MY STUDY WINDOWS.*
A voLumir from Mr. Lowell's pen is an intellectual feast. There is a pleasure to be derived from the mere flavour of his writing, apart altogether from the subject he may choose. Like some skil- ful musician passing his hand over the keys of his instrument in some light prelude before he strikes the chords which are to arrest the ear, it is often in such preluding we catch the very thought which inspires the rest, so in the volume before us Mr. Lowell has thrown off a few light pages at the beginning which are certainly among the happiest he has ever written. He is speaking of White's Natural History of Selborne, and says of it, "Open the book where you will, it takes you out of doors. In our broiling July weather one can walk out with this genially garrulous Fellow of Oriel, and find refreshment instead of fatigue. The book has also the delightfulness of absolute leisure. Mr. White seems never to have had any harder work to do than to study the habits of his feathered townsfolk or watch the ripening of his peaches on the walls. His volumes are the journal of Adam in Paradise." And then Mr. Lowell proceeds with exquisite leisurely humour to touch on what that journal is,—how Mr. White "brags of no fine society, but is plainly elated by having considerable acquaintance with a tame brown owl." "The great events of his life have that dispropor- tionate importance which is always humorous. To think of his hand having actually been thought worthy (as neither Wil- loughby's nor Ray's were) to hold a stilted plover, Charadrius humantopus, with no back toe, and therefore liable in specula- tion to perpetual vacillations." Our author, with a quiet laugh, wonders "by the way, if metaphysicians have no hind toes." He goes on to relate the history of the old family tortoise, so dear to Mr. White's heart that after ten years' acquaintance he finally elopes with it in a post-chaise, rousing it so thoroughly by the journey that "when I turned it out on a border, it walked twice down to the bottom of my garden." "It reads like a Court journal," says Mr. Lowell with quiet irony, "Yesterday morning H.R.H. the Princess Alice took an airing of half an hour on the terrace of Windsor Castle," and he adds," it had just been discovered that a surface inclined at a certain angle with the plane of the horizon took more of the sun's rays. The tortoise had always known this (though he unostentatiously made no parade of it), and used, accordingly, to tilt himself up against the garden wall in the autumn." Mr. Lowell remarks, "There are moods in which this kind of history is infinitely refreshing. These creatures, whom we affect to look down upon as the drudges of instinct, are members of a common- wealth, whose constitution rests on an irremovable basis." And then the entire sympathy, with just a dash of self-satire, with which he enters into Mr. White's anxieties about his thermometer :— " Do we not share his indignation at that stupid Martin, who had gra- duated his thermometer no lower than 4° above zero of Fahrenheit, so • My Study Window. By James Russell Lowell, &M. London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston. 1811 that in the coldest weather ever known the mercury basely absconded into the bulb, and left us to see the victory slip through our fingers just as they were closing upon it? No man, I suspects ever lived long in the country without being bitten by these meteorological ambitions. He likes to be hotter and colder, to have been more deeply snowed up, to have more trees and larger blown down than his neighbours. With us descendants of the Puritans especially, the weather competitions supply the abnegated excitement of the race-course. Men learn to value ther- mometers of the true imaginative temperament, capable of prodigious elations and corresponding dejections. The other day (5th July) I marked 98° in the shade, my high-water mark, higher by one degree than I had ever seen it before. I happened to meet a neighbour ; as we mopped our brows at each other he told me that he had just cleared 100°, and I went home a beaten man. I had not felt the beat before,. save as a beautiful exaggeration of sunshine ; but now it oppressed me with the prosaic vulgarity of an oven. What had been poetic intensity. became all at once rhetorical hyperbole. I might suspect his ther- mometer (as, indeed, I did, for we Harvard men are apt to think ill of any graduation but our own), but it was a poor consolation. The fact remained that his herald Mercury, standing a-tip-toe, could look down on mine. I seem to glimpse something of this familiar weakness in Mr, White. Ho, too, has shared in these mercurial triumphs and defeats."
