He was the chief founder of an artificial style of writing, which in his hands was living and powerful, because he used it to express artificial modes of thinking and an artificial state of society. Measured by any high standard of imagination, he will be found wanting; tried by any test of wit, he is unrivaled.

It is to the essay on Chaucer that I should send anyone who wishes to test Lowell's highest capacity as a critic. With the exception of a rather dubious excursus on the Anglo-Saxon and his capacity for art, there is not a page in it which does not display insight, quick appreciation, shrewd sense, and a generous enthusiasm for beauty and honesty. Honesty in an author was a sure passport to Lowell's heart; the lack of it made him immediately suspicious. When Carlyle took to praising Frederick, Lowell's sound sense revolted against the panegyric bestowed on a man 'very far below any lofty standard of heroic greatness.' In Chaucer he found and praised a simplicity, a downrightness, a naturalness which are rare in any literature, and especially rare in an art so consummate as Chaucer's; and I think Lowell was the first considerable critic to claim for Chaucer his high place as 'one of the most purely original of poets, as much so in respect of the world that is about us as Dante in respect of that which is within us.' And how good and just is this:

The very form of the Canterbury Tales was imaginative. The garden of Boccaccio, the supper party of Grazzini, and the voyage of Giraldi make a good enough thread for their stories, but exclude all such equals and friends, exclude consequently human nature in its wider meaning. But by choosing a pilgrimage, Chaucer puts us on a plane where all men are equal, with souls to be saved, and with another world in view that abolishes all distinctions. By this choice, and by making the Host of the Tabard always the central figure, he has happily united the two most familiar emblems of life the short journey and the inn. We

find more and more as we study him that he rises quietly from the conventional to the universal, and may fairly take his place with Homer in virtue of the breadth of his humanity.

Good critic as Lowell is, it is his poetry which gives him his secure place in our affections. He wrote at a time when the world was full of the vision of poets; and in this country he has never, I think, quite had justice done to him. He has always had vehement admirers, men like Hughes and Ludlow, who strove to popularize his work, and succeeded in getting an audience for the Biglow Papers and a few of the narrative and lyrical poems. And he has always, I think, been loved beyond measure by those to whom his poetry came early with the breath of health and the promise of dawn upon it. He is without Longfellow's almost excessive mellifluousness; but his best verse has a vigor and a virility which no American poet save Whitman can approach. Such a poem as "The Parable' carries the charm of rhetorical verse, the peculiar direct appeal of eloquent statement as far as it can go. It is in the tradition of which Hood is the best exponent in England. Indeed, I think that in Hood we have the nearest parallel to Lowell. Hood had not Lowell's learning, and was more. of a professional fun-maker; but each poet has a whimsical, friendly outlook on life; each has an ingenuity in versemaking which is at times an actual danger; and each suffered from the proximity of greater authors than himself. Just as Hood's verse stands in a position of tutelage to Keats's, so Lowell's debt to Wordsworth and Tennyson is obvious; yet in each case it is easy for the careless reader to overlook the power and beauty of the lesser poet's production. Indeed, in Lowell's case it might be argued that it is rather that his verse, like that of

his English contemporaries, derives from the great traditional sources of English poetry. Yet Lowell was not, in any sense, a derivative poet; he was not disciple to any man in the way, for instance, that O'Shaughnessy was disciple to Swinburne. His serious verse is not of the first rank, frequently not even of the second; but it is as definitely his own as is Kingsley's or John Davidson's. He is one of those poets for whom his predecessors' work has been not a model to imitate, but an inspiration as natural and as fecundatory as the glad things of nature and the deep things of life. He had, again resembling Hood, the lithe imagination which responds readily to the beauty which has already been expressed in art; an imagination in no wise unresponsive to the great things of the real world, but touched more quickly if those truths are presented to it in a form which already owes something to art. His one grave fault is a tendency which he himself mocks at in his Fable for Critics and in The Origin of Didactic Poetry: I suppose the self-portrait in the Fable is still well known, but the criticism in The Origin may be less familiar. The poem describes Athene's desperate efforts to write verse, the boredom which ensues when she recites her poems on Olympus, and how she finally tore her manuscripts to pieces and flung them through 'Olympus's back window.' Then Lowell describes their fate:

The verses? Some in ocean swilled,
Killed every fish that bit to 'em;
Some Galen caught, and, when distilled,
Found morphine the residuum;
But some that rotted on the earth
Sprang up again in copies,
And gave two strong narcotics birth,
Didactic verse and poppies.

