The United States have produced authors not a few; among some names not the most famous, perhaps, on the popular tongue, are two or three names of their poets; but they have hardly given to the world more than one man of letters--judicious, judicial, disinterested, patient, happy, temperate, delighted.The colonial days, with the 'painful' divines who brought the parish into the wilderness; the experimental period of ambition and attempts at a literature that should be young as the soil and much younger than the race; the civil-war years, with a literature that matched the self-conscious and inexpert heroism of the army;--none of these periods of the national life could fitly be represented by a man of letters.And though James Russell Lowell was the contemporary of the 'transcendentalists,' and a man of middle age when the South seceded, and though indeed his fame as a Yankee humourist is to be discerned through the smoke and the dust, through the gravity and the burlesque, of the war, clear upon the other side, yet he was virtually the child of national leisure, of moderation and education, an American of the seventies and onwards.He represented the little-recognised fact that in ripeness, not in rawness, consists the excellence of Americans -an excellence they must be content to share with contemporary nations, however much it may cost them to abandon we know not what bounding ambitions which they have never succeeded in definitely describing in words.Mr.Lowell was a refutation of the fallacy that an American can never be American enough.He ranked with the students and the critics among all nations, and nothing marks his transatlantic conditions except, perhaps, that his scholarliness is a little anxious and would not seem so; he enriches his phrases busily, and yet would seem composed; he makes his allusions tread closely one upon another, and there is an assumed carelessness, and an ill-concealed vigilance, as to the effect their number and their erudition will produce upon the reader.The American sensitiveness takes with him that pleasantest of forms; his style confesses more than he thinks of the loveable weakness of national vanity, and asks of the stranger now and again, 'Well, what do you think of my country?'
Declining, as I do, to separate style in expression from style in the thought that informs it--for they who make such a separation can hardly know that style should be in the very conception of a phrase, in its antenatal history, else the word is neither choice nor authentic--I recognise in Mr.Lowell, as a prose author, a sense of proportion and a delicacy of selection not surpassed in the critical work of this critical century.Those small volumes, Among My Books and My Study Windows, are all pure literature.A fault in criticism is the rarest thing in them.I call none to mind except the strange judgment on Dr.Johnson: 'Our present concern with the Saxons is chiefly a literary one...Take Dr.Johnson as an instance.The Saxon, as it appears to me, has never shown any capacity for art,'
