“Like wealthy men, not knowing what they give.”
more probably he felt a sacredness in the money got by literature, which
the literary man never quite rids him self of, even when he is not a
poet, and which made him wish to dedicate it to something finer than the
every day uses. He lived very quietly, but he had by no means more than
he needed to live upon, and at that time he had pecuniary losses. He was
writing hard, and was doing full work in his Harvard professorship, and
he was so far dependent upon his salary, that he felt its absence for the
year he went abroad. I do not know quite how to express my sense of
something unworldly, of something almost womanlike in his relation to
money.
He was not only generous of money, but he was generous of himself, when
he thought he could be of use, or merely of encouragement. He came all
the way into Boston to hear certain lectures of mine on the Italian
poets, which he could not have found either edifying or amusing, that he
might testify his interest in me, and show other people that they were
worth coming to. He would go carefully over a poem with me, word by
word, and criticise every turn of phrase, and after all be magnanimously
tolerant of my sticking to phrasings that he disliked. In a certain line
“The silvern chords of the piano trembled,”
he objected to silvern. Why not silver? I alleged leathern, golden, and
like adjectives in defence of my word; but still he found an affectation
in it, and suffered it to stand with extreme reluctance. Another line of
another piece:
“And what she would, would rather that she would not”
he would by no means suffer. He said that the stress falling on the last
word made it “public-school English,” and he mocked it with the answer a
maid had lately given him when he asked if the master of the house was at
home. She said, “No, sir, he is not,” when she ought to have said “No,
sir, he isn’t.” He was appeased when I came back the next day with the
stanza amended so that the verse could read:
“And what she would, would rather she would not so”
but I fancy he never quite forgave my word silvern. Yet, he professed
not to have prejudices in such matters, but to use any word that would
serve his turn, without wincing; and he certainly did use and defend
words, as undisprivacied and disnatured, that made others wince.
He was otherwise such a stickler for the best diction that he would not
have had me use slovenly vernacular even in the dialogue in my stories:
my characters must not say they wanted to do so and so, but wished, and
the like. In a copy of one of my books which I found him reading, I saw
he had corrected my erring Western woulds and shoulds; as he grew old he
was less and less able to restrain himself from setting people right to
their faces. Once, in the vast area of my ignorance, he specified my
small acquaintance with a certain period of English poetry, saying,
“You’re rather shady, there, old fellow.” But he would not have had me
too learned, holding that he had himself been hurt for literature by his
scholarship.
His patience in analyzing my work with me might have been the easy effort
of his habit of teaching; and his willingness to give himself and his own
was no doubt more signally attested in his asking a brother man of
letters who wished to work up a subject in the college library, to stay a
fortnight in his house, and to share his study, his beloved study, with
him. This must truly have cost him dear, as any author of fixed habits
will understand. Happily the man of letters was a good fellow, and knew
how to prize the favor-done him, but if he had been otherwise, it would
have been the same to Lowell. He not only endured, but did many things
for the weaker brethren, which were amusing enough to one in the secret
of his inward revolt. Yet in these things he was considerate also of the
editor whom he might have made the sharer of his self-sacrifice, and he
seldom offered me manuscripts for others. The only real burden of the
kind that he put upon me was the diary of a Virginian who had travelled
in New England during the early thirties, and had set down his
impressions of men and manners there. It began charmingly, and went on
very well under Lowell’s discreet pruning, but after a while he seemed to
fall in love with the character of the diarist so much that he could not
bear to cut anything.