near neighbor.
3
Thomas Hughes.
2

58

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
1

spectre over against Europe, — the shadow of what
they were coming to, that was the unpleasant part of
it. Even in such misty image as they had of him,
it was painfully evident that his clothes were not of
any cut hitherto fashionable, nor conceivable by a
Bond Street tailor, — and this in an age, too, when
everything depends upon clothes, when, if we do not
keep up appearances, the seeming-solid frame of this
universe, nay, your very God, would slump into himself, like a mockery king of snow, being nothing, after
all, but a prevailing mode, a make-believe of believing. From this moment the young giant assumed the
respectable aspect of a phenomenon, to be got rid of
if possible, but at any rate as legitimate a subject of
human study as the glacial period or the silurian whatd'ye-call-ems. If the man of the primeval drift-heaps
be so absorbingly interesting, why not the man of the
drift that is just beginning, of the drift into whose
irresistible current we are just being sucked whether
we will or no ? If I were in their place, I confess I
should not be frightened. Man has survived so much,
and contrived to be comfortable on this, planet after
surviving so much! I am something of a protestant
in matters of government also, and am willing to get
rid of vestments and ceremonies and to come down to
bare benches, if only faith in God take the place of a
general agreement to profess confidence in ritual and
sham. Every mortal man of us holds stock in the
1
Brocken or Blocksherg is the highest summit of the Hartz
Mountains in Germany. The surrounding valleys at times sen<jl
up columns of vapor, leaving a space at the top of the mountain
clear, and at sunset or sunrise the shadows of persons on this
plateau are cast upon the hank of cloud, and produce the phenomenon known as the Brockengespenst, or Spectre of the
Brocken.

CONDESCENSION

IN FOREIGNERS.

59

only public debt that is absolutely sure of payment,
and that is the debt of the M a k e r of this Universe to
the Universe he has made. I have no notion of selling out my shares in a panic.
I t was something to have advanced even to the
dignity of a phenomenon, and yet I do not know t h a t
the relation of the individual American to the individual European was bettered by i t ; and that, after
all, must adjust itself comfortably before there can
be a right understanding between the two. W e h a d
been a desert, we became a museum. People came
hither for scientific and not social ends. T h e very
cockney could not complete his education without
taking a vacant stare at us in passing. B u t the sociologists ( I think they call themselves so) were t h e .
hardest to bear. There was no escape. I have even
known a professor of this fearful science to come disguised in petticoats. W e were cross-examined as a
chemist cross-examines a new substance. H u m a n ?
yes, all the elements are present, though abnormally
combined. Civilized ? H m ! t h a t needs a stricter
assay. N o entomologist could take a more friendly
interest in a strange bug. After a few such experiences, I , for one, have felt as if I were merely one of
those horrid things preserved in spirits ( a n d very b a d
spirits, too) in a cabinet. I was not the fellow-being
of these explorers : I was a curiosity ; I was a specimen.
H a t h not an American organs, dimensions,
senses, affections, passions even as a E u r o p e a n h a t h ?
If you prick us, do we not bleed ? If you tickle us,
do we not laugh ? I will not keep on with Shylock
to his next question but one. 1
1

" I f you wrong us shall we not revenge?" Merchant of
Venice, Act III., Scene 1.

60

JAMES RUSSELL

LOWELL.

Till after our Civil War it never seemed to ente
the head of any foreigner, especially of any Englisl
man, that an American had what could be called
country, except as a place to eat, sleep, and trade ir
Then it seemed to strike them suddenly. " By Jov<
you know, fellahs don't fight like that for a shoj
till! " No, I rather think not. To Americans Americ
is something more than a promise and an expectatioi
It has a past and traditions of its own. A descer
from men who sacrificed everything and came hithei
not to better their fortunes, but to plant their idea i
virgin soil, should be a good pedigree. There ws
never colony save this that went forth, not to see
gold, but God. Is it not as well to have sprung froi
such as these as from some burly beggar who cam
over with Wilhelmus Conquestor, unless, indeed,
line grow better as it runs farther away from stalwai
ancestors ? And for our history, it is dry enough, r
doubt, in the books, but, for all that, is of a kind th;
tells in the blood. I have admitted that Carlyle
sneer 1 had a show of truth in it. But what does 1
himself, like a true Scot, admire in the Hohenzc
lerns ? First of all, that they were canny, a thrift;
forehanded race. Next, that they made a good fig]
from generation to generation with the chaos arour
them. That is precisely the battle which the Englis
race on this continent has been pushing doughtily fc
ward for two centuries and a half. Doughtily ar
silently, for you cannot hear in Europe " that eras
the death-song of the perfect tree," that has be<
going on here from sturdy father to sturdy son, ai
making this continent habitable for the weaker 0—
World breed that has swarmed to it during the last
1

See Democracy', p. 21.

CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS.

61

half-century. If ever men did a good stroke of work
on this planet, it was the forefathers of those whom
you are wondering whether it would not be prudent to
acknowledge as far-off cousins. Alas, man of genius,
to whom we owe so much, could you see nothing more
than the burning of a foul chimney in that clash of
Michael and Satan*• which flamed up under your very
eyes?
Before our war we were to Europe but a huge mob
of adventurers and shopkeepers. Leigh Hunt expressed it well enough when he said that he could
never think of America without seeing a gigantic
counter stretched all along the seaboard. And Leigh
Hunt, without knowing it, had been more than half
Americanized, too ! Feudalism had by degrees made
commerce, the great civilizer, contemptible. But a
tradesman with sword on thigh and very prompt of
stroke was not only redoubtable, he had become respectable also. Few people, I suspect, alluded twice
to a needle in Sir John Hawkwood's 2 presence, after
that doughty fighter had exchanged it for a more
dangerous tool of the same metal. Democracy had
been hitherto only a ludicrous effort to reverse the
laws of nature by thrusting Cleon into the place of
Pericles. But a democracy that could fight for an
abstraction, whose members held life and goods cheap
compared with that larger life which we call country,
was not merely unheard-of, but portentous. It was
the nightmare of the Old World taking upon itself
1

See Paradise Lost, Book VI.
An English adventurer who in his youth had heen apprenticed to a tailor. He served with honor in the army, and was
knighted by Edward III. He afterward attained wealth and
renown in the Italian wars of the fourteenth century.
2

62

JAMES

RUSSELL

LOWELL.

flesh and blood, turning out to be substance and not
dream. Since the Norman crusader clanged down
upon the throne of the porphyro-genitij- carefullydraped appearances had never received such a shock,
had never been so rudely called on to produce their
titles to the empire of the world. Authority has had
its periods not unlike those of geology, and at last
comes Man claiming kingship in right of his mere
manhood. The world of the Saurians might be in
some respects more picturesque, but the march of
events is inexorable, and that world is bygone.
The young giant had certainly got out of longclothes. He had become the enfant terrible of the
human household. It was not and will not be easy
for the world (especially for our British cousins) to
look upon us as grown up. The youngest of nations,
its people must also be young and to be treated accordingly, was the syllogism, — as. if libraries did not
make all nations equally old in all those respects, at
least, where age is an advantage and not a defect.
Youth, no doubt, has its good qualities, as people feel
who are losing it, but boyishness is another thing.
W e had been somewhat boyish as a nation, a little
loud, a little pushing, a little braggart. But might
it not partly have been because we felt that we had
certain claims to respect that were not admitted ?
The war which established our position as a vigorous
nationality has also sobered us. A nation, like a man,
cannot look death in the eye for four years without
some strange reflections, without arriving at some
clearer consciousness of the stuff it is made of, without some great moral change. Such a change, or the
1
Born in the purple ; a term applied to sons of a monarch
born after his accession to the throne.

