The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays by James Russell Lowell

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THE FUNCTION OF THE POET
AND OTHER ESSAYS

BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

COLLECTED AND EDITED BY
ALBERT MORDELL

KENNIKAT PRESS, INC./PORT WASHINGTON, N.Y.

THE FUNCTION OF THE POET

1920 by Houghton Mifflin Company

Reissued in 1967 by Kennikat Press

PREFACE

The Centenary Celebration of James Russell Lowell last year showed that
he has become more esteemed as a critic and essayist than as a poet.
Lowell himself felt that his true calling was in critical work rather
than in poetry, and he wrote very little verse in the latter part of his
life. He was somewhat chagrined that the poetic flame of his youth did
not continue to glow, but he resigned himself to his fate; nevertheless,
it should be remembered that "The Vision of Sir Launfal," "The Biglow
Papers," and "The Commemoration Ode" are enough to make the reputation
of any poet.

The present volume sustains Lowell's right to be considered one of the
great American critics. The literary merit of some of the essays herein
is in many respects nowise inferior to that in some of the volumes he
collected himself. The articles are all exquisitely and carefully
written, and the style of even the book reviews displays that quality
found in his best writings which Ferris Greenslet has appropriately
described as "savory." That such a quantity of good literature by so
able a writer as Lowell should have been allowed to repose buried in the
files of old magazines so long is rather unfortunate. The fact that
Lowell did not collect them is a tribute to his modesty, a tribute all
the more worthy in these days when some writers of ephemeral reviews on
ephemeral books think it their duty to collect their opinions in book
form.

The essays herein represent the matured author as they were written in
the latter part of his life, between his thirty-sixth and fifty-seventh
years. The only early essay is the one on Poe. It appeared in _Graham's
Magazine_ for February, 1845, and was reprinted by Griswold in his
edition of Poe. It has also been reprinted in later editions of Poe, but
has never been included in any of Lowell's works. This was no doubt due
to the slight break in the relations between Poe and Lowell, due to
Poe's usual accusations of plagiarism. The essay still remains one of
the best on Poe ever written.

Though Lowell became in later life quite conservative and academic, it
should not be thought that these essays show no sympathy with liberal
ideas. He was also appreciative of the first works of new writers, and
had good and prophetic insight. His favorable reviews of the first works
of Howells and James, and the subsequent career of these two men,
indicate the sureness of Lowell's critical mind. Many readers will
enjoy, in these days of the ouija board and messages from the dead, the
raps at spiritualism here and there. Moreover, there is a passage in the
first essay showing that Lowell, before Freud, understood the
psychoanalytic theory of genius in its connection with childhood
memories. The passage follows Lowell's narration of the story of little
Montague.

None of the essays in this volume has appeared in book form except a few
fragments from some of the opening five essays which were reported from
Lowell's lectures in the _Boston Advertiser_, in 1855, and were
privately printed some years ago. Charles Eliot Norton performed a
service to the world when he published in the _Century Magazine_ in 1893
and 1894 some lectures from Lowell's manuscripts. These lectures are now
collected and form the first five essays in this book. I have also
retained Professor Norton's introductions and notes. Attention is called
to his remark that "The Function of the Poet" is not unworthy to stand
with Sidney's and Shelley's essays on poetry.

The rest of the essays in this volume appeared in Lowell's lifetime in
the _Atlantic Monthly_, the _North American Review_, and the _Nation_.
They were all anonymous, but are assigned to Lowell by George Willis
Cooke in his "Bibliography of James Russell Lowell." Lowell was editor
of the _Atlantic_ from the time of its founding in 1857 to May, 1861. He
was editor of the _North American Review_ from January, 1864, to the
time he left for Europe in 1872. With one exception (that on "Poetry and
Nationalism" which formed the greater part of a review of the poems of
Howells's friend Piatt), all the articles from these two magazines,
reprinted in this volume, appeared during Lowell's editorship. These
articles include reviews of poems by his friends Longfellow and
Whittier. And in his review of "The Courtship of Miles Standish," Lowell
makes effective use of his scholarship to introduce a lengthy and
interesting discourse on the dactylic hexameter.

While we are on the subject of the New England poets a word about the
present misunderstanding and tendency to underrate them may not be out
of place. Because it is growing to be the consensus of opinion that the
two greatest poets America has produced are Whitman and Poe, it does not
follow that the New-Englanders must be relegated to the scrap-heap. Nor
do I see any inconsistency in a man whose taste permits him to enjoy
both the free verse and unpuritanic (if I may coin a word) poems of
Masters and Sandburg, and also Whittier's "Snow-Bound" and Longfellow's
"Courtship of Miles Standish." Though these poems are not profound,
there is something of the universal in them. They have pleasant
school-day memories for all of us and will no doubt have such for our
children.

