I am supposing still that I saw Salem before I saw Boston, but however
the fact may be, I am sure that I decided it would be better to see
shoemaking in Lynn, where I really did see it, thirty years later. For
the purposes of the present visit, I contented myself with looking at a
machine in Haverhill, which chewed a shoe sole full of pegs, and dropped
it out of its iron jaws with an indifference as great as my own, and
probably as little sense of how it had done its work. I may be unjust to
that machine; Heaven knows I would not wrong it; and I must confess that
my head had no room in it for the conception of any machinery but the
mythological, which also I despised, in my revulsion from the
eighteenth-century poets to those of my own day.
I cannot quite make out after the lapse of so many years just how or when
I got to Haverhill, or whether it was before or after I had been in
Salem. There is an apparitional quality in my presences, at this point
or that, in the dim past; but I hope that, for the credit of their order,
ghosts are not commonly taken with such trivial things as I was. For
instance, in Haverhill I was much interested by the sight of a young man,
coming gayly down the steps of the hotel where I lodged, in peg-top
trousers so much more peg top than my own that I seemed to be wearing
mere spring-bottoms in comparison; and in a day when every one who
respected himself had a necktie as narrow as he could get, this youth had
one no wider than a shoestring, and red at that, while mine measured
almost an inch, and was black. To be sure, he was one of a band of negro
minstrels, who were to give a concert that night, and he had a light to
excel in fashion.
I will suppose, for convenience’ sake, that I visited Haverhill, too,
before I reached Boston: somehow that shoe-pegging machine must come in,
and it may as well come in here. When I actually found myself in Boston,
there were perhaps industries which it would have been well for me to
celebrate, but I either made believe there were none, or else I honestly
forgot all about them. In either case I released myself altogether to
the literary and historical associations of the place. I need not say
that I gave myself first to the first, and it rather surprised me to find
that the literary associations of Boston referred so largely to
Cambridge. I did not know much about Cambridge, except that it was the
seat of the university where Lowell was, and Longfellow had been,
professor; and somehow I had not realized it as the home of these poets.
That was rather stupid of me, but it is best to own the truth, and
afterward I came to know the place so well that I may safely confess my
earlier ignorance.
I had stopped in Boston at the Tremont House, which was still one of the
first hostelries of the country, and I must have inquired my way to
Cambridge there; but I was sceptical of the direction the Cambridge
horse-car took when I found it, and I hinted to the driver my anxieties
as to why he should be starting east when I had been told that Cambridge
was west of Boston. He reassured me in the laconic and sarcastic manner
of his kind, and we really reached Cambridge by the route he had taken.
The beautiful elms that shaded great part of the way massed themselves in
the “groves of academe” at the Square, and showed pleasant glimpses of
“Old Harvard’s scholar factories red,” then far fewer than now. It must
have been in vacation, for I met no one as I wandered through the college
yard, trying to make up my mind as to how I should learn where Lowell
lived; for it was he whom I had come to find. He had not only taken the
poems I sent him, but he had printed two of them in a single number of
the Atlantic, and had even written me a little note about them, which I
wore next my heart in my breast pocket till I almost wore it out; and so
I thought I might fitly report myself to him. But I have always been
helpless in finding my way, and I was still depressed by my failure to
convince the horse-car driver that he had taken the wrong road. I let
several people go by without questioning them, and those I did ask
abashed me farther by not knowing what I wanted to know. When I had
remitted my search for the moment, an ancient man, with an open mouth and
an inquiring eye, whom I never afterwards made out in Cambridge,
addressed me with a hospitable offer to show me the Washington Elm. I
thought this would give me time to embolden myself for the meeting with
the editor of the Atlantic if I should ever find him, and I went with
that kind old man, who when he had shown me the tree, and the spot where
Washington stood when he took command of the Continental forces, said
that he had a branch of it, and that if I would come to his house with
him he would give me a piece. In the end, I meant merely to flatter him
into telling me where I could find Lowell, but I dissembled my purpose
and pretended a passion for a piece of the historic elm, and the old man
led me not only to his house but his wood-house, where he sawed me off a
block so generous that I could not get it into my pocket. I feigned the
gratitude which I could see that he expected, and then I took courage to
put my question to him. Perhaps that patriarch lived only in the past,
and cared for history and not literature. He confessed that he could not
tell me where to find Lowell; but he did not forsake me; he set forth
with me upon the street again, and let no man pass without asking him. In
the end we met one who was able to say where Mr. Lowell was, and I found
him at last in a little study at the rear of a pleasant, old-fashioned
house near the Delta.