CONDESCENSION

IN FOREIGNERS.

63

beginning of it, no observant person can fail to see
here. Our thought and our politics, our bearing as
a people, are assuming a manlier tone. W e have
been compelled to see what was weak in democracy
as well as what was strong. We have begun obscurely to recognize that things do not go of themselves, and that popular government is not in itself
a panacea, is no better than any other form except
as the virtue and wisdom of the people make it so, and
that when men undertake to do their own kingship,
they enter upon the dangers and responsibilities as
well as the privileges of the function. Above all, it
looks as if we were on the way to be persuaded that no
government can be carried on by declamation. I t is
noticeable also that facility of communication has
made the best English and French thought far more
directly operative here than ever before. Without
being Europeanized, our discussion of important questions in statesmanship, in political economy, in aesthetics, is taking a broader scope and a higher tone. I t
had certainly been provincial, one might almost say
local, to a very unpleasant extent. Perhaps our experience in soldiership has taught us to value training
more than we have been popularly wont. W e may
possibly come to the conclusion, one of these days,
that self-made men may not be always equally skilful
in the manufacture of wisdom, may not be divinely
commissioned to fabricate the higher qualities of opinion on all possible topics of human interest.
So long as we continue to be the most commonschooled and the least cultivated people in the world,
I suppose we must consent to endure this condescending manner of foreigners toward us. The more
friendly they mean to be, the more ludicrously pro*

64

JAMES

RUSSELL

LOWELL.

minent it becomes. They can never appreciate the
immense amount of silent work that has been done
here, making this continent slowly fit for the abode of
man, and which will demonstrate itself, let us hope,
in the character of the people. Outsiders can only be
expected to judge a nation by the amount it has contributed to the civilization of the world ; the amount,
that is, that can be seen and handled. A great place
in history can only be achieved by competitive examinations, nay, by a long course of them. How much
new thought have we contributed to the common
stock? Till that question can be triumphantly answered, or needs no answer, we must continue to be
simply interesting as an experiment, to be studied
as a problem, and not respected as an attained result
or an accomplished solution. Perhaps, as I have
hinted, their patronizing manner toward us is the fair
result of their failing to see here anything more than
a poor imitation, a plaster-cast of Europe. And are
they not partly right ? If the tone of the uncultivated
American has too often the arrogance of the barbarian,
is not that of the cultivated as often vulgarly apologetic ? In the America they meet with is there the
simplicity, the manliness, the absence of sham, the sincere human nature, the sensitiveness to duty and implied obligation, that in any way distinguishes us from
what our orators call " the effete civilization of the
Old World " ? Is there a politician among us daring
enough (except a Dana here and there *) to risk his
future on the chance of our keeping our word with
1
The reference is to Richard Henry Dana, jurist, politician,
and author ; one of the founders of the Free Soil Party, in 1848,
and a life-long friend of Lowell. He was a son of Richard
Henry Dana, the poet and essayist.

CONDESCENSION

IN FOREIGNERS.

65

the exactness of superstitious communities like Eng*
land? Is it certain that we shall be ashamed of a
bankruptcy of honor, if we can only keep the letter
of our bond ? I hope we shall be able to answer all
these questions with a frank yes. At any rate, we
would advise our visitors that we are not merely curious creatures, but belong to the family of man, and
that, as individuals, we are not to be always subjected
to the competitive examination above mentioned, even
if we acknowledged their competence as an examining board. Above all, we beg them to remember that
America is not to us, as to them, a mere object of
external interest to be discussed and analyzed, but in
us, part of our very marrow. Let them not suppose
that we conceive of ourselves as exiles from the graces
and amenities of an older date than we, though very
much at home in a state of things not yet all it might
be or should be, but which we mean to make so, and
which we find both wholesome and pleasant for men
(though perhaps not for dilettanti) to live in. " The
full tide of human existence " may be felt here as
keenly as Johnson felt it at Charing Cross, and in a
larger sense. I know one person who is singular
enough to think Cambridge the very best spot on the
habitable globe. " Doubtless God could have made
a better, but doubtless he never did." 1
It will take England a great while to get over her
airs of patronage toward us, or even passably to conceal them. She cannot help confounding the people
with the country, and regarding us as lusty juveniles.
1

This saying originated with Dr. William Butler, who died
in England in 1621. He declared of the strawberry : " Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless he never
did."

66-

JAMES

RUSSELL

LOWELL,

She has a conviction that whatever good there is in us
is wholly English, when the truth is that we are worth
nothing except so far as we have disinfected ourselves
of Anglicism. She is especially condescending just
now, and lavishes sugar-plums on U3 as if we had not
outgrown them. I am no believer in sudden conversions, especially in sudden conversions to a favorable
opinion of people who have just proved you to be mistaken in judgment and therefore unwise in policy. I
never blamed her for not wishing well to democracy,
— how should she ? — but Alabamas are not wishes.
Let her not be too hasty in believing Mr. Eeverdy
Johnson's 1 pleasant words. Though there is no
thoughtful man in America who would not consider
a war with England the greatest of calamities, yet the
feeling towards her here is very far from cordial,
whatever our Minister may say in the effusion that
comes after ample dining. Mr. Adams, 2 with his
famous " My Lord, this means war," perfectly represented his country. Justly or not, we have a feeling
that we have been wronged, not merely insulted.
The only sure way of bringing about a healthy relation between the two countries is for Englishmen to
1
At the time Mr. Lowell was writing this essay the settlement of the Alabama claims was pending. Reverdy Johnson
was minister to England, and his action in the matter was so
unsatisfactory to his own government that he was recalled.
2
During the Civil War Charles Francis Adams, who was then
minister to England, urged forcibly upon that nation that it
should not allow Confederate cruisers to be fitted out in its
ports. Lord Russell thought the government could not interfere. But when, a little later, Mr. Adams informed him that
a certain iron-clad ram was about to leave Liverpool on its hostile errand against the United States, and added, " I t would be
superfluous in me to point out to your lordship that this is war,"
means were found to prevent the vessel from sailing.

CONDESCENSION

IN FOREIGNERS.