Lowell's cosmopolitan tastes may be seen in his essays on men so
different as Thackeray, Swift, and Plutarch. Hardly any one knows that
he even wrote about these authors. Lowell preferred Thackeray to
Dickens, a judgment in which many people to-day no longer agree with
him. As a young man he hated Swift, but he gives us a sane study of him.
The review of Plutarch's "Essays" edited by Goodwin, with an
introduction by Emerson, is also of interest.

The last essay in the volume on "A Plea for Freedom from Speech and
Figures of Speech-Makers" shows Lowell's satirical powers at their best.
Ferris Greenslet tells us, in his book on Lowell, that the Philip Vandal
whose eloquence Lowell ridicules is Wendell Phillips. The essay gives
Lowell's humorous comments on various matters, especially on
contemporary types of orators, reformers, and heroes. It represents
Lowell as he is most known to us, the Lowell who is always ready with
fun and who set the world agog with his "Biglow Papers."

Lowell's work as a critic dates from the rare volume "Conversations on
Some of the Old Poets," published in 1844 in his twenty-fifth year,
includes his best-known volumes "Among My Books" and "My Study Windows,"
and most fitly concludes with the "Latest Literary Essays," published in
the year of his death in 1891. My sincere hope is that this book will
not be found to be an unworthy successor to these volumes.

Though some of Lowell's literary opinions are old-fashioned to us (one
author even wrote an entire volume to demolish Lowell's reputation as a
critic), there is much in his work that the world will not let die. He
is highly regarded abroad, and he is one of the few men in our
literature who produced creative criticism.

Thanks and acknowledgments are due the _Century Magazine_ and the
literary representatives of Lowell, for permission to reprint in this
volume the first five essays, which are copyrighted and were published
in the _Century Magazine_.

ALBERT MORDELL

_Philadelphia, January 13, 1920_

CONTENTS

ON POETRY AND BELLES-LETTRES

THE FUNCTION OF THE POET
With note by Charles Eliot Norton.
_Century Magazine_, January, 1894

HUMOR, WIT, FUN, AND SATIRE
With note by Charles Eliot Norton.
_Century Magazine_, November, 1893

THE FIVE INDISPENSABLE AUTHORS (HOMER, DANTE,
CERVANTES, GOETHE, SHAKESPEARE)
_Century Magazine_, December, 1893

THE IMAGINATION
_Century Magazine_, March, 1894

CRITICAL FRAGMENTS
_Century Magazine_, May, 1894
I. Life in Literature and Language
II. Style and Manner
III. Kalevala

REVIEWS OF CONTEMPORARIES

HENRY JAMES: JAMES'S TALES AND SKETCHES
_The Nation_, June 24, 1875

LONGFELLOW: THE COURTSHIP OF MILES STANDISH
_Atlantic Monthly_, January, 1859

TALES OF A WAYSIDE INN
_North American Review_, January, 1864

WHITTIER: IN WAR TIME, AND OTHER POEMS
_North American Review_, January, 1864

HOME BALLADS AND POEMS
_Atlantic Monthly_, November, 1860

SNOW-BOUND: A WINTER IDYL
_North American Review_, April, 1866

POETRY AND NATIONALITY
_North American Review_, October, 1868

W.D. HOWELLS: VENETIAN LIFE
_North American Review_, October, 1866

EDGAR A. POE
_Graham's Magazine_, February, 1845;
R.W. Griswold's edition of Poe's Works (1850)

THACKERAY: ROUNDABOUT PAPERS
_North American Review_, April, 1864

TWO GREAT AUTHORS

SWIFT: FORSTER'S LIFE OF SWIFT
_The Nation_, April 13 and 20, 1876

PLUTARCH'S MORALS
_North American Review_, April, 1871

A PLEA FOR FREEDOM FROM SPEECH AND FIGURES OF SPEECH-MAKERS
_Atlantic Monthly_, December, 1860

ON POETRY AND BELLES-LETTRES

THE FUNCTION OF THE POET

This was the concluding lecture in the course which Lowell read before
the Lowell Institute in the winter of 1855. Doubtless Lowell never
printed it because, as his genius matured, he felt that its assertions
were too absolute, and that its style bore too many marks of haste in
composition, and was too rhetorical for an essay to be read in print.
How rapid was the growth of his intellectual judgment, and the
broadening of his imaginative view, may be seen by comparing it with his
essays on Swinburne, on Percival, and on Rousseau, published in 1866 and
1867--essays in which the topics of this lecture were touched upon anew,
though not treated at large.

