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James Russell Lowell, From My Study Windows (1871)
- University of Iowa Press
- Chapter
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[] As a poet, essayist, and editor of the Atlantic Monthly (1857–1861) and the North American Review (1863–1872), James Russell Lowell influenced American literary and aesthetic taste for the better part of the nineteenth century. Students of American Transcendentalism have recognized that, while Lowell rejected the mysticism associated with the movement and Emerson’s championing of some of its more eccentric practitioners, including Bronson Alcott and Thoreau, he nevertheless respected Emerson as a person and a friend. Lowell was a very perceptive and sympathetic reader of Emerson’s character and his works. In A Fable for Critics (1848), he captured the essential competing elements of Emerson’s character when he wrote that he possessed a “Greek head on right Yankee shoulders, whose range / Has Olympus for one pole, for t’ other the Exchange,” and he aptly characterized what for many was the greatest limitation of Emerson’s writings and thought: “though he builds glorious temples , ’t is odd / He leaves never a doorway to get in.” Lowell drew most of his chapter on Emerson in My Study Windows directly from a previously published review, “Mr. Emerson’s New Course of Lectures,” Nation, 7 (12 November 1868): 389–90. The occasion for this review was a series of six private lectures that Emerson delivered in Boston between 12 October and 16 November 1868. Managed by his publishers Ticknor and Fields, the series included “Historical Notes of American Life and Letters,” “Hospitality ,” and “Greatness,” three of Emerson’s most popular lectures at this time; however, in his highly favorable account of the series, Lowell is far less interested in the content or popularity of the lectures than he is in Emerson’s enduring appeal as a lecturer. Taking the long view of his own familiarity with and appreciation of Emerson’s platform manner and style of delivery, he offers this summary judgment: “I have heard some great speakers and some accomplished orators, but never any that so moved and persuaded men as he.” As a public judgment, this assessment accords precisely with Lowell’s private appraisal of Emerson’s impact on his audience. Writing to Charles Eliot Norton on 18 July 1867, Lowell gave this report of Emerson’s delivery of “The Progress of Culture” before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard University earlier that day: James Russell Lowell From My Study Windows ( ) emerson in his own time [] Emerson’s oration was more disjointed than usual even for him. It began nowhere & ended everywhere, & yet, as always with that divine man, it left you feeling that something beautiful had passed that way—something more beautiful than anything else, like the rising & setting of stars. Every possible criticism might have been made but one—that it was not noble. There was a tone in it that awakened all elevating associations . He boggled, he lost his place, he had to put on his glasses, but it was as if a creature from some fairer world had lost his way in our fogs, & it was our fault, not his. It was chaotic, but it was all such stuff as stars are made of, & you couldn’t help feeling that, if you waited a little, all that was nebulous would be whirled into planets & would assume the mathematical gravity of a system. All through it I felt something in me that cried “ha, ha, to the sound of the trumpets.” (In the Houghton Library, Harvard University; see bMS Am 765 [98].) (continued) It is a singular fact, that Mr. Emerson is the most steadily attractive lecturer in America. . . . 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. . . . We call it a singular fact, because we Yankees are thought to be fond of the spread-eagle style, and nothing can be more remote from that than his. We are reckoned a practical folk, who would rather hear about a new air-tight stove than about Plato; yet our favorite teacher’s practicality is not in the least of the Poor Richard variety. . . . [I]f he were to make an almanac, his directions to farmers would be something like this: “October: Indian Summer; now is the time to get in your early Vedas.” What, then, is his secret ? Is it not that...