Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/104

 disjecta membra of an old-fashioned metaphysical philosophy and attributable still more to his want of a modern critical method and matter to work upon. In 1870 Charles Eliot Norton, an American dedicated to "the study of perfection" who had enjoyed intimate relations with the leaders of culture in England and in Europe, lamented that Emerson was losing his grip and that no one was rising to take his place. "No best man with us," he declared, "has done more to influence the nation than Emerson—but the country has in a sense outgrown him. He was the friend and helper of its youth; but for the difficulties and struggles of its manhood we need the wisdom of the reflective and rational understanding, not that of the intuitions." (My italics.)

It is clear to any reader of Norton's Letters that he would have liked to see Lowell succeed Emerson as leader of the American intelligentsia; but it is also clear, I think, that Lowell in some respects disappointed him. Even when on the occasion of Lowell's death Norton strives to give the fullest possible emphasis to the nation's loss, there is a latent note of dissatisfaction in his tribute: "He has done more than any man of our generation to maintain the level of good sense and right feeling in public affairs." One expects an intellectual leader of the first rank to do more than merely maintain "the level of good sense and right feeling in public affairs." The suggestion is that Lowell failed to rise above an admirable mediocrity; that, industrious reader though he was, he lacked the energy, the