But the spirit of this lecture is so fine, its tone so full of the
enthusiasm of youth, its conception of the poet so lofty, and the truths
it contains so important, that it may well be prized as the expression
of a genius which, if not yet mature, is already powerful, and aquiline
alike in vision and in sweep of wing. It is not unworthy to stand with
Sidney's and with Shelley's "Defence of Poesy," and it is fitted to warm
and inspire the poetic heart of the youth of this generation, no less
than of that to which it was first addressed. As a close to the lecture
Lowell read his beautiful (then unpublished) poem "To the Muse."

_Charles Eliot Norton_

* * * * *

Whether, as some philosophers assume, we possess only the fragments of a
great cycle of knowledge in whose centre stood the primeval man in
friendly relation with the powers of the universe, and build our hovels
out of the ruins of our ancestral palace; or whether, according to the
development theory of others, we are rising gradually, and have come up
out of an atom instead of descending from an Adam, so that the proudest
pedigree might run up to a barnacle or a zoophyte at last, are questions
that will keep for a good many centuries yet. Confining myself to what
little we can learn from history, we find tribes rising slowly out of
barbarism to a higher or lower point of culture and civility, and
everywhere the poet also is found, under one name or other, changing in
certain outward respects, but essentially the same.

And however far we go back, we shall find this also--that the poet and
the priest were united originally in the same person; which means that
the poet was he who was conscious of the world of spirit as well as that
of sense, and was the ambassador of the gods to men. This was his
highest function, and hence his name of "seer." He was the discoverer
and declarer of the perennial beneath the deciduous. His were the _epea
pteroenta_, the true "winged words" that could fly down the unexplored
future and carry the names of ancestral heroes, of the brave and wise
and good. It was thus that the poet could reward virtue, and, by and by,
as society grew more complex, could burn in the brand of shame. This is
Homer's character of Demodocus, in the eighth book of the "Odyssey,"
"whom the Muse loved and gave the good and ill"--the gift of conferring
good or evil immortality. The first histories were in verse; and sung as
they were at feasts and gatherings of the people, they awoke in men the
desire of fame, which is the first promoter of courage and self-trust,
because it teaches men by degrees to appeal from the present to the
future. We may fancy what the influence of the early epics was when they
were recited to men who claimed the heroes celebrated in them for their
ancestors, by what Bouchardon, the sculptor, said, only two centuries
ago: "When I read Homer, I feel as if I were twenty feet high." Nor have
poets lost their power over the future in modern times. Dante lifts up
by the hair the face of some petty traitor, the Smith or Brown of some
provincial Italian town, lets the fire of his Inferno glare upon it for
a moment, and it is printed forever on the memory of mankind. The
historians may iron out the shoulders of Richard the Third as smooth as
they can, they will never get over the wrench that Shakespeare gave
them.

The peculiarity of almost all early literature is that it seems to have
a double meaning, that, underneath its natural, we find ourselves
continually seeing or suspecting a supernatural meaning. In the older
epics the characters seem to be half typical and only half historical.
Thus did the early poets endeavor to make realities out of appearances;
for, except a few typical men in whom certain ideas get embodied, the
generations of mankind are mere apparitions who come out of the dark for
a purposeless moment, and reenter the dark again after they have
performed the nothing they came for.

Gradually, however, the poet as the "seer" became secondary to the
"maker." His office became that of entertainer rather than teacher. But
always something of the old tradition was kept alive. And if he has now
come to be looked upon merely as the best expresser, the gift of seeing
is implied as necessarily antecedent to that, and of seeing very deep,
too. If any man would seem to have written without any conscious moral,
that man is Shakespeare. But that must be a dull sense, indeed, which
does not see through his tragic--yes, and his comic--masks awful eyes
that flame with something intenser and deeper than a mere scenic
meaning--a meaning out of the great deep that is behind and beyond all
human and merely personal character. Nor was Shakespeare himself
unconscious of his place as a teacher and profound moralist: witness
that sonnet in which he bewails his having neglected sometimes the
errand that was laid upon him:

Alas, 't is true I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view,
Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
Made old offences of affections new;
Most true it is that I have look'd on truth
Askance and strangely;

the application of which is made clear by the next sonnet, in which he
distinctly alludes to his profession.

There is this unmistakable stamp on all the great poets--that, however
in little things they may fall below themselves, whenever there comes a
great and noble thing to say, they say it greatly and nobly, and bear
themselves most easily in the royalties of thought and language. There
is not a mature play of Shakespeare's in which great ideas do not jut up
in mountainous permanence, marking forever the boundary of provinces of
thought, and known afar to many kindreds of men.