67

clear their minds of the notion that we are always
to be treated as a kind of inferior and deported E n g lishman whose nature they perfectly understand, and
whose back they accordingly stroke the wrong way of
the fur with amazing perseverance. L e t them learn
to treat us naturally on our merits as h u m a n beings,
as they would a German or a F r e n c h m a n , and not as
if we were a kind of counterfeit Briton whose crime
appeared in every shade of difference, and before long
there would come t h a t right feeling which we naturally call a good understanding. T h e common blood,
and still more the common language, are fatal instruments of misapprehension. L e t them give u p trying
to understand us, still more thinking that they do, and
acting in various absurd ways as the necessary consequence, for they will never arrive at t h a t devoutly-tobe-wished consummation, till they learn to look a t us
as we are and not as they suppose us to be. D e a r old
long-estranged mother-in-law, it is a great many years
since we parted. Since 1660, when you married again,
you have been a step-mother to us. P u t on your spectacles, dear madam. Yes, we have grown, and changed
likewise. Y o u would not let us d a r k e n your doors,
if you could help it. W e know t h a t perfectly well.
B u t pray, when we look to be treated as men, don't
shake t h a t rattle in our faces, nor talk baby to us any
longer.
" Do, child, go to it grandam, child ;
Give grandam kingdom, and it grandam will
Give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig ! " 1
1

See King John, Act II., Scene L

T H E STUDY O F MODERN

LANGUAGES1

THREE years ago I was one of those who gathered
in the Sanders Theatre to commemorate the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of a college founded to
perpetuate living learning chiefly by the help of three
dead languages, the Hebrew, the Greek, and the
Latin. I have given them that order of precedence
which they had in the minds of those our pious
founders. The Hebrew came first because they believed that it had been spoken by God himself, and
that it would have been the common speech of mankind but for the judicial invention of the modern languages at Shinar. 2 Greek came next because . the
New Testament was written in that tongue, and Latin
last as the interpreter between scholars. Of the men
who stood about that fateful cradle swung from bough
of the primeval forest, there were probably few who
believed that a book written in any living language
could itself live.
For nearly two hundred years no modern language
was continuously and systematically taught here. In
the latter half of the last century a stray Frenchman
was caught now and then, and kept as long as he
could endure the baiting of his pupils. After fail1
The seventh annual convention of the Modern Language
Association of America was held at Harvard University in December, 1889. The address by James Russell Lowell, which
follows, was the most important one of the meeting.
2
See Genesis xi. 1-9.

THE

STUDY

OF MODERN

LANGUAGES.

69

ing as a teacher of his mother-tongue, he commonly
turned dancing-master, a calling which public opinion
seems to have p u t on the same intellectual level with
the other. W h a t e v e r haphazard teaching of F r e n c h
there may have been was, no doubt, for the benefit of
those youth of the better classes who might go abroad
after t a k i n g their degrees. By hook or by crook
some enthusiasts managed to learn German, 1 but there
was no official teacher before D r . Follen about sixty
•years ago. W h e n at last a chair of French and
Spanish was established, it was rather with an eye to
commerce than to culture.
I t indicates a very remarkable, and, I think, wholesome change in our way of looking at things t h a t I
should now be addressing a numerous Society composed wholly of men engaged in teaching thoroughly
and scientifically the very languages once deemed
unworthy to be taught at all except as a social accomplishment or as a commercial subsidiary. There are
now, I believe, as many teachers in t h a t single department of H a r v a r d College as sufficed for the entire
undergraduate course when I took my first degree.
A n d this change has taken place within two generations.
Tw S* fj§rj Suo jjikv yeveal /xepo7ro)v avBpuiriov
Ecf>6{a6'.2

9

1 Mr. George Bancroft told me that he learned German of
Professor Sydney Willard, who, himself self-taught, had no
notion of its pronunciation. One instructor in French we had, a
little more than a century ago, in Albert Gallatin, a Swiss, afterwards eminent as a teacher in statesmanship and diplomacy.
There was no regularly appointed tutor in French before 1806. —*
J . K. L.
2
" Two ages were increased
Of divers-languaged men."

70

JAMES

RUSSELL

LOWELL.

I make this familiar quotation for two reasons : be*
cause Chapman translates ixzpoirw " divers-languaged,"
which is apt for our occasion, and because it enables
me to make an easier transition to what l a m about to
say ; namely, that I rise to address you not without a
certain feeling of embarrassment. For every man is,
more or less consciously, the prisoner of his date, and
I must confess that I was a great while in emancipating myself from the formula which prescribed the
Greek and Latin Classics as the canonical books of
that infallible Church of Culture outside of which
there could be no salvation,—none, at least, that
was orthodox. Indeed, I am not sure that I have
wholly emancipated myself even yet. The old phrases
(for mere phrases they had mostly come to be) still
sing in my ears with a pleasing if not a prevailing
enchantment.
The traditions which had dictated this formula were
of long standing and of eminent respectability. They
dated back to the exemplaria Grceca of Horace. 1 For
centuries the languages which served men for all the
occasions of private life were put under a ban, and
the revival of learning extended this outlawry to the
literature, such as it was, that had found vent through
them. Even the authors of that literature tacitly
admitted the justice of such condemnation when they
used the word Latin as meaning language par excel*
lence, just as the Newfoundlanders say fish when they
mean cod. They could be witty, eloquent, pathetic,
poetical, competent, iti a word, to every demand of
their daily lives, in their mother-tongue, as the Greeks
1

William Y. Sellar says of Horace : " In the general principles which he lays down he seems to be a mere exponent of
the canons of Greek criticism."

THE STUDY

OF MODERN

LANGUAGES.

71

and Romans had been in theirs, b u t all this would not
d o ; what was so embalmed would not keep. A l l t h e
prudent and forethoughtful among them accordingly
were careful to put their thoughts and fancies, or
what with them supplied the place of these commodities, into L a t i n as the one infallible pickle. T h e y
forgot the salt, to be sure, an ingredient which tho
author alone can furnish. F o r it is not the language
in which a man writes, b u t what he has been able to
make t h a t language say or sing, that resists decay.
Y e t men were naturally a great while in reaching this
conviction. They thought it was not good form, as
the phrase is, to be pleased with what, and what alone,
really touched them home. T h e reproach — at vestri
proavi1 — r a n g deterrent in their ears. T h e author
of " Partonopeus de Blois," 2 it is true, plucks u p a
proper s p i r i t : —
" Cil clere client que n'est pas sens
Qujeserive estoire d'antif tens,
Quant je nes escris en latin,
E t que je perc mon tans enfin ;
Cil le perdent qui ne font rien
Moult plus que je ne f ac le mien."