Lowell was not then at the height of his fame; he had just reached this
thirty years after, when he died; but I doubt if he was ever after a
greater power in his own country, or more completely embodied the
literary aspiration which would not and could not part itself from the
love of freedom and the hope of justice. For the sake of these he had
been willing to suffer the reproach which followed their friends in the
earlier days of the anti-slavery struggle: He had outlived the reproach
long before; but the fear of his strength remained with those who had
felt it, and he had not made himself more generally loved by the ‘Fable
for Critics’ than by the ‘Biglow Papers’, probably. But in the ‘Vision
of Sir Launfal’ and the ‘Legend of Brittany’ he had won a liking if not a
listening far wider than his humor and his wit had got him; and in his
lectures on the English poets, given not many years before he came to the
charge of the Atlantic, he had proved himself easily the wisest and
finest critic in our language. He was already, more than any American
poet,
“Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
The love of love,”
and he held a place in the public sense which no other author among us
has held. I had myself never been a great reader of his poetry, when I
met him, though when I was a boy of ten years I had heard my father
repeat passages from the Biglow Papers against war and slavery and the
war for slavery upon Mexico, and later I had read those criticisms of
English poetry, and I knew Sir Launfal must be Lowell in some sort; but
my love for him as a poet was chiefly centred in my love for his tender
rhyme, ‘Auf Wiedersehen’, which I can not yet read without something of
the young pathos it first stirred in me. I knew and felt his greatness
some how apart from the literary proofs of it; he ruled my fancy and held
my allegiance as a character, as a man; and I am neither sorry nor
ashamed that I was abashed when I first came into his presence; and that
in spite of his words of welcome I sat inwardly quaking before him. He
was then forty-one years old, and nineteen my senior, and if there had
been nothing else to awe me, I might well have been quelled by the
disparity of our ages. But I have always been willing and even eager to
do homage to men who have done something, and notably to men who have
done something in the sort I wished to do something in, myself. I
could never recognize any other sort of superiority; but that I am proud
to recognize; and I had before Lowell some such feeling as an obscure
subaltern might have before his general. He was by nature a bit of a
disciplinarian, and the effect was from him as well as in me; I dare say
he let me feel whatever difference there was as helplessly as I felt it.
At the first encounter with people he always was apt to have a certain
frosty shyness, a smiling cold, as from the long, high-sunned winters of
his Puritan race; he was not quite himself till he had made you aware of
his quality: then no one could be sweeter, tenderer, warmer than he; then
he made you free of his whole heart; but you must be his captive before
he could do that. His whole personality had now an instant charm for me;
I could not keep my eyes from those beautiful eyes of his, which had a
certain starry serenity, and looked out so purely from under his white
forehead, shadowed with auburn hair untouched by age; or from the smile
that shaped the auburn beard, and gave the face in its form and color the
Christ-look which Page’s portrait has flattered in it.
His voice had as great a fascination for me as his face. The vibrant
tenderness and the crisp clearness of the tones, the perfect modulation,
the clear enunciation, the exquisite accent, the elect diction--I did not
know enough then to know that these were the gifts, these were the
graces, of one from whose tongue our rough English came music such as I
should never hear from any other. In this speech there was nothing of
our slipshod American slovenliness, but a truly Italian conscience and an
artistic sense of beauty in the instrument.