And it is for this kind of sight, which we call insight, and not for any
faculty of observation and description, that we value the poet. It is in
proportion as he has this that he is an adequate expresser, and not a
juggler with words. It is by means of this that for every generation of
man he plays the part of "namer." Before him, as before Adam, the
creation passes to be named anew: first the material world; then the
world of passions and emotions; then the world of ideas. But whenever a
great imagination comes, however it may delight itself with imaging the
outward beauty of things, however it may seem to flow thoughtlessly away
in music like a brook, yet the shadow of heaven lies also in its depth
beneath the shadow of earth. Continually the visible universe suggests
the invisible. We are forever feeling this in Shakespeare. His
imagination went down to the very bases of things, and while his
characters are the most natural that poet ever created, they are also
perfectly ideal, and are more truly the personifications of abstract
thoughts and passions than those of any allegorical writer whatever.

Even in what seems so purely a picturesque poem as the "Iliad," we feel
something of this. Beholding as Homer did, from the tower of
contemplation, the eternal mutability and nothing permanent but change,
he must look underneath the show for the reality. Great captains and
conquerors came forth out of the eternal silence, entered it again with
their trampling hosts, and shoutings, and trumpet-blasts, and were as
utterly gone as those echoes of their deeds which he sang, and which
faded with the last sound of his voice and the last tremble of his lyre.
History relating outward events alone was an unmeaning gossip, with the
world for a village. This life could only become other than
phantasmagoric, could only become real, as it stood related to something
that was higher and permanent. Hence the idea of Fate, of a higher power
unseen--that shadow, as of an eagle circling to its swoop, which flits
stealthily and swiftly across the windy plains of Troy. In the "Odyssey"
we find pure allegory.

Now, under all these names--praiser, seer, soothsayer--we find the same
idea lurking. The poet is he who can best see and best say what is
ideal--what belongs to the world of soul and of beauty. Whether he
celebrate the brave and good man, or the gods, or the beautiful as it
appears in man or nature, something of a religious character still
clings to him; he is the revealer of Deity. He may be unconscious of his
mission; he may be false to it; but in proportion as he is a great poet,
he rises to the level of it the more often. He does not always directly
rebuke what is bad and base, but indirectly by making us feel what
delight there is in the good and fair. If he besiege evil, it is with
such beautiful engines of war (as Plutarch tells us of Demetrius) that
the besieged themselves are charmed with them. Whoever reads the great
poets cannot but be made better by it, for they always introduce him to
a higher society, to a greater style of manners and of thinking. Whoever
learns to love what is beautiful is made incapable of the low and mean
and bad. If Plato excludes the poets from his Republic, it is expressly
on the ground that they speak unworthy things of the gods; that is, that
they have lost the secret of their art, and use artificial types instead
of speaking the true universal language of imagination. He who
translates the divine into the vulgar, the spiritual into the sensual,
is the reverse of a poet.

The poet, under whatever name, always stands for the same
thing--imagination. And imagination in its highest form gives him the
power, as it were, of assuming the consciousness of whatever he speaks
about, whether man or beast, or rock or tree, fit is the ring of Canace,
which whoso has on understands the language of all created things. And
as regards expression, it seems to enable the poet to condense the whole
of himself into a single word. Therefore, when a great poet has said a
thing, it is finally and utterly expressed, and has as many meanings as
there are men who read his verse. A great poet is something more than an
interpreter between man and nature; he is also an interpreter between
man and his own nature. It is he who gives us those key-words, the
possession of which makes us masters of all the unsuspected
treasure-caverns of thought, and feeling, and beauty which open under
the dusty path of our daily life.

And it is not merely a dry lexicon that he compiles,--a thing which
enables us to translate from one dead dialect into another as dead,--but
all his verse is instinct with music, and his words open windows on
every side to pictures of scenery and life. The difference between the
dry fact and the poem is as great as that between reading the shipping
news and seeing the actual coming and going of the crowd of stately
ships,--"the city on the inconstant billows dancing,"--as there is
between ten minutes of happiness and ten minutes by the clock. Everybody
remembers the story of the little Montague who was stolen and sold to
the chimney-sweep: how he could dimly remember lying in a beautiful
chamber; how he carried with him in all his drudgery the vision of a
fair, sad mother's face that sought him everywhere in vain; how he threw
himself one day, all sooty as he was from his toil, on a rich bed and
fell asleep, and how a kind person woke him, questioned him, pieced
together his broken recollections for him, and so at last made the
visions of the beautiful chamber and the fair, sad countenance real to
him again. It seems to me that the offices that the poet does for us are
typified in this nursery-tale. We all of us have our vague reminiscences
of the stately home of our childhood,--for we are all of us poets and
geniuses in our youth, while earth is all new to us, and the chalice of
every buttercup is brimming with the wine of poesy,--and we all remember
the beautiful, motherly countenance which nature bent over us there. But
somehow we all get stolen away thence; life becomes to us a sooty
taskmaster, and we crawl through dark passages without end--till
suddenly the word of some poet redeems us, makes us know who we are, and
of helpless orphans makes us the heir to a great estate. It is to our
true relations with the two great worlds of outward and inward nature
that the poet reintroduces us.