And then his whimsical defence of the country gentleman's interest in the weather-cock, as leading him to dwell rather upon the indigestions of the elements than his own. It is all preluding ; very lightly the fingers touch the various strings, and the reader perhaps asks, is this all we are to get ? This is very inimitable of its kind, but he is laughing good-humouredly in our faces all the- time, while there are lines in his own which tell of thought deeper- than laughter. Well, if any one is disposed to hurry on, let then) get the book, and we promise them reward enough ; for ourselves, we are still loth to quit these first pages, filled for the next fifty with the author's own reminiscences of quiet country life, where. "the return of the robin is commonly announced in the news- papers, like that of eminent or notorious people to a watering place, as the first authentic notification of spring." We can scarcely resist giving the two humorous pages in which he
the habits of these feathered Pecksniffs, as they stood in special relation to himself and his own garden. Our space forbids, but who does not recognize the creatures' very eye, as, "after they have pinched and shaken all the life out of an earth-worm, as= Italian cooks pound all the spirit out of a steak, and then gulped him, they stand up in honest self-confidence, expand their red waistcoats with the air of a lobby member, and outface you with' an eye which calmly challenges inquiry. Do I look like a bird that knows the flavour of raw vermin? I throw myself upon a jury of my peers. Ask any robin if he ever ate anything lest ascetic than the frugal berry of the juniper, and he will answer- that his vow forbids him. Can such an open bosom cover such depravity ? Alas, yes ! I have no doubt his breast was redder at that very moment with the blood of my raspberries." There were other feathered friends, who treated our author very much as if they were landlord and he tenant at their will, to his great and abiding amusement, but we must paw on.
The next chapter is a "Good word for winter," in which, after- humorously commenting on the amiable willingness of mankind in general to assist at any spectacle to which they are admitted gratis, even to the constancy with which free lectures are attended," where- the gratuitous hearers are anawthetized to suffering by a sense of virtue, and are performing, perhaps, the noblest, as it is one of the most difficult, of human functions, in getting something (no matter how small) for nothing. They are not pestered by the awful duty of securing their money's worth. They are wasting time, to- do which elegantly and without lassitude is the highest achieve- ment of civilization." This instinct for gratuitous amusement. being so strong, Mr. Lowell has sometimes "wondered that the peep-shows Nature provides with such endless variety for her children, and to which we are admitted on the bare condition of having eyes, should be so generally neglected." "To be sure," he adds, "eyes are not so common as people think, or poets would be plentier ; and perhaps, also, these exhibitions of hers are cheapened in estimation by the fact that in enjoying them we are not getting the better of anybody else. Your true lovers of Nature, however, contrive to get even this solace ; and Words-'- worth, looking upon mountains as his own peculiar sweethearts, was jealous of anybody else who ventured upon even the most innocent flirtation with them. As if such fellows, indeed, could pretend to that nicer sense of what-d'ye-call-it which was so remarkable in him !"
He then proceeds to give a sketch of the seasons, which makee. the reader remember it was not as a prose writer that he first, made the author's acquaintance ; but though we hardly agree that. "Winter is a better poet than Autumn, when he has a mind, though he does not touch those melancholy chords on which Autumn is as great a master as Heine ;" yet we can imagine what the real snowstorm can be to the American, when the confusion of the elements which have warred all night is succeeded by a day in which all that is unsightly in nature has been covered over, "and all the batteries of noise are spiked." The freshness of boy nature exists still in Mr. Lowell, even though the shadows of even- ing are deepening around him. "For exhilaration," he can still write, "there is nothing like a stiff snow-crust, that creaks like a
cricket at every step, and communicates its own sparkle to the senses. The air you drink is frappe, all its grosser particles preci- pitated, and the dregs of your blood with them "; but with a laugh
once more against himself, he adds :—" Even where there is abun- dance of snow, I find as I grow older there are not so many good 'crusts as there used to be. When I first observed this, I rashly set it to the account of that general degeneracy in nature which forces itself on the attention and into the philosophy of middle life. But happening once to be weighed, it occurred to me that an arch which would bear fifty pounds could hardly be blamed for giving way under more than three times the weight. I have sometimes thought that if theologians would remember this in their argu- ments, and consider that a man may slump through with no fault of his own where the boy would have skimmed the surface in safety, it would be better for all parties."
We turn next to a clever essay on "A Certain Condescension in Foreigners." The term foreigner is by no means a happy one, and suggests a momentary bitterness in our generally so genial author, since the name is applied chiefly to Englishmen, whose insolence of demeanour towards all men and institutions essentially American, sharpens the blade of his sarcasm to its finest edge. We commend the entire essay to thoughtful readers. It is impossible to give a mere résumé of it,—we content ourselves with one sentence :— "In short, we were vulgar. This was one of those horribly vague accusations, the victims of which have no defence. An umbrella is of no avail against a Scotch mist. It envelops you, it penetrates at every pore, it wets you through without seeming to wet you at all. Vulgarity is an eighth deadly sin added to the list in these latter days, and worse than all the others put together, since it perils your salvation in this world,—far the more important of the two in the minds of most men. it profits nothing to draw nice distinctions between essential and con- ventional, for the convention in this case is the essence, and you may break every command of the Decalogue with perfect good breeding, nay, If you are adroit, without losing caste. We, indeed, had it not to lose, for we had never gained it. 'How am I vulgar ?' asks the culprit, shud- deringly.—' Because thou art not like unto us,' answers Lucifer, Son of the Morning, and there is no more to be said. The god of this world may be a fallen angel, but he has us there?"
