480
DANIEL AARON
Greenslet plundered Scudder without adding anything substantially new.
Robert C. Beatty, less derivative but more tendentious, glared at Lowell
through the glasses of Southern Agrarianism; and Leon Howard made
literary evidence carry a heavier biographical burden than it warranted.
None of these books, moreover, is so well-written as Mr. Duberman's,
and none is based on such meticulous and exhaustive scholarship. He has
ransacked manuscript collections in thirty-eight libraries here and abroad,
consulted living Lowells and assorted specialists on Lowell's world and
attached 116 pages of bibliography and notes to his lucid and unclut–
tered text-the tip of the iceberg.
Mr. Duberman has no wish to inflate Lowell's current literary repu–
tation (he concedes his success as editor, teacher, diplomat and public
commentator), but he greatly admires Lowell's character, and he feels
that in rehabilitating him as a superior "human being," he may counter
the "fashionable view of the 'Brahmins' as smug, limited men, ineffectual
shadows of their Puritan forbears." His biography, then, is in part an
evaluation of a man and to a lesser degree of a generation and a place.
Lowell's career is not scanted, but each event or personal detail the
biographer elects to focus upon contributes to a finished portrait that
neither flatters nor debunks its subject. Here is James Russell Lowell
with his gifts and weaknesses unambiguously revealed.
An exact contemporary of Melville (whom he missed entirely de–
spite friendships they had in common) and of Whitman (whose muse
he mistook for a strumpet), Lowell is often presented as their stuffy
antithesis, nurtured by an indulgent society, applauded by uncritical
friends and rewarded far beyond his deserts. Mr. Duberman, while never
relaxing his critical stance, rebuts these half-truths and in so doing
makes Lowell complex and interesting. Success, he shows, did not turn
Lowell into a complacent man, nor was his career one unimpeded
triumph. His adoring and adored young wife died after they had buried
three of their children. Money was always a problem. Lowen struggled
doggedly for meager financial reward until almost the end of his life.
Eventually his books sold pretty well, and he could rely upon an af–
fectionate claque to praise him, but not all critics smiled upon him, and
at various times his writing, politics and character came under attack.
Theodore Parker, for example, once said that Lowell was "resent–
ful and jealous as a woman," that it was his first wife--"the good angel
who
~t
or stQod with broad wings behind his study chair"-who sup–
plied and directed his inspiration. Parker wrote this after Lowell's reform–
ist zeal had somewhat abated, but he was unfair to Lowell whose
abolitionism antedated his courtship of Maria White. What Parker took