Yet Lowell's own didactic verse can hardly claim to have soporific powers. It suffers at times from over-emphasis,

it rouses opposition by its vehement and boldly stated preference; it is, in short, rhetoric rather than poetrybut what good rhetoric it is! The last verse of the stanzas to Freedom has been thumbed out of all freshness by every tub-thumping orator, used and misused in all sorts of strange causes, tied in doleful tatters to the cars of alien and unpleasant parties - but even now it rings true metal, and I am certain would gain a sure response in simple hearts:

They are slaves who fear to speak
For the fallen and the weak;
They are slaves who will not choose
Hatred, scoffing, and abuse,

Rather than in silence shrink

From the truth they needs must think;
They are slaves who dare not be
In the right with two or three.

A man is poor in imagination and thin in blood if he cannot realize how triumphant a defiance that stanza was, how clear a challenge, how proud a war-cry in the great struggle on whose outcome depended the very existence of the United States.

The poet's first function, some would say, was to cheer the warrior into battle; his second to console those left behind with generous praise of the fighting and the fallen. Rarely have poets in historical times fulfilled the first of these duties. There is nearly always something stiff and ceremonial about the occasional poems written during war. Here Lowell is the great exception. It can be seen how great an exception if we stop to think how English literature would have gained had we possessed a Lowell during our civil wars, or a Lowell during the great wars with Napoleon. The first Biglow Paper and the first poem were a violent attack, a scathing and unanswerable satire on the Mexican war. It started a series of poems which has no parallel in English literature. There

are points, no doubt, in which the Lowell of the Biglow Papers touches the Burns of the Jolly Beggars; but the aims of the two poets are so different that the resemblance is scarcely more than superficial. By all the rules of chance the Biglow Papers should have been mere journalism; but Lowell's white-hot sincerity, his passion, his sense for freedom and righteousness have burned so into the poems that they remain still a flaming fire against all oppression and untruth and dishonesty. Is there any political platform in any country where the remarks of Increase D. O'Phace would not be still suitable? Increase is complaining that their member has voted the wrong way:

Who ever'd ha' thought sech a poisonous rig

Would be run by a chap that wuz chose fer a Wig?

We knowed wut his princerples wuz 'fore we sent him?

Wut wuz there in them from the vote to pervent him?

A marciful Providence fashioned us holler

Never have any political poems been so full of point, so biting and at the same time so generous. There are poems of Swift's which can compare with the Biglow Poems for irony and bitterness and anger; but in Swift there is always a strange inhuman note, a kind of indifference which makes us move uneasily, as under the flail of a god, rather than from the buffets of a fellow man. That is the most abiding thing in Lowell's best the sense of human brotherhood, of comradeship, of equality. It is something which is the mark of a good deal of American, as of English

verse

Ain't princerple precious? then, who's going to use it

Wen there's resk o' some chap's gittin' up to abuse it?

I can't tell the way on 't, but nothin' is so

sure

Ez that princerple kind o' gits spiled by

exposure.

And I hope that some one at the Peace Conference will recite the Pious Editor's Creed. It would not be a bad thing if it were said every morning before the Conference opened. Anatole France might be trusted to give a very perfect French equivalent for some of those immortal stanzas:

I du believe that I should give
Wat's his'n unto Cæsar;

Fer it's by him I move and live
By him my bread and cheese air;

The Bookman

so much a display of it as Whitman, or some of Whitman's English disciples, and yet I feel it is with him a sincerer and more natural thing. His humanity and fellowship are like the fellowship of Dickens or of Lamb. He is one of the companionable authors who do not trouble greatly always to be at their best, but who give you what they

can

when they can. Considering rather your need than their capacity, they may not be the greatest artists, but they have the charm of good company, and that is a thing which is surely one of the most valuable and heartsome things in literature. Lowell is the kind of author who could make you put up with a coal shortage; there are many greater men of whom that could never be said.

THE English language declined steadily through the nineteenth century, and in the last twenty years the declension has continued with accelerated speed. At the beginning of the last century Lamb, Hazlitt, Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, De Quincey, and Leigh Hunt, were writing for the daily, weekly, and quarterly press, as well as publishing poems and essays. Heavens! How those fellows could write! After Waterloo, we had Shelley writing The Cenci, and Byron writing Don Juan while in the region of journalism Cobbett was producing his best Registers and his Rural Rides. Cobbett was a spiteful, vain, unscrupulous beast as a controversialist: but his English is pure, racy, and exhilarating. Cobbett had a knack of finding out the weak spot in an antagonist's body, and of pasting on a nickname that stuck. All fundholders were, according to him, Jews, and he spoke of their wives as 'sooty-necked Jewesses' what an adjective! eloquent Erskine took a peerage in the style of Baron Erskine and Clackmannan. Cobbett always referred to him as 'Baron Clackmannan'- there was genius in that, as in his nicknaming Lord Goderich-the transient and embarrassed phantom-'prosperity Robinson.' But Cobbett is by the way: he is a much neglected master of English prose. After the great Reform Bill and the accession of the girl Queen and her German husband, we had a fresh departure in English literature. That was the period of Ruskin, Carlyle, Macaulay, Disraeli, Lytton, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Browning, and Tennyson, a prolific and rhetorical period.