3

A n d the sarcasm of the last couplet was more b i t i n g
even than the author thought it. Those moderns who
wrote in L a t i n truly ne faisoient
rien,4 for I cannot
recollect any work of the k i n d that has in any sense
1

But your forefathers !
An old French romantic poem ascribed to the twelfth or
thirteenth century.
8
If scholars say it is not wise that I should write a story of
ancient times unless I write it in Latin, and that, indeed, I lose
my time ; if they are losers who do nothing, much more I, if 1
do not my own.
4
Did nothing.
2

72

JAMES RUSSELL

LOWELL.

survived as literature, unless it be the " Epistolse Obscurorum Virorum" 2 (whose Latin is a part of its
bum or) and a few short copies of verse, as they used,
aptly enough, to be called. Milton's foreign correspondence as Secretary for the Commonwealth was
probably the latest instance of the use of Latin in
diplomacy.
You all remember Du Bellay's 2 eloquent protest,
" I cannot sufficiently blame the foolish arrogance
and temerity of some of our nation, who, being least
of all Greeks or Latins, depreciate and reject with a
more than Stoic brow everything written in French,
and I cannot sufficiently wonder at the strange opinion of some learned men, who think our vernacular
incapable of all good literature and erudition." When
this was said, Montaigne was already sixteen years
old, and, not to speak of the great mass of verse and
prose then dormant in manuscript, France had produced in Rabelais a great humorist and strangely
open-eyed thinker, and in Villon 3 a poet who had written at least one immortal poem, which still touches us
1
Letters of Obscure Men, a collection of satirical letters in
dog-Latin, published in Hagenau (though professedly in Venice)
early in the sixteenth century, and probably written, at least in
part, by Ulric von Hutten.
They were aimed against the
monks and scholastics of the time ; and by their severe criticism
of the doctrines, morals, and manner of life of those classes they
contributed forcibly to the bringing about of the Reformation.
2
Du Bellay was a French cardinal and statesman. Under
Francis I. he was an ambassador to Henry V I I I . of England, and
to Pope Paul I I I . At one time, also, he was lieutenant-general
of France in the king's absence. He protected and encouraged
letters ; and it was at his suggestion that the College of France
was founded.
3
Francois Villon, the most famous French poet of the fifteenth century. His first work of importance, published in 1456,

THE STUDY

OF MODERN

LANGUAGES,

with t h a t painless sense of the lachrymce rerum1
consoling in poetry and the burthen of which
Oil sont les neiges d'antan ? "

73
so

2

falters and fades away in the ear like the last stroke
of Beauty's passing-bell. I must not let you forget
that D u Bellay had formed himself on the classics,
and t h a t he insists on the assiduous study of them.
" Devour them," he says, " not in order to imitate,
b u t to t u r n them into blood and nutriment." A n d
surely this always has been and always will be their
true use.
I t was not long before the living languages justified
their right to exist by producing a living literature,
b u t as the knowledge of Greek and L a t i n was t h e
exclusive privilege of a class, that class naturally
made an obstinate defence of its vested rights. N o r
was it less natural that men like Bacon, who felt t h a t
he was speaking to the civilized world, and lesser men,
who fancied themselves charged with a pressing message to it, should choose to utter themselves in the
only tongue that was cosmopolitan. B u t already such
books as had more than a provincial meaning, though
written in what the learned still looked on as patois,
were beginning to be translated into the other E u r o pean languages. T h e invention of printing had insensibly b u t surely enlarged the audience which genius
addresses. T h a t there were persons in England who
had learned something of French, Italian, Spanish,
and of H i g h and Low D u t c h three centuries ago is
was one which he called Lais, but which came to be known as
Le Testament de Villon, or Le petit Testament, while his great
work is Le grand Testament.
v
Literally, the tears of things ; i. e. the sadness of life.
8
Where are the snows of last year ?

74

JAMES RUSSELL

LOWELL.

shown by the dramatists of the day, but the speech
of the foreigner was still generally regarded as something noxious. Later generations shared the prejudice
of sturdy Abbot Samson,1 who confirmed the manor
of Thorpe " cuidam Anglico natione . . . de cujus
fidelitate plenius confidebat quia bonus agricola erat
et quia neseiebat loqui Gallice"2
This was in 1182,
but there is a still more amusing instance of the same
prejudice so lately as 1668. " Erasmus hath also a
notable story of a man of the same age, an Italian,
that had never been in Germany, and yet he spake
the German tongue most elegantly, being as one possessed of the Devil; notwithstanding was cured by a
Physician that administered a medicine which expelled
an infinite number of worms, whereby he was also
freed of his knowledge of the German tongue "z
Dr. Ramesey seems in doubt whether the vermin or
the language were the greater deliverance.
Even after it could no longer be maintained that
no masterpiece could be written in a modern language,
it was affirmed, and on very plausible grounds, that
no masterpiece of style could be so written unless
after sedulous study of the ancient and especially of
1
Abbot of the Convent of St. Edmondsbury, in the time of
Richard Cceur de Lion and his brother John. His memory has
been preserved in the Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond. To
general readers he is known chiefly through Carlyle, who has an
exceedingly interesting chapter concerning him in Past and
Present.
2
To a certain Englishman, of whose fidelity he was the more
confident because he was a good farmer, and because he could
not speak French.
3
From a treatise on worms by William Kamesey, physician in
ordinary to Charles I I . , which contains some very direct hints of
the modern germ-theory of disease. — J . R. L.

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75

the Grecian models. This may have been partially,
but was it entirely true? Were those elements of
the human mind which tease it with the longing for
perfection in literary workmanship peculiar to the
Greeks? Before the new birth of letters, Dante
(though the general scheme of his great poem be
rather mechanical than organic) had given proof of a
style, which, where it is best, is so parsimonious in the
number of its words, so goldenly sufficient in the value
of them, that we must go back to Tacitus for a comparison, and perhaps not even to him for a parallel.
But Dante was a great genius, and language curtsies
to its natural kings. I will take a humbler instance,
the Chant-fable of " Aucassin and Nicolete," * rippling into song, and subsiding from it unconsciously
as a brook. Leaving out the episode of the King of
Torelore, evidently thrust in for the groundlings, what
is there like it for that unpremeditated charm which
is beyond the reach of literary artifice and perhaps
does not survive the early maidenhood of language ?
If this be not style, then there is something better
than style. And is there anything so like the best
epigrams of Meleager 2 in grace of natural feeling, in
the fine tact which says all and leaves it said unblurred
by afterthought, as some little snatches of song by
nameless French minstrels of five centuries ago ?
I t is instructive that, only fifty years after Du
Bellay wrote the passage I have quoted, Bishop H a l l 3
1
A French romance of the thirteenth century, which Saintsbury calls " the finest prose tale of the French Middle Ages."
2
A Greek epigrammatist of the first century B. c , famous
for his purity of style and the beauty of his versification.
3
Joseph Hall, bishop of Exeter, and later of Norwich, author
of controversial writings and Satires.

76

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was indirectly praising Sidney for having learned in
France and brought back with him to England that
very specialty of culture which we are told can only
be got in ancient Greece or, at second hand, in ancient
Rome. Speaking of some nameless rhymer, he says
of him that
" He knows the grace of that new elegance
Which sweet Philisides l fetched late from France."

