Studies of Lowell | Page 8

wrong; if he could not, he sometimes whimsically
persisted in his error, in defiance of all authority; but mostly he had
such reverence for the truth that he would not question it even in jest.
If I dropped in upon him in the afternoon I was apt to find him reading

the old French poets, or the plays of Calderon, or the 'Divina
Commedia', which he magnanimously supposed me much better
acquainted with than I was because I knew some passages of it by heart.
One day I came in quoting
"Io son, cantava, io son dolce Sirena, Che i marinai in mezzo al mar
dismago."
He stared at me in a rapture with the matchless music, and then uttered
all his adoration and despair in one word. "Damn!" he said, and no
more. I believe he instantly proposed a walk that day, as if his study
walls with all their vistas into the great literatures cramped his soul
liberated to a sense of ineffable beauty of the verse of the 'somma
poeta'. But commonly be preferred to have me sit down with him there
among the mute witnesses of the larger part of his life. As I have
suggested in my own case, it did not matter much whether you brought
anything to the feast or not. If he liked you he liked being with you, not
for what he got, but for what he gave. He was fond of one man whom I
recall as the most silent man I ever met. I never heard him say anything,
not even a dull thing, but Lowell delighted in him, and would have you
believe that he was full of quaint humor.

V.
While Lowell lived there was a superstition, which has perhaps
survived him, that he was an indolent man, wasting himself in barren
studies and minor efforts instead of devoting his great powers to some
monumental work worthy of them. If the robust body of literature, both
poetry and prose, which lives after him does not yet correct this vain
delusion, the time will come when it must; and in the meantime the
delusion cannot vex him now. I think it did vex him, then, and that he
even shared it, and tried at times to meet such shadowy claim as it had.
One of the things that people urged upon him was to write some sort of
story, and it is known how he attempted this in verse. It is less known
that he attempted it in prose, and that he went so far as to write the first
chapter of a novel. He read this to me, and though I praised it then, I
have a feeling now that if he had finished the novel it would have been
a failure. "But I shall never finish it," he sighed, as if he felt
irremediable defects in it, and laid the manuscript away, to turn and
light his pipe. It was a rather old-fashioned study of a whimsical

character, and it did not arrive anywhere, so far as it went; but I believe
that it might have been different with a Yankee story in verse such as
we have fragmentarily in 'The Nooning' and 'FitzAdam's Story'. Still,
his gift was essentially lyrical and meditative, with the universal New
England tendency to allegory. He was wholly undramatic in the
actuation of the characters which he imagined so dramatically. He liked
to deal with his subject at first hand, to indulge through himself all the
whim and fancy which the more dramatic talent indulges through its
personages.
He enjoyed writing such a poem as "The Cathedral," which is not of his
best, but which is more immediately himself, in all his moods, than
some better poems. He read it to me soon after it was written, and in
the long walk which we went hard upon the reading (our way led us
through the Port far towards East Cambridge, where he wished to show
me a tupelo-tree of his acquaintance, because I said I had never seen
one), his talk was still of the poem which he was greatly in conceit of.
Later his satisfaction with it received a check from the reserves of other
friends concerning some whimsical lines which seemed to them too
great a drop from the higher moods of the piece. Their reluctance
nettled him; perhaps he agreed with them; but he would not change the
lines, and they stand as he first wrote them. In fact, most of his lines
stand as he first wrote them; he would often change them in revision,
and then, in a second revision go back to the first version.
He was very sensitive to criticism, especially from those he valued
through his head or heart. He would try to