In the hurry of the London season I did not see so much of Lowell on our
second sojourn as on our first, but once when we were alone in his study
there was a return to the terms of the old meetings in Cambridge. He
smoked his pipe, and sat by his fire and philosophized; and but for the
great London sea swirling outside and bursting through our shelter, and
dashing him with notes that must be instantly answered, it was a very
fair image of the past. He wanted to tell me about his coachman whom he
had got at on his human side with great liking and amusement, and there
was a patient gentleness in his manner with the footman who had to keep
coming in upon him with those notes which was like the echo of his young
faith in the equality of men. But he always distinguished between the
simple unconscious equality of the ordinary American and its assumption
by a foreigner. He said he did not mind such an American’s coming into
his house with his hat on; but if a German or Englishman did it, he
wanted to knock it off. He was apt to be rather punctilious in his shows
of deference towards others, and at one time he practised removing his
own hat when he went into shops in Cambridge. It must have mystified the
Cambridge salesmen, and I doubt if he kept it up.
With reference to the doctrine of his young poetry, the fierce and the
tender humanity of his storm and stress period, I fancy a kind of baffle
in Lowell, which I should not perhaps find it easy to prove. I never
knew him by word or hint to renounce this doctrine, but he could not come
to seventy years without having seen many high hopes fade, and known many
inspired prophecies fail. When we have done our best to make the world
over, we are apt to be dismayed by finding it in much the old shape. As
he said of the moral government of the universe, the scale is so vast,
and a little difference, a little change for the better, is scarcely
perceptible to the eager consciousness of the wholesale reformer. But
with whatever sense of disappointment, of doubt as to his own deeds for
truer freedom and for better conditions I believe his sympathy was still
with those who had some heart for hoping and striving. I am sure that
though he did not agree with me in some of my own later notions for the
redemption of the race, he did not like me the less but rather the more
because (to my own great surprise I confess) I had now and then the
courage of my convictions, both literary and social.
He was probably most at odds with me in regard to my theories of fiction,
though he persisted in declaring his pleasure in my own fiction. He was
in fact, by nature and tradition, thoroughly romantic, and he could not
or would not suffer realism in any but a friend. He steadfastly refused
even to read the Russian masters, to his immense loss, as I tried to
persuade him, and even among the modern Spaniards, for whom he might have
had a sort of personal kindness from his love of Cervantes, he chose one
for his praise the least worthy, of it, and bore me down with his heavier
metal in argument when I opposed to Alarcon’s factitiousness the
delightful genuineness of Valdes. Ibsen, with all the Norwegians, he put
far from him; he would no more know them than the Russians; the French
naturalists he abhorred. I thought him all wrong, but you do not try
improving your elders when they have come to three score and ten years,
and I would rather have had his affection unbroken by our difference of
opinion than a perfect agreement. Where he even imagined that this
difference could work me harm, he was anxious to have me know that he
meant me none; and he was at the trouble to write me a letter when a
Boston paper had perverted its report of what he said in a public lecture
to my disadvantage, and to assure me that he had not me in mind. When
once he had given his liking, he could not bear that any shadow of change
should seem to have come upon him. He had a most beautiful and endearing
ideal of friendship; he desired to affirm it and to reaffirm it as often
as occasion offered, and if occasion did not offer, he made occasion. It
did not matter what you said or did that contraried him; if he thought he
had essentially divined you, you were still the same: and on his part he
was by no means exacting of equal demonstration, but seemed not even to
wish it.