And did not Spenser (whose earliest essay in verse
seems to have been translated from Du Bellay) form
himself on French and Italian models? Did not
Chaucer ^and Gower, the shapers of our tongue, draw
from the same sources? Does not Higgins tell us
in the " Mirrour for Magistrates " that Buckhurst,
Phaer, Tuberville, Go!ding, and Gascoygne imitated
Marot? Did not Montaigne prompt Bacon to his
Essays and Browne (unconsciously and indirectly, it
may be) to his " Religio Medici " ? Did not Skelton
borrow his so-called Skeltonian measure^from France?
Is not the verse of " Paradise Lost " moulded on that
of the " Divina Commedia " ? Did not Dryden's
prose and Pope's verse profit by Parisian example ?
Nay, in our own time, is it not whispered that more
than one of our masters of style in English, and they,
too, among the chief apostles of classic culture, owe
more of this mastery to Paris than to Athens or Rome ?
I am not going to renew the Battle of the Books,2 nor
1

The name of a shepherd in Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia.
I n a Pastoral JEglogue upon the death of Sir Philip Sidney, published in 1596, and attributed to Sir Edward Dyer, a company
of shepherds take up the lament in turn, each beginning, " P h i lisides is dead."
'' 2 The Battle of the Books was written by Dean Swift to sup*
port his patron, Sir William Temple, in the famous Boyle and

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77

would I be understood as questioning the rightful
place so long held by ancient and especially by Greek
literature as an element of culture and that the most
fruitful. But I hold this evening a brief for the
Modern Languages, and am bound to put their case
in as fair a light as I conscientiously can. Your kindness has put me in a position where I am forced to reconsider my opinions and to discover, if I can, how
far prejudice and tradition have had a hand in forming them.
I will not say with the Emperor Charles V. that a
man is as many men as he knows languages, and still
less with Lord Burleigh that such polygiottism is but
" to have one meat served in divers dishes." But I
think that to know the literature of another language,
whether dead or living matters not, gives us the prime
benefits of foreign travel. I t relieves us from what
Richard Lassels x aptly calls a " moral Excommunication ; " it greatly widens the mind's range of view,
and therefore of comparison, thus strengthening the
judicial faculty; and it teaches us to consider the relations of things to each other and to some general
scheme rather than to ourselves ; above all, it enlarges
aesthetic charity. It has seemed to me also that a
foreign language, quite as much as a dead one, has
the advantage of putting whatever is written in it at
just such a distance as is needed for a proper mental
perspective. No doubt this strangeness, this novelty,
adds much to the pleasure we feel in reading the literBentley controversy, which originated in the violently contested
question of the relative superiority of ancient and modern literature.
1
An English Catholic priest and author of the seventeenth.
century.

78

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a t u r e of other languages than our own. I t play& t h e
p a r t of poet for us b y putting familiar things in a n
unaccustomed way so deftly t h a t we feel as if we h a d
gained another sense and had ourselves a share in the
sorcery t h a t is practised on us. T h e words of our
mother-tongue have been worn smooth b y so often
r u b b i n g against our lips or minds, while the alien
word has all the subtle emphasis and beauty of some
new-minted coin of ancient Syracuse. I n our critical
estimates we should be on our guard against this
charm.
I n reading such books as chiefly deserve to be read
in any foreign language, it is wise to translate consciously and in words as we read. There is no such
help to a fuller mastery of our vernacular. I t compels us to such a choosing and testing, to so nice a
discrimination of sound, propriety, position, and shade
of meaning, t h a t we now first learn the secret of the
words we have been using or misusing all our lives,
and are gradually made aware t h a t to set forth even
the plainest matter, as it should be set forth, is not
only a very difficult thing, calling for thought and
practice, b u t an affair of conscience as well. Translating teaches us as nothing else can, not only that there
is a best way, b u t t h a t it is the only way. Those who
have tried it know too well how easy it is to g r a s p the
verbal meaning of a sentence or of a verse. T h a t is
the bird in the hand. T h e real meaning, the soul of
it, t h a t which makes it literature and not jargon, that
is the bird in the bush which tantalizes and stimulates
with the vanishing glimpses we catch of it as it flits
from one to another lurking-place, —
" Et f ugit ad salices et se cupit ante videri." 1
1

And flies to the willows, yet wishes first to be seen. Virgil,
iEclogue 3,1. 65.

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After all, I am driven back to my Virgil again,
you see, for the happiest expression of what I was
trying to say. I t was these shy allurements and
provocations of Omar Khayyam's Persian which led
Fitzgerald to many a peerless phrase and made an
original poet of him in the very act of translating. I
cite this instance merely by way of hint that as a spur
to the mind, as an open-sesame to the treasures of our
native vocabulary, the study of a living language
(for literary, not linguistic, ends) may serve as well
as that of any which we rather inaptly call dead.
We are told that perfection of form can be learned
only of the Greeks, and it is certainly true that many
among them attained to, or developed out of some
hereditary germ of aptitude, a sense of proportion
and of the helpful relation of parts to the whole organism which other races mostly grope after in vain.
Spenser, in the enthusiasm of his new Platonism, tells
us that " Soul is form, and doth the body make," and
no doubt this is true of the highest artistic genius.
Form without soul, the most obsequious observance
of the unities, the most perfect a priori adjustment of
parts, is a lifeless thing, like those machines of perpetual motion admirable in every way but one — that
they will not go. I believe that I understand and
value form as much as I should, but I also believe
that some of those who have insisted most strongly on
its supreme worth as the shaping soul of a work of art
have imprisoned the word " soul " in a single one of
its many meanings and the soul itself in a single one
of its many functions. For the soul is not only that
which gives form, but that which gives life, the mysterious and pervasive essence always in itself beautiful, not always so in the shapes which it informs, but

80

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even then full of infinite suggestion. In literature it
is what we call genius, an insoluble ingredient which
kindles, lights, inspires, and transmits impulsion to
other minds, wakens energies in them hitherto latent,
and makes them startlingly aware that they too may
be parts of the controlling purpose of the world. . A
book may be great in other ways than as a lesson in
form, and it may be for other qualities that it is most
precious to us. Is it nothing, then, to have conversed
with genius ? Goethe's " Iphigenie " is far more perfect in form than his " Faust," which is indeed but a
succession of scenes strung together on a thread of
moral or dramatic purpose, yet it is " F a u s t " that we
read and hold dear alike for its meaning and for the
delight it gives us. And if we talk of classics; what,
then, is a classic, if it be not a book that forever
delights, inspires, and surprises, — in which, and in
ourselves, by its help, we make new discoveries every
day? What book has so warmly embosomed itself
in the mind and memory of men as the Iliad ? And
yet surely not by its perfection in form so much as by
the stately simplicity of its style, by its pathetic truth
to nature, for so loose and discursive is its plan as to
have supplied plausible argument for a diversity of
authorship. What work of classic antiquity has given
the bransle,1 as he would have called it, to more fruitful thinking than the Essays of Montaigne, the most
planless of men who ever looked before and after, a
chaos indeed, but a chaos swarming with germs of
evolution? There have been men of genius, like
Emerson, richly seminative for other minds; like
Browning, full of wholesome ferment for other minds,
1
Old French = impulse. Related to French branler, to stir,
to move.