The

But the mechanical age was already beginning, the age of cheap postage, railways, steamships, and, finally, of electricity, which affected the style of literature silently and rapidly. When it cost tenpence to send a letter two hundred miles, people took pains that their letters should contain something worth reading. The amount of literary ability evoked and perfected by the practice of correspondence among men and women of the upper and middle classes can only be realized by those who have been allowed or obliged to read Georgian and early Victorian letters. Rowland Hill's penny postage, which was started soon after Victoria's accession, killed the art of letter writing. People wrote scrappy stupid notes about trivial matters it only cost a penny. What the penny post began, the telegraph, and later the telephone, and the typewriter, completed. We do not remember ever to have received a wellwritten, informative, or witty letter in our life. Railways and steamships produced a restlessness which motors have aggravated. Toward the end of the Victorian period was witnessed a frequent phenomenon in morals and literature, a reaction, namely, against the fashion of the hour, the last leap of the dying fire. Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde in prose, and Swinburne in foetry, developed a verbal scrupulosity, an excessive fondness for words, which was really a subconscious protest against the coarse carelessness of the penny paper and the cheap novel. But the reaction was short-lived, and was indeed discredited by the conduct of Oscar Wilde. It is absurd, no doubt,

but none the less true, that Wilde's life more than canceled the service which his pen rendered to English literary style. We speak, of course, of the present generation. Fifty or a hundred years hence it will no more matter that Wilde was a sexual pervert than that Sheridan was a drunkard.

Whatever the Fabians and other dour economists may write, the individual counts, and the masses are nothing. The perversity of a few individuals made style in writing immoral. Alongside of this eccentric and disturbing force, there was the steady pressure of the mechanical age, the diversion of the best brains from what used to be called 'the professions,' i.e., the Bar, the Church, Medicine, and Literature, to engineering, chemistry, and stock-jobbing. At the back of this materialistic movement there arose the apparition, grimy enough, of millions of half-educated hand-workers, worse than uneducated, half-educated, disbelieving Christianity, laughing at duty, only set on the apolaustic life in whatever coarsest form they could reach it. Football matches, coursing, race meetings, films, theatres, eating, and drinking, these were the things that preoccupied the millions; and to please them a new illustrated press, reaping huge profits, sprang into being. But the new press was obliged to speak the language of the new millions, and cunningly. Therefore, they bid for the best writers, according to repute, of the day. One of the new millionaire papers can and will pay for a thousand words as much as an old quarterly or monthly magazine will pay for five thousand words. What is the result? The young men with a real aptitude for style go into the millionaire press business: for though Talleyrand said he saw reason why people should live, his

opinion has never been popular. Compression is good, and is to be learned only of the Greeks and Romans: but the perpetual necessity of squeezing into a thousand words conclusions on important subjects is, in the long run, fatal to style. And that is what has happened to most of the young writers of the rising generation.

The mechanical age, not the extension of the franchise or compulsory education, has produced democracy, and democracy has produced casual manners, which are hostile to, or careless of, literary form. 'Moi je suis beaucoup pour la forme,' says Bridoison, in the comedy of Beaumarchais. The last thing which the young man of the democratic age cares about is 'la forme.' The style, if it can be called so, most in favor to-day is the hands-in-the-pocket-turned-up-trouser style of the cheap illustrated paper. The language is horribly stuffed with unintelligible slang from America and the Colonies. A dramatically familiar form of address is adopted in writing, and everything is contracted. Plenipotentiary becomes 'plenipot.,' and the headline is the thing. All this is fatal to the English language. would be prudish to deny that novelists like Messrs. Wells and Bennett are masters of a certain kind of English. But it is in description alone that they excel. Mr. Anthony Hope among novelists, and Mr. E. V. Lucas among essayists, endeavor, against an adverse current of slang, to maintain the purity and dignity of our tongue. In one of the most eloquent passages of his preface to the English Dictionary Johnson wrote: If the changes that we fear be thus irresistible, what remains but to acquiesce in silence, as in the other insurmountable distresses of humanity? It remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure. Life

It