The civil war, however, taught friends and foes alike this, at least,—that the average American was not exactly the man they had represented him to themselves to be. That while they were talking poetry, it was not quite certain he was not enacting a poem. Witness one stanza, in those fifteen millions paid to heal and recruit the sick and wounded. They sent no hat round to other nations with doleful tale of men who had fallen, nor did they press half-recovered men again into the fray, but got them home and had them cared for there, and found—that same vulgar North— that their fighting strength at the close of the war was as great as at its commencement. The Christianity which underlies all good manners might get itself uttered with a nasal twang, but we in Europe might yet learn a few lessons in the humanity which made that war unique. Have we sold our very souls to conventionality, that it seems so impossible to us to read such a paper as this on Abraham Lincoln without apologizing to ourselves for the estimate of the man to which it perforce leads us ? Seriously, this paper on Mr. Lincoln's policy, in its calm impartiality, is a valuable contri- bution to contemporary history. He did the huge task imposed upon him, "that Western attorney," well and thoroughly, so thoroughly that there should be no future need to do it over again. And he possessed the quality, possible only to the really great, of absolute patience in the bringin; up of his reserve force. " Ohne Haat, aber ohne Rest," might have been his motto. "God alone," says Mr. Lowell, "has time enough, but a prudent man may make shift to find as much as he needs." It is impossible to follow our author through the subjects he has crowded into this one volume ; we can but lightly touch one or two more.
A clever paper on Thoreau, sketches for us the period when Carlyle in England and the Apostles of Newness in America, were preaching re-action and revolt against Philisterei. "It was," says Mr. Lowell, "simply a struggle for fresh air, in which, if the windows could not be opened, there was danger that panes would be broken, though painted with images of the saints and martyrs." Among the disciples of such men as Emerson, Thoreau was one of the most remarkable. "Strange books are these of his," writes our author, "and interesting in many ways, instructive chiefly as showing how considerable a crop may be raised on a comparatively narrow close of mind." There is a whole biography in those two lines. Of the effects of narrowness he speaks further on. "A greater familiarity with ordinary men would have done Thoreau good, by showing him how many fine qualities are common to the race. The radical vice of his theory of life was, that he con- founded physical with spiritual remoteness from men. One is far enough withdrawn from his fellows if he keep himself clear of their weaknesses. He is not so truly withdrawn, as exiled, if he refuse to share their strength." Yet while criticizing Thoreau severely., he says, nevertheless, "that though not belonging to the class of creative man, he was one of the scarcely smaller class who are peculiar, and whose leaves shed their thought-seeds like ferns," —and this, it seems to us, is much to say of any man. It cannot be a light thing to be under Mr. Lowell's scalpel ; he has dissected Mr. Carlyle, till we almost wonder if it be possible to put him together again. "Perhaps," he says, speaking of Mr. Carlyle's cynicism, "perhaps, if he expected less, he would find more. Saul seeking his father's asses found himself turned sud- denly into a king ; but Mr. Carlyle on the look-out for a king, always seems to find the other sort of animal." Again, speaking of the habit which of late has grown upon Mr. Carlyle of ascribing so much to force, mere brute force after all, he says, " Petrarch has celebrated the laurel, Chaucer the daisy, and Wordsworth the gallows-tree, it remained for the ex-peda- gogue of Ecclefechan to become the volunteer laureate of the rod, and to imagine a world created and directed by a divine Dr. Busby." And so, while remembering that the cynical view of human nature is congenial to certain moods, and is "so little in- consistent with original nobleness of mind, that it is not seldom the acetous fermentation of it," Mr. Lowell does not forget, that it is the view of the satirist, "not the historian, and takes in but a narrow arc in the circumference of truth." "Cynicism," he says, "is the intellectual analogue of the truffle, and though it may be very well in giving a relish to thought for certain palates, it cannot supply the substance of it." But we cannot follow Mr. Lowell further. We heartily advise our readers to ascertain for them- selves what else he has to say to them out of his study windows.
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