But the imagination has a deeper use than merely to give poets a power
of expression. It is the everlasting preserver of the world from blank
materialism. It forever puts matter in the wrong, and compels it to show
its title to existence. Wordsworth tells us that in his youth he was
sometimes obliged to touch the walls to find if they were visionary or
no, and such experiences are not uncommon with persons who converse much
with their own thoughts. Dr. Johnson said that to kick one's foot
against a stone was a sufficient confutation of Berkeley, and poor old
Pyrrho has passed into a proverb because, denying the objectivity of
matter, he was run over by a cart and killed. But all that he affirmed
was that to the soul the cart was no more real than its own imaginative
reproduction of it, and perhaps the shade of the philosopher ran up to
the first of his deriders who crossed the Styx with a triumphant "I told
you so! The cart did not run over _me_, for here I am without a bone
broken."

And, in another sense also, do those poets who deal with human
character, as all the greater do, continually suggest to us the purely
phantasmal nature of life except as it is related to the world of ideas.
For are not their personages more real than most of those in history? Is
not Lear more authentic and permanent than Lord Raglan? Their realm is a
purely spiritual one in which space and time and costume are nothing.
What matters it that Shakespeare puts a seaport in Bohemia, and knew
less geography than Tommy who goes to the district school? He understood
eternal boundaries, such as are laid down on no chart, and are not
defined by such transitory affairs as mountain chains, rivers, and seas.

No great movement of the human mind takes place without the concurrent
beat of those two wings, the imagination and the understanding. It is by
the understanding that we are enabled to make the most of this world,
and to use the collected material of experience in its condensed form of
practical wisdom; and it is the imagination which forever beckons toward
that other world which is always future, and makes us discontented with
this. The one rests upon experience; the other leans forward and listens
after the inexperienced, and shapes the features of that future with
which it is forever in travail. The imagination might be defined as the
common sense of the invisible world, as the understanding is of the
visible; and as those are the finest individual characters in which the
two moderate and rectify each other, so those are the finest eras where
the same may be said of society. In the voyage of life, not only do we
depend on the needle, true to its earthly instincts, but upon
observation of the fixed stars, those beacons lighted upon the eternal
promontories of heaven above the stirs and shiftings of our lower
system.

But it seems to be thought that we have come upon the earth too late,
that there has been a feast of imagination formerly, and all that is
left for us is to steal the scraps. We hear that there is no poetry in
railroads and steamboats and telegraphs, and especially none in Brother
Jonathan. If this be true, so much the worse for him. But because _he_
is a materialist, shall there be no more poets? When we have said that
we live in a materialistic age we have said something which meant more
than we intended. If we say it in the way of blame, we have said a
foolish thing, for probably one age is as good as another, and, at any
rate, the worst is good enough company for us. The age of Shakespeare
was richer than our own, only because it was lucky enough to have such a
pair of eyes as his to see it, and such a gift of speech as his to
report it. And so there is always room and occasion for the poet, who
continues to be, just as he was in the early time, nothing more nor less
than a "seer." He is always the man who is willing to take the age he
lives in on trust, as the very best that ever was. Shakespeare did not
sit down and cry for the water of Helicon to turn the wheels of his
little private mill at the Bankside. He appears to have gone more
quietly about his business than any other playwright in London, to have
drawn off what water-power he needed from the great prosy current of
affairs that flows alike for all and in spite of all, to have ground for
the public what grist they wanted, coarse or fine, and it seems a mere
piece of luck that the smooth stream of his activity reflected with such
ravishing clearness every changing mood of heaven and earth, every stick
and stone, every dog and clown and courtier that stood upon its brink.
It is a curious illustration of the friendly manner in which Shakespeare
received everything that came along,--of what a _present_ man he
was,--that in the very same year that the mulberry-tree was brought into
England, he got one and planted it in his garden at Stratford.

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