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81

though wholly destitute of any proper sense of form.
Yet perhaps those portions of their writings where
their genius has precipitated itself in perfect, if detached and unrelated crystals, flashing hack the light
of our common day tinged with the diviner hue of
their own nature, are and will continue to be a more
precious and fecund possession of mankind than many
works more praiseworthy as wholes, but in which the
vitality is less abounding, or seems so because more
evenly distributed and therefore less capable of giving
that electric shock which thrills through every fibre
of the soul.
But Samuel Daniel, an Elizabethan poet less valued
now than many an inferior man, has said something
to my purpose far better than I could have said it.
Nor is he a suspicious witness, for he is himself a master of style. He had studied the art of writing, and
his diction has accordingly been less obscured by time
than that of most of his contemporaries. He knew
his classics, too, and his dullest work is the tragedy of
" Cleopatra " shaped on a classic model, presumably
Seneca, certainly not the best. But he had modern
instincts and a conviction that the later generations
of men had also their rights, among others that of
speaking their minds in such forms as were most congenial to them. In answer to some one who had denounced the use of rhyme as barbarous, he wrote his
" Defence of Rhyme," a monument of noble and yet
impassioned prose. In this he says, "Suffer, the
world to enjoy that which it knows and what it likes,
seeing whatsoever form of words doth move delight,
and sway the affections of men, in what Scythian a sort
1

As the Scythians were a nomadic people, the adjective denotes lack of culture and refinement.

82

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soever it be disposed and uttered, that is true number*
measure, eloquence, and the perfection of speech." I
think that Daniel's instinct guided him to a halftruth, which he as usual believed to include the other
half also. For I have observed that truth is the only
object of man's ardent pursuit of which every one is
convinced that he, and he alone, has got the whole*
I am not sure that Form, which is the artistic sense
of decorum controlling the coordination of parts and
ensuring their harmonious subservience to a common
end, can be learned at all* whether of the Greeks or
elsewhere. I am not sure that even Style (a lower
form of the same faculty or quality, whichever it be)
which has to do with the perfection of the parts themselves, and whose triumph it is to produce the greatest
effect with the least possible expenditure of material*
— I am not sure that even this can be taught in any
schooL If Sterne had been asked where he got that
style which, when he lets it alone, is as perfect as
any that I know* if Goldsmith had been asked where
he got his, so equable, so easy without being unduly
familiar, might they not have answered with the
maiden in the ballad, —
" I gat it in mymither's frame,
Where ye '11 get never the like " ?

But even though the susceptibility of art must be
inborn, yet skill in the practical application of it to
use may be increased, — best by practice, and very
far next best by example. Assuming, however, that
either Form or Style is to be had without the inter*
vention of our good fairy, we can get them, or at least
a wholesome misgiving that they exist and are of
serious import, from the French, as Sir Philip Sidney
and so many others have done, as not a few are doing

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LANGUAGES.

83

now. It is for other and greater virtues that I would
frequent the Greeks.
Browning, in the preface to his translation of the
" Agamemnon," says bluntly, as is his wont, " learning Greek teaches Greek and nothing else." One is
sometimes tempted to think that it teaches some other
language far harder than Greek when one tries to read
his translation* Matthew Arnold, on the other hand,
was never weary of insisting that the grand style
could be best learned of the Greeks, if not of them
only. I think it may be taught, or, at least, fruitfully
suggested, in other ways. Thirty odd years ago I
brought home with me from Nuremberg photographs
of Peter Fischer's statuettes of the twelve apostles.
These I used to show to my pupils and ask for a
guess at their size. The invariable answer was
" larger than life." They were really about eighteen
inches high, and this grandiose effect was wrought by
simplicity of treatment, dignity of pose, a large unfretted sweep of drapery. This object-lesson I found
more telling than much argument and exhortation.
I am glad that Arnold should have been so insistent,
he said so many admirable things in maintaining his
thesis. But I question the validity of single verses,
or even of three or four, as examples of style, whether
grand or other, and I think he would have made an
opponent very uncomfortable who should have ventured to discuss Homer with as little knowledge of
Greek as he himself apparently had of Old French
when he commented on the "Chanson de Roland."
He cites a passage from the poem and gives in a note
an English version of it which is translated, not from
the original, but from the French rendering by Genin,
who was himself on no very intimate terms with the

84

JAMES RUSSELL

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archaisms of his mother-tongue. W i t h what he says
of the poem I have little fault to find. I t is said with
his usual urbane discretion and marked by his nsual
steadiness of insight. B u t I must protest when he
quotes four lines, apt as they are for his purpose, as
a n adequate sample, and then compares them with a
most musically pathetic passage from Homer.
Who
is there t h a t could escape undiminished from such a
comparison? Nor do I think t h a t he appreciated as
he should one quality of the poem which is essentially
H o m e r i c : I mean its invigorating energy, the exhilaration of manhood and courage that exhales from it,
the same t h a t Sidney felt in " Chevy Chase." x I believe we should judge a book r a t h e r by its total effect
t h a n by the adequacy of special parts, and is not
this effect moral as well as aesthetic ? If we speak of
style, surely t h a t is like good breeding, not fortuitous,
b u t characteristic, the key which gives the pitch of
the whole tune. If I should set some of the epithets
with which Achilles lays Agamemnon about the ears
in the first book of the Iliad in contrast with the dispute between E o l a n d a n d Oliver about blowing t h e
olifaunt, 2 I am not sure t h a t H o m e r would win t h e
prize of higher breeding. O r shall I cite H e c u b a ' s
rov iyu) JJL4CTOV rjirap e^ot/xi
i(T$€fX€vai 7rpocrcj>vcra ? 8 •
T h e " Chanson de E o l a n d " is to me a very interest1

Sir Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poesie, says, " I never
heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my
heart moved more than with a trumpet."
2
Written also olifant. The horn or bugle of Roland. It
was of ivory, and the legend ascribes to it a much more ringing
sound than to any other horn.
« " Whose inmost vitals I were fain to fasten and feed upon."

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85

ing and inspiring poem, certainly not to be named
with the Iliad for purely literary charm, but equipped
with the same moral qualities that have made that
poem dearer to mankind than any other. When I
am " moved more than with a trumpet," I care not
greatly whether it be blown by Greek or Norman
breath.
And this brings me back to the application of what
I quoted just now from Daniel. There seems to be a
tendency of late to value literature and even poetry
for their usefulness as courses of moral philosophy or
metaphysics, or as exercises to put and keep the mental muscles in training. Perhaps the highest praise
of a book is that it sets us thinking, but surely the
next highest praise is that it ransoms us from thought.
Milton tells us that he thought Spenser " a better
teacher than Scotus or Aquinas," 1 but did he prize
him less that he lectured in a garden of Alcina? 2 To
give pleasure merely is one, and not the lowest, function of whatever deserves to be called literature.
Culture, which means the opening and refining of the
faculties, is an excellent thing, perhaps the best, but
there are other things to be had of the Muses which
are also good in their kind. Eefined pleasure is refining pleasure too, and teaches something in her way,
though she be no proper schooldame. In my weaker
moments I revert with a sigh, half deprecation, half
relief, to the old notion of literature as holiday, as
" The world's sweet inn from care and wearisome turmoil."
1

Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas, famous teachers of theology in the thirteenth century.
2
Alcina was a fairy, the embodiment of carnal delights, whr
figures in Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato and Ariosto's Orlando
Furioso.

