professional man of religion, and in his journal his discontent with the professional poet ("The poetic gift we want, but not the poetic profession'), and in his essay on Shakspere he calls for a new type of man, the poet-priest, a whole man made up of these two half men who would answer all our needs. This organic fusion of art and religion stirs the imagination, and pleases us far better than Emerson's other solution of the problem the rejection of art in favor of religion. Yet it, too, is an impossible solution, if by impossible we mean that which has never been and hence is likely never to be. The ideal of the poet-priest can only be approximated, and therefore we may find the words in Emerson again 'we shall cease to look in men for completeness, and shall content ourselves with their social and delegated quality.' We must put up with the priests, and with the poets; with religion, and with art. Thus Emerson is really leading us nowhere when he dismisses art as merely initial, or when he proposes a union of art and religion. If then we ask, finally, why it is that his discussion of the relation of art to life leaves us in the end unresponsive, why, with an insight probably unsurpassed in modern times into the higher services of art, Emerson yet makes us feel that he was rarely quite at home in the province of art, we must conclude, I think, that it is because his cast of mind was dominantly priestly rather than poetic, mystical rather than æsthetic. He is full of impetuous exaltations, of sudden raptures that carry him far aloft and beyond sight of the familiar terrain of man's life. Beneath his mysticism there is little articulated thought such thought as Plato's or even Plotinus's to sustain and direct it. He rises on the wings of faith, not from their high tableland of the mind, but from the flats of daily experience. Even when he lives with us, with home and kindred and nature and art, he is never in the current of the human affections but outside of them, contem plating them, on the verge of transcending them. "He is always pluming his wings, not for an epic flight, but for a mystical ascension to the Highest, where the ways of God do not even need justification, and where the ways of men are forgotten. That absorbed interest in the ways of men - in their actions, thoughts, sensations, passions- which the æsthetic point of view presupposes, was, after all, wanting in Emerson, notwithstanding his resolutions to be a student of the world. He preferred his Plato and his Jesus to his ballads and his Hamlets, and preferred them so markedly that he never quite understood what the ballad-makers and the master of revels had accomplished. Sifting great men to ascertain the constitution of the First Class, he reduced the number sternly to two, Jesus and Shakspere. Logically he should have reduced the number to one, Jesus, and then have substituted for Him that Oneself whose praises his disciple Whitman was confusedly to sing. CHAPTER III LOWELL §1 IN no other American of the nineteenth century has the critical spirit manifested itself so comprehensively as in James Russell Lowell. Despite the fact that he leaves an impression of comparative superficiality and futility shortcomings to which we are keenly sensitive to-day, perhaps because they are our own - he must still be regarded as our most distinguished literary critic. While there is far more of original vigor in both Poe and Emerson (and in Whitman, as will appear), he was free of the special purposes that limited their achievement as critics. The bulk of Poe's work was journalism, book-reviewing, ephemeral commentary on the books of the day; Emerson, at the other extreme, characteristically chose for his literary essays themes that are timeless; Lowell, however, attempted rounded portraits and estimates of so many authors of the past that he virtually wrote a critical history of literature from Dante to his own age.1 As this contrast might imply, Poe read little outside his times; Emerson read widely but transcendentally; 1 For convenient reference I will arrange his subjects in chronological order: 1. Dante (Prose Works, vol. Iv); 2. Chaucer (111); 3. Don Quixote (vi); 4. Spenser (IV); 5. Marlowe (vii); 6. Shakspere Once More (11); 7. Shakspere's Richard III (vii); 8. Beaumont and Fletcher (vii); 9. Webster (vii); 10. Chapman (vii); 11. Massinger and Ford (vi); 12. Milton (Iv); 13. Milton's Areopagitica (vII); 14. Walton (vii); 15. Dryden (1); 16. Pope (iv); 17. Rousseau (11); 18. Fielding (vi); 19. Gray (VII); 20. Lessing (11); 21. Wordsworth (Iv); 22. Wordsworth (vi); 23. Coleridge (vi); 24. Keats (1); 25. Landor, Some Letters of (VII); 26. Carlyle (11); 27. Swinburne's Tragedies (11); 28. Percival, Life and Letters of (11); 29. Emerson the Lecturer (1); 30. Thoreau (1). (In this list I have disregarded Lowell's Early Prose Writings, The Function of the Poet and Other Essays, and Letters of James Russell Lowell.) An edition of Lowell's literary essays, thus arranged, would render a service to lovers of books. while Lowell was a good deal of the detached scholar. Again, Poe in his most memorable work was concerned with technique; Emerson, as Lowell phrases it, with 'the profounder ethics of art'; and Lowell himself with both. Poe extolled beauty and fought the heresy of the didactic; Emerson, though eager for beauty, could not long lay aside his ministerial function; it remained for Lowell to mediate, with fair success, between the two. Poe and Emerson were at their best in critical theory; Lowell, wanting their turn for speculation, excelled in practice. Poe and Emerson have certain æsthetic doctrines associated with their names; but the name of Lowell suggests nothing of the kind, suggests, rather, gusto and flashes of insight, the free play of feeling and intelligence. From what has just been said that æsthetic doctrines are so inconspicuous in Lowell, and that he excelled in practice rather than theory -it might reasonably be inferred that he was an impressionist, that the center of interest in his essays is the man himself, a delightful personality, blending such qualities as warmth of sympathy, infectious enthusiasm, an active imagination and fancy, irrepressible wit and humor, fundamental sanity and common sense. In substantiation of this inference, it might be urged that we read his literary essays much as we read his charming letters for their personal qualities and that if we subtracted these personal qualities the essays would dissolve into nothingness, while in the case of Poe and Emerson the skeleton of ideas would remain. At a glance, one has reason to say of Lowell: his criteria are negligible, the man is all, he was an impressionist. Such, I say, is the conclusion to which we are quickly drawn if we follow what Poe, with his one-track mind, somewhat haughtily termed ratiocination, or what Emerson, with his trackless mind, disparaged as mere logic or understanding. Yet surely the weakness of logic resides less in the thing itself than in the ease of its abuse by those who, indulging an emotional bias, disregard important facts and arrive at a predetermined conclusion. In the present instance, the important facts are twofold. In the first place is the obvious fact that the impressionist is not a critic without criteria, but a critic who refuses to delimit his criteria by deliberate formulation and application. To call Lowell an impressionist is not to dispose of his criteria. In the second place, a thorough scrutiny of Lowell's criticism would show that his criteria, far from being negligible, are really distinct and impressive. It could probably be demonstrated, indeed, that his weakness was the very reverse of that which is commonly alleged; that, instead of having insignificant criteria and effective personal qualities, he possessed a set of controlling ideas that wanted only the impetus of great personal qualities to make them in the highest degree significant and useful. This is a large claim, necessitating a careful study both of his theory of criticism and literary art, and of his personal endowment and attainment. §2 Books and the Man - in the commerce of the two lies the whole story of criticism. While Emerson defined the scholar or critic as Man Thinking, and, though a great reader, never lost himself in his books, Lowell might almost have defined the critic as Man Reading, since his habitual occupation was so much more passive than active, receptive than creative. In his commerce with books, Lowell's imports far exceeded his exports. From childhood to old age he read voraciously, in the fine library of his father, in the library of Harvard College, and in his own accumulating collection of books. Not long before his death he came to the conclusion that 'the problem of the scholar was formerly how to acquire books; for us it is how to get rid of them.' He spoke of Cotton Mather as book-suffocated, an epithet that perhaps describes himself quite as justly. From the greatest of English Puritans |