22 February: Boreham on James Russell Lowell

A Healing Minstrelsy
If, today, the British and American peoples find themselves bound together by the most intimate and most sacred ties, their amity is largely the fruit of the fine work of James Russell Lowell, the anniversary of whose birth we mark today. In his time Lowell was a personality to be reckoned with. Handsome in appearance, brilliant in conversation, and of infinite geniality and charm, he became at once the central figure in any social group that he chose to adorn. W. M. Rossetti said of him that he had a cast of countenance that would have graced an Italian saint or a mediaeval troubadour, and that the painter who, wishing to portray the rejuvenated Faust or Goethe, could have persuaded Lowell to pose for his model, would have been very fortunate indeed.

Theodore Watts-Dunton once finely said of Lowell that, though literature was the passion of his life, he knew that to join the hands of England and America, as he set himself to do, was to make a poem in action—a poem that would work towards the final emancipation of the English-speaking race, the final emancipation of the world. In view of all that has happened of recent years these words seem almost prophetic, as do the lines addressed to the British and American peoples at the time of Lowell's death:

Your hands he joined—those fratricidal hands,
Once trembling each to seize a
brother's throat,
How shall ye honour him whose spirit stands
Between you
still? Keep love's bright sails afloat
For Lowell's sake, where once ye
strove and smote
On those wide waters that divide your strands.

It was to achieve this historic triumph that Lowell made the greatest sacrifice of his career.

The Poet Who Became A Plenipotentiary
For, to enable him to realise his dream, he had to pay the price. The bald fact is that Lowell had it in him to become a first-class poet yet never did become one. Diplomacy shared with Poesy the hospitalities of his soul and the Muses resented the divided devotion. As it is, he may be described rather as an ethical rhymer than as a classical poet. As he grew to maturity he recognised the defects of his earlier work, but by that time he was no longer so passionately in love with the laurels as to apply himself diligently to the perfection of his latent powers. As a natural consequence, he seldom rises above an elaborate mediocrity. He says what he wishes to say, and says it effectively, but he never says it with the genius of a laureate, the rapture of a minstrel, or the sweetness of a poet. Edgar Allan Poe once told him bluntly that, whilst he was capable of work unequalled in the Western hemisphere, he was only turning out compositions that were essentially loose, ill-conceived and feebly executed, remarkable only for their obvious lack of literary finish.

His most intoxicating draught of fame came to him, strangely enough, as a result of the verses that he had published anonymously. As a protest against the Mexican War, and as a plea for the abolition of slavery, Lowell sent forth the Biglow Papers. Couched in the quaintest colloquialisms, and peppered with the choicest morsels of Yankee diction, the whimsical verses immediately captured the popular ear. "Who is Hosea Biglow?" everybody was asking. Lowell himself was constantly entangled in the discussion. "I found the Biglow jingles copied everywhere," he says. "I saw them pinned up in workshops; I heard them quoted and their authorship debated; and once, when rumour had at length drawn my name into one of its eddies, I even had the satisfaction of hearing it demonstrated, in the pauses of a concert, that I was utterly incompetent to have written anything of the kind." It is at least a suggestive indication of what might have been had he wholeheartedly devoted his cunning to his craft.

Literary Renown Sacrificed
But he dissipated his brilliance. Invited by the President to go to Russia as Ambassador, Lowell declined on the ground that he owed something to the gifts that had lifted him from obscurity to eminence. Three years later, however, he accepted an appointment to the Court at Madrid, which led, in due course to his preferment as United States Ambassador to Great Britain. And thus, in a whirl of diplomatic duties and social functions, his literary gift was suffocated. He carried in his breast a divided heart. As a result, he never rises to super excellence. If, by a feat of concentration that should have been well within his power, he had focused his really amazing faculties upon any one of the imposing tasks to which he set his hand, his name would have shone with an even brighter lustre and he would have taken his place among the greatest of the great.

He richly deserves, however, to be gratefully and admiringly remembered. By his facile pen and his enormous personal influence he turned the faces of two great nations towards each other. He therefore stands, as one of our historians has vividly said, a golden link between two worlds. In all his work he strikes, clearly, sanely and attractively, the purely ethical note. To him, life's ultimate issues were crystal clear. "Once," he sang:

"Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of
truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Careless seems the great
avenger; history's pages but record
One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt
old systems and the word;
Truth for ever on the scaffold, wrong for ever on
the throne.
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim
unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own."

In that fine faith he lived and laboured alike in the literary and in the diplomatic fields. It was a real torture to him that, between the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon world, no love was lost. He observed with genuine and growing sorrow the evidences of estrangement and alienation between his own people and the people of the British Isles. He regarded it as his supreme mission in life to heal that hurt, and the world owes him a heavy debt of obligation for the fidelity with which, to the last day of his life, he held faithfully to his exalted purpose.

F W Boreham

Picture: J R Lowell