86

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RUSSELL

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Shall I make the ignominious confession that I relish
Skelton's " Philip Sparowe," 1 pet of Skelton's Mais*
tres Jane, or parts of it, inferior though it be in form,
almost as much as that more fortunate pet of Lesbia?
There is a wonderful joy in it to chase away ennui,
though it may not thrill our intellectual sensibility
like its Latin prototype.
And in this mood the Modern Languages add largely
to our resources. I t may be wrong to be happy unless in the grand style, but it is perilously agreeable.
And shall we say that the literature of the last three
centuries is incompetent to put a healthy strain upon
the more strenuous faculties of the mind? That it
does not appeal to and satisfy the mind's loftier desires ? That Dante, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Bacon,
Shakespeare, Cervantes, Pascal, Calderon, Lessing,
and he of Weimar in whom Carlyle and so many
others have found their University,—that none of
these set our thinking gear in motion to as good purpose as any ancient of them all ? Is it less instructive
to study the growth of modern ideas than of ancient ?
Is the awakening of the modern world to consciousness and its first tentative, then fuller, then rapturous
expression of it, like
— " the new-abashed nightingale
That stinteth first when she beginneth sing,"
" Till the fledged notes at length forsake their nests,
Fluttering in wanton shoals,"

less interesting or less instructive to us because it
finds a readier way to our sympathy through a pos<
tern which we cannot help leaving sometimes on the
1

John Skelton wrote an elaborate lament, some forty pages
in length, for a pet sparrow. Its Latin prototype was the poem
which Catullus wrote on the death of Lesbia's bird.

THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES.

87

latch, than through the ceremonious portal of classical
prescription? Goethe went to the root of the matter
when he said, " people are always talking of the study
of the ancients; yet what does this mean but apply
yourself to the actual world and seek to express it,
since this is what the ancients also did when they
were alive ? " That " when they were alive " has an
unconscious sarcasm in it. I am not ashamed to confess that the first stammerings of our English speech
have a pathetic charm for me which I miss in the
wiser and ampler utterances of a tongue, not only
foreign to me as modern languages are foreign, but
thickened in its more delicate articulations by the
palsying touch of Time. And from the native woodnotes of many modern lands, from what it was once
the fashion to call the rude beginnings of their literature, my fancy carries away, I think, something as precious as Greek or Latin could have made it. Where
shall I find the piteous and irreparable poverty of the
parvenu so poignantly typified as in the " Lai de
TOiselet " ? Where the secret password of all poetry
with so haunting a memory as in " Count Arnaldos," —•
" Yo no digo esta cancion
Sino a quien conmigo va " ? 1

It is always wise to eliminate the personal equation
from our judgments of literature as of other things
that nearly concern us. But what is so subtle, so elusive, so inapprehensible as this folle dulogisf2
Are
we to be suspicious of a book's good character in proportion as it appeals more vividly to our own private
consciousness and experience ? How are we to know
1

1 do not sing this song except to those who go along with

me.
2

Imagination.

88

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LOWELL.

to how many it may be making the same appeal ? I s
there no resource, then, b u t to go back humbly to the
old quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab
omnibus.1
and to accept nothing as orthodox literature on which
the elder centuries have not laid their consecrating
hands ? The truth is, perhaps, t h a t in reading ancient
literature many elements of false judgment, partly
involved in the personal equation, are inoperative, or
seem to be so, which, when we read a more nearly
neighboring literature, it is wellnigh impossible to
neutralize. D i d not a p a r t of Matthew Arnold's preference for the verses of Homer, with the thunder-roll
of which he sent poor old T h u r o l d u s 2 about his business, spring from a secret persuasion of their more
noble harmony, their more ear-bewitching canorousness? A n d yet he no doubt recited those verses in a
fashion which would have disqualified them as barbarously for the ear of an ancient G r e e k as if they h a d
been borrowed of Thuroldus himself. Do we not see
here the personal fallacy's eartip ? I fancy if we could
call up the old jongleur
and bid him sing to us,
accompanied by his vielle, we should find in his verses
a plaintive and not unimpressive melody such as so
strangely moves one in the untutored song of the Tuscan peasant heard afar across the sun-steeped fields
with its prolonged fondling of the assonants. There is
no question about what is supreme in literature. T h e
difference between what is best and what is next best
is immense ; it is felt instinctively; it is a difference
1
W h a t always, what everywhere, what by all [has been ap*
proved].
2
Thuroldus is a name appended to one of the manuscripts of the
Chanson de Roland. In " The Study of Poetry " (Essays in Criticism, Second Series), Mr. Arnold compares the Chanson with the
great poems of Homer, and pronounces it immeasurably inferior.

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89

not of degree b u t of kind. A n d yet m a y we not without lese-majesty say of books what F e r d i n a n d says of
women, -—
" for several virtues
Have I liked several women ; never any
With so full soul but some defect in her
Did quarrel with the noblest grace she owed
And put it to the foil" ? 1

I n growing old one grows less fanatically punctual
in the practice of those austerities of taste which
make too constant demands on our self-denial. The
ages have made u p their minds about the ancients.
W h i l e they are doing it about the moderns ( a n d they
are sometimes a little long about it, having the whole
of time before t h e m ) , may we not allow ourselves to
take an honest pleasure in literature far from the
highest, if you will, in point of form, not so far in
point of substance, if it comply more kindly with our
mood or quicken it with oppugnancy according to our
need ? T h e r e are books in all modern languages
which fulfil these conditions as perfectly as any, however sacred by their antiquity, can do. W e r e the men
of the Middle Ages so altogether wrong in preferring
Ovid because his sentiment was more in touch with
their own, so t h a t he seemed more neighborly? O r
the earlier dramatists in overestimating Seneca for the
same reason ? W h e t h e r it be from natural predisposition or fr^m some occult influence of the time, there
are men who find in the literature of modern E u r o p e
a stimulus and a satisfaction which Athens and Eome
cieny them. If these books do not give so keen an
intellectual delight as the more consummate art and
more musical voice of Athens enabled her to give,
yet they establish and maintain, I am more than half
1
See The Tempest, Act III., Scene 1.

90

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willing to believe, more intimate and confiding relations with us. They open new views, they liberalize
us as only an acquaintance with the infinite diversity
of men's minds and judgments can do, they stimulate
to thought or tease the fancy with suggestion, and in
short do fairly well whatever a good book is expected
to do, what ancient literature did at the Revival of
L e a r n i n g , with an effect like t h a t which the reading
of Chapman's H o m e r had upon Keats. 1 And we must
not forget that the best result of this study of the
ancients was the begetting of the moderns, though
D a n t e somehow contrived to get born with no help
from the Greek H e r a and little more from the R o m a n
Lucina. " ' T i s an unjust way of compute," says Sir
Thomas Browne, " to magnify a weak head for some
L a t i n abilities, and to undervalue a solid j u d g m e n t
because he knows not the genealogy of Hector."
A s implements of education, the modern books have
some advantages of their own. I am told, and I believe, that there is a considerable number of not uningenuous youths, who, whether from natural inaptitude
or want of hereditary predisposition, are honestly
bored by Greek arid Latin, and who yet would take a
wholesome and vivifying interest in what was nearer
to their habitual modes of thought and association.
I would not take this for granted, I would give the
horse a chance at the ancient springs before I came
to the conclusion that he would not drink. No doubt,
the greater difficult}7- of the ancient languages is believed by many to be a prime recommendation of them
as challenging the more strenuous qualities of the
mind. I t h i n k there are grounds for this belief, and
was accordingly pleased to learn the other day t h a t
1
See Keats?s On first looking into Chapman's Homer.