I saw, before he sat down across his writing-table from me, that he was
not far from the medium height; but his erect carriage made the most of
his five feet and odd inches. He had been smoking the pipe he loved, and
he put it back in his mouth, presently, as if he found himself at greater
ease with it, when he began to chat, or rather to let me show what manner
of young man I was by giving me the first word. I told him of the
trouble I had in finding him, and I could not help dragging in something
about Heine’s search for Borne, when he went to see him in Frankfort; but
I felt at once this was a false start, for Lowell was such an impassioned
lover of Cambridge, which was truly his patria, in the Italian sense,
that it must have hurt him to be unknown to any one in it; he said, a
little dryly, that he should not have thought I would have so much
difficulty; but he added, forgivingly, that this was not his own house,
which he was out of for the time. Then he spoke to me of Heine, and when
I showed my ardor for him, he sought to temper it with some judicious
criticisms, and told me that he had kept the first poem I sent him, for
the long time it had been unacknowledged, to make sure that it was not a
translation. He asked me about myself, and my name, and its Welsh
origin, and seemed to find the vanity I had in this harmless enough. When
I said I had tried hard to believe that I was at least the literary
descendant of Sir James Howels, he corrected me gently with “James
Howel,” and took down a volume of the ‘Familiar Letters’ from the shelves
behind him to prove me wrong. This was always his habit, as I found
afterwards when he quoted anything from a book he liked to get it and
read the passage over, as if he tasted a kind of hoarded sweetness in the
words. It visibly vexed him if they showed him in the least mistaken;
but
“The love he bore to learning was at fault”
for this foible, and that other of setting people right if he thought
them wrong. I could not assert myself against his version of Howels’s
name, for my edition of his letters was far away in Ohio, and I was
obliged to own that the name was spelt in several different ways in it.
He perceived, no doubt, why I had chosen the form liked my own, with the
title which the pleasant old turncoat ought to have had from the many
masters he served according to their many minds, but never had except
from that erring edition. He did not afflict me for it, though; probably
it amused him too much; he asked me about the West, and when he found
that I was as proud of the West as I was of Wales, he seemed even better
pleased, and said he had always fancied that human nature was laid out on
rather a larger scale there than in the East, but he had seen very little
of the West. In my heart I did not think this then, and I do not think
it now; human nature has had more ground to spread over in the West; that
is all; but “it was not for me to bandy words with my sovereign.” He
said he liked to hear of the differences between the different sections,
for what we had most to fear in our country was a wearisome sameness of
type.
He did not say now, or at any other time during the many years I knew
him, any of those slighting things of the West which I had so often to
suffer from Eastern people, but suffered me to praise it all I would. He
asked me what way I had taken in coming to New England, and when I told
him, and began to rave of the beauty and quaintness of French Canada, and
to pour out my joy in Quebec, he said, with a smile that had now lost all
its frost, Yes, Quebec was a bit of the seventeenth century; it was in
many ways more French than France, and its people spoke the language of
Voltaire, with the accent of Voltaire’s time.
I do not remember what else he talked of, though once I remembered it
with what I believed an ineffaceable distinctness. I set nothing of it
down at the time; I was too busy with the letters I was writing for a
Cincinnati paper; and I was severely bent upon keeping all personalities
out of them. This was very well, but I could wish now that I had
transgressed at least so far as to report some of the things that Lowell
said; for the paper did not print my letters, and it would have been
perfectly safe, and very useful for the present purpose. But perhaps he
did not say anything very memorable; to do that you must have something
positive in your listener; and I was the mere response, the hollow echo,
that youth must be in like circumstances. I was all the time afraid of
wearing my welcome out, and I hurried to go when I would so gladly have
staid. I do not remember where I meant to go, or why he should have
undertaken to show me the way across-lots, but this was what he did; and
when we came to a fence, which I clambered gracelessly over, he put his
hands on the top, and tried to take it at a bound. He tried twice, and
then laughed at his failure, but not with any great pleasure, and he was
not content till a third trial carried him across. Then he said, “I
commonly do that the first time,” as if it were a frequent habit with
him, while I remained discreetly silent, and for that moment at least
felt myself the elder of the man who had so much of the boy in him. He
had, indeed, much of the boy in him to the last, and he parted with each
hour of his youth reluctantly, pathetically.