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for apostasy was probably the recrudescence of a rational strain never
quite extinguished even during Lowell's "enthusiastic" period. Age and
experience simply made him less doctrinaire and readier for compromise.
Mr. Duberman shows Lowell's radicalism gradually mellowing into
Mugwumpery, his angry eloquence into pious exhortation; but he also
notices the light of the trenchant humorist and moralist flickering behind
the platitudes.
The Lowell emerging from this biography is at once more human
and less grand than the minor deity of the New England pantheon and
more deserving of consideration than his latter-day detractors would ad–
mit. Mr. Duberman makes no excessive claims for Lowell as a poet
(The Bigelow Papers
and a small number of humorous and satirical
poems excepted) nor does he rank him very high as a critic. But he
quite properly acknowledges Lowell's brilliance as a political essayist
(surely
The Anti-Slauery Papers
and the Civil War pieces alone justify
this estimate) and his importance as a literary force. Lowell's decision
to give up the law for literature was both risky and courageous. As
editor of three important magazines, he displayed a characteristic slop–
piness about details, but he raised the standards of American journalism
by publishing serious writers and refusing to knuckle under
to
vulgar
popular taste. To young writers he was invariably generous and solicitous.
It would be hard to disagree with Mr. Duberman's inference that
Lowell's career and personality owed much to his Cambridge environ–
ment and to the influence of the Brahmin ethos.
If
Martin Green is
right, Boston until 1845 was the only city in the Union in which a high
culture was possible and where "powerful forces of will and intellect
were harmonized firmly to moral purpose." Something of its strong
civic sense and reverence for the moral mind rubbed off on the young
Lowell and formed him into a humane and "clubbable" man. And yet
this happy attachment as writer and reformer to a prosperous and
public-spirited society seriously concerned with the care and culture
of men may have hobbled as much a:s helped him. At least it might
explain why he ranked good-fellowship higher than poetry. Mr. Duber–
man notes that Lowell, even as a hot reformer, remained fundamentally
an insider. A kind of neoclassical correctness tinctured his radicalism
and held his romanticism in check, so that when he elevated the Heart
over the Head, it was never done at the expense of the proprieties.
With the absorption of the minor causes into the Great Cause of
anti-slavery, and with the ostensible settling of that wrong, Lowell's
instinctive conservatism deepened. By 1860, the Brahmins still adhered to
the gospel of Stewardship, but the prewar agitation that had prevented