THE STUDY

OF MODERN

LANGUAGES.

91

my eldest grandson was taking kindly to his Homer,
I had rather he should choose Greek than any modern
tongue, and I say this as a hint that I am making
allowance for the personal equation. The wise gods
have put difficulty between man and everything that
is worth having. But where the mind is of softer
fibre, and less eager of emprise, may it not be prudent
to open and make easy every avenue that leads to literature, even though it may not directly lead to those
summits that tax the mind and muscle only to reward
the climber at last with the repose of a more ethereal
air ?
May we not conclude that modern literature, and
the modern languages as the way to it, should have a
more important place assigned to them in our courses
of instruction, assigned to them moreover as equals in
dignity, except so far as age may justly add to it, and
no longer to be made to feel themselves inferior by
being put below the salt ? That must depend on the
way they are taught, and this on the competence and
conscience of those who teach them. Already a very
great advance has been made. The modern languages
have nothing more of which to complain. There are
nearly as many professors and assistants employed in
teaching them at Harvard now as there were students
of them when I was in college. Students did I say ?
I meant boys who consented to spend an hour with
the professor three times a week for the express purpose of evading study. Some of us learned so much
that we could say " How do you do ? " in several languages, and we learned little more. The real impediment was that we were kept forever in the elementary
stage, that we could look forward to no literature that
Would have given significance to the languages and

92

JAMES

RUSSELL

LOWELL.

made them beneficent. I t is very different now, and
with the number of teachers the number of students
has more t h a n proportionally increased. A n d the
reason is not far to seek. T h e study has been made
more serious, more thorough, and therefore more inspiring. A n d it is getting to be understood t h a t as
a training of the faculties, the comparative philology,
at least, of the modern languages may be made as serviceable as that of the ancient. The classical superstitions of the English race made them especially behindhand in this direction, and it was long our shame
t h a t we must go to the Germans to be t a u g h t t h e
rudiments of our mother-tongue. This is no longer
true. A n g l o - S a x o n , Gothic, Old H i g h and Middle
H i g h G e r m a n and Icelandic are all taught, not only
here, b u t in all our chief centres of learning. W h e n
I first became interested' in Old French I made a surprising discovery. If the books which I took from
t h e College L i b r a r y had been bound with gilt or
yellow edges, those edges stuck together as, when so
ornamented, they are wont to do till the leaves have
been turned. No one h a d ever opened those books
before.
" I was the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea." 1

Old F r e n c h is now one of the regular courses of instruction, and not only is the language taught, b u t its
literature as well. Remembering what I remember,
it seems to me a wonderful thing that I should have
lived to see a poem in Old F r e n c h edited by a young
American scholar (present here this evening) and
1

W e were the first that s ever burst
Into that silent sea.
COLEKIDGE, The Ancient

Mariner.

THE STUDY

OF MODERN

LANGUAGES.

93

printed in the journal of this Society, a journal in
every way creditable to the scholarship of the country. Nor, as an illustration of the same advance in
another language, should we forget Dr. Fay's admirable
Concordance of the " Divina Commedia." But a more
gratifying illustration than any is the existence and
fruitful activity of this Association itself, and this
select concourse before me which brings scholars together from all parts of the land, to stimulate them
by personal commerce with men of kindred pursuits,
and to unite so many scattered energies in a single
force controlled by a common and invigorated purpose.
W e have every reason to congratulate ourselves on
the progress the modern languages have made as well
in academic as in popular consideration. They are
now taught (as they could not formerly be taught) in
a way that demands toil and thought of the student,
as Greek and Latin, and they only, used to be taught,
and they also open the way to higher intellectual joys,
to pastures new and not the worse for being so, as
Greek and Latin, and they only, used to do. Surely
many-sidedness is the very essence of culture, and it
matters less what a man learns than how he learns
it. The day will come, nay, it is dawning already,
when it will be understood that the masterpieces of
whatever language are not to be classed by an arbitrary standard, but stand on the same level in virtue
of being masterpieces ; that thought, imagination, and
fancy may make even a patois acceptable to scholars ;
that the poets of all climes and of all ages " sing to
one clear harp in divers tones ; " and that the masters
of prose and the masters of verse in all tongues teach
the same lesson and exact the same fee.

94

JAMES

RUSSELL

LOWELL.

I began by saying that I had no wish to renew the
Battle of the Books. I cannot bring myself to look
upon the literatures of the ancient and modern worlds
as antagonists, but rather as friendly rivals in the effort
to tear as many as may be from the barbarizing plutolatry which seems to be so rapidly supplanting the
worship of what alone is lovely and enduring. No,
they are not antagonists, but by their points of disparity, of likeness, or contrast, they can be best understood, perhaps understood only through each other.
The scholar must have them both, but may not he who
has not leisure to be a scholar find profit even in the
lesser of the two, if that only be attainable ? Have
I admitted that one is the lesser ? O matre pulchra
filia pulchrior 1 is perhaps what I should say here.
If I did not rejoice in the wonderful advance made
in the comparative philology of the modern languages,
I should not have the face to be' standing here. But
neither should I if I shrank from saying what I believed to be the truth, whether here or elsewhere. I
think that the purely linguistic side in the teaching
of them seems in the way to get more than its fitting
share. I insist only that in our college courses this
should be a separate study, and that, good as it is in
itself, it should, in the scheme of general instruction,
be restrained to its own function as the guide to something better. And that something better is Literature. Let us rescue ourselves from what Milton calls
" these grammatic flats and shallows." The blossoms
of language have certainly as much value as its roots ;
for if the roots secrete food and thereby transmit life
to the plant, yet the joyous consummation of that life
is in the blossoms, which alone bear the seeds that
1

0 more beautiful daughter of a beautiful mother.

THE STUDY

OF MODERN

LANGUAGES.

95

distribute and renew it in other growths. Exercise is
good for the muscles of mind and to keep it well in
hand for work, but the true end of Culture is to give
it play, a thing quite as needful.
What I would urge, therefore, is that no invidious
distinction should be made between the Old Learning
and the New, but that students, due regard being had
to their temperaments and faculties, should be encouraged to take the course in modern languages as being
quite as good in point of mental discipline as any
other, if pursued with the same thoroughness and to
the same end. And that end is Literature, for there
language first attains to a full consciousness of its
powers and to the delighted exercise of them. Literature has escaped that doom of Shinar which made our
Association possible, and still everywhere speaks in
the universal tongue of civilized man. And it is only
through this record of Man's joys and sorrows, of his
aspirations and failures, of his thought, his speculation, and his dreams, that we can become complete
men, and learn both what he is and what he may be,
for it is the unconscious autobiography of mankind.
And has no page been added to it since the last ancient classic author laid down his pen ?

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