When we met in London, some years later, he came almost every afternoon
to my lodging, and the story of our old-time Cambridge walks began again
in London phrases. There were not the vacant lots and outlying fields of
his native place, but we made shift with the vast, simple parks, and we
walked on the grass as we could not have done in an American park, and
were glad to feel the earth under our feet. I said how much it was like
those earlier tramps; and that pleased him, for he wished, whenever a
thing delighted him, to find a Cambridge quality in it.
But he was in love with everything English, and was determined I should
be so too, beginning with the English weather, which in summer cannot be
overpraised. He carried, of course, an umbrella, but he would not put it
up in the light showers that caught us at times, saying that the English
rain never wetted you. The thick short turf delighted him; he would
scarcely allow that the trees were the worse for foliage blighted by a
vile easterly storm in the spring of that year. The tender air, the
delicate veils that the moisture in it cast about all objects at the
least remove, the soft colors of the flowers, the dull blue of the low
sky showing through the rifts of the dirty white clouds, the hovering
pall of London smoke, were all dear to him, and he was anxious that I
should not lose anything of their charm.
He was anxious that I should not miss the value of anything in England,
and while he volunteered that the aristocracy had the corruptions of
aristocracies everywhere, he insisted upon my respectful interest in it
because it was so historical. Perhaps there was a touch of irony in this
demand, but it is certain that he was very happy in England. He had come
of the age when a man likes smooth, warm keeping, in which he need make
no struggle for his comfort; disciplined and obsequious service; society,
perfectly ascertained within the larger society which we call
civilization; and in an alien environment, for which he was in no wise
responsible, he could have these without a pang of the self-reproach
which at home makes a man unhappy amidst his luxuries, when he considers
their cost to others. He had a position which forbade thought of
unfairness in the conditions; he must not wake because of the slave, it
was his duty to sleep. Besides, at that time Lowell needed all the rest
he could get, for he had lately passed through trials such as break the
strength of men, and how them with premature age. He was living alone in
his little house in Lowndes Square, and Mrs. Lowell was in the country,
slowly recovering from the effects of the terrible typhus which she had
barely survived in Madrid. He was yet so near the anguish of that
experience that he told me he had still in his nerves the expectation of
a certain agonized cry from her which used to rend them. But he said he
had adjusted himself to this, and he went on to speak with a patience
which was more affecting in him than in men of more phlegmatic
temperament, of how we were able to adjust ourselves to all our trials
and to the constant presence of pain. He said he was never free of a
certain distress, which was often a sharp pang, in one of his shoulders,
but his physique had established such relations with it that, though he
was never unconscious of it, he was able to endure it without a
recognition of it as suffering.
He seemed to me, however, very well, and at his age of sixty-three, I
could not see that he was less alert and vigorous than he was when I
first knew him in Cambridge. He had the same brisk, light step, and
though his beard was well whitened and his auburn hair had grown ashen
through the red, his face had the freshness and his eyes the clearness of
a young man’s. I suppose the novelty of his life kept him from thinking
about his years; or perhaps in contact with those great, insenescent
Englishmen, he could not feel himself old. At any rate he did not once
speak of age, as he used to do ten years earlier, and I, then half
through my forties, was still “You young dog” to him. It was a bright
and cheerful renewal of the early kindliness between us, on which indeed
there had never been a shadow, except such as distance throws. He wished
apparently to do everything he could to assure us of his personal
interest; and we were amused to find him nervously apprehensive of any
purpose, such as was far from us, to profit by him officially. He
betrayed a distinct relief when he found we were not going to come upon
him even for admissions to the houses of parliament, which we were to see
by means of an English acquaintance. He had not perhaps found some other
fellow-citizens so considerate; he dreaded the half-duties of his place,
like presentations to the queen, and complained of the cheap ambitions he
had to gratify in that way.
He was so eager to have me like England in every way, and seemed so fond
of the English, that I thought it best to ask him whether he minded my
quoting, in a paper about Lexington, which I was just then going to print
in a London magazine, some humorous lines of his expressing the mounting
satisfaction of an imaginary Yankee story-teller who has the old fight
terminate in Lord Percy’s coming
“To hammer stone for life in Concord jail.”
It had occurred to me that it might possibly embarrass him to have this
patriotic picture presented to a public which could not take our Fourth
of July pleasure in it, and I offered to suppress it, as I did afterwards
quite for literary reasons. He said, No, let it stand, and let them make
the worst of it; and I fancy that much of his success with a people who
are not gingerly with other people’s sensibilities came from the
frankness with which he trampled on their prejudice when he chose. He
said he always told them, when there was question of such things, that
the best society he had ever known was in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He
contended that the best English was spoken there; and so it was, when he
spoke it.
We were in London out of the season, and he was sorry that he could not
have me meet some titles who he declared had found pleasure in my books;
when we returned from Italy in the following June, he was prompt to do me
this honor. I dare say he wished me to feel it to its last implication,
and I did my best, but there was nothing in the evening I enjoyed so much
as his coming up to Mrs. Lowell, at the close, when there was only a
title or two left, and saying to her as he would have said to her at
Elmwood, where she would have personally planned it, “Fanny, that was a
fine dinner you gave us.” Of course, this was in a tender burlesque; but
it remains the supreme impression of what seemed to me a cloudlessly
happy period for Lowell. His wife was quite recovered of her long
suffering, and was again at the head of his house, sharing in his
pleasures, and enjoying his successes for his sake; successes so great
that people spoke of him seriously, as “an addition to society” in
London, where one man more or less seemed like a drop in the sea. She was
a woman perfectly of the New England type and tradition: almost
repellantly shy at first, and almost glacially cold with new
acquaintance, but afterwards very sweet and cordial. She was of a dark
beauty with a regular face of the Spanish outline; Lowell was of an ideal
manner towards her, and of an admiration which delicately travestied
itself and which she knew how to receive with smiling irony. After her
death, which occurred while he was still in England, he never spoke of
her to me, though before that he used to be always bringing her name in,
with a young lover-like fondness.