TWENTY YEARS OF HARVARD
Mr. Lowell’s real connection with the daily work of the college ceased
in 1876, when he accepted the offer of the mission to Spain. It covered
the period when he wrote most, and when, as his cousin has said so
well, in the passage I have cited, his work in prose and poetry proved
to be most satisfactory to himself. His duty afterwards as a
diplomatist, in Spain and in England, was of value to the country and
of credit to himself. And his life as a man of letters had prepared him
for such work. But, all the same, it is as a man of letters that he
will be most generally remembered.
During the twenty-one years from 1855 to 1876 the college was going
through the change which has made it the university which it is. It had
not only enlarged in the number of pupils, but the purposes and range
of all persons connected with it widened with every year. This change
from the “seminary,” as President Quincy used to call it, to the
university of to-day has not been wrought by any spasmodic revolution
planned by either of the governing bodies at any given time. It has
come about, healthy and strong, in the growth of the country—let us
even say in the improvement of the world.
Presidents Quincy, Everett, Sparks, and Walker were all engaged in
promoting the evolution of the university. After the close of that
series come Thomas Hill and Charles William Eliot, the present
incumbent, to whose energy, foresight, and courage so much of what may
be called this revolution is due. I have already made some notes here
of Mr. Quincy and Dr. Walker. It was in Walker’s administration that
Lowell returned to the college as Smith professor.
Cornelius Conway Felton, who succeeded Dr. Walker, had been the Greek
professor, and had distinguished himself in his place as an editor of
Homer and in papers on subjects of Greek literature. Perhaps he soon
wore out his hopes for classes of schoolboys. Certainly in my time and
Lowell’s, when we were undergraduates, he made little or no effort as a
teacher to open out the work of the Greek poets whom we read. Alkestis
or the Iliad were literally mere text-books. All the same, the boys
believed in Felton. I remember one scene of great excitement when he
was a professor, when we thought we were very badly used by the
government, as perhaps we were. There was a great crowd of us in front
of Holworthy, and Felton appeared on the steps of Stoughton or at a
window. Somebody shouted, “Hear Felton! hear Felton! he tells us the
truth,” and the noisy mob was still to listen. A man might be glad to
have these words carved on his tombstone.
When with other men of letters, Dr. Felton was charming. And his
kindness to his old pupils till they died was something marvelous. The
published Sumner letters, the Longfellow letters, and other
correspondence of the men of that time, with many of his careful
reviews, and an occasional pamphlet, perhaps on some subject of
controversy now forgotten, show how highly he was prized in his day and
how well he deserved such esteem. For many years he was one of the most
acceptable writers for the “North American Review.” He died, suddenly,
after less than two years of service as President.
President Felton’s successor, Thomas Hill, was a graduate of Harvard,
as all her presidents have been since Chauncy died in 1672. Dr. Hill
was of a noble family,—if we count nobility on the true standards,—who
were driven out of England by the Birmingham riots of 1791, and settled
near Philadelphia. Dr. Hill was appointed president of Antioch College,
Ohio, in 1859, and, after a very successful administration there, he
was inaugurated at Cambridge in 1862. At Antioch he had succeeded
Horace Mann in the presidency.
Dr. Hill’s health failed, and he resigned in 1868, leaving behind him
charming memories of his devotion to duty and of the simplicity of his
character. I called upon him once, with Dr. Newman Hall, when he was in
this country. It was delightful to see the enthusiasm with which Dr.
Hill spoke of the pleasure he expected in the evenings of the
approaching winter, from studying, with his charming wife, the new text
of the Syriac version of the New Testament, which had then just been
edited by Cureton. He was one of the most distinguished mathematicians
of his time. Here is an amusing note to him from Lowell about the
arboriculture of the college yard.
MY DEAR DR. HILL,—I have been meaning to speak to you for some time
about something which I believe you are interested in as well as
myself, and, not having spoken, I make occasion to write this note.
Something ought to be done about the trees in the college yard. That
is my thesis, and my corollary is that you are the man to do it. They
remind me always of a young author’s first volume of poems. There are
too many of ’em, and too many of one kind. If they were not planted
in such formal rows, they would typify very well John Bull’s notion
of “our democracy,” where every tree is its neighbor’s enemy, and all
turn out scrubs in the end, because none can develop fairly. Then
there is scarce anything but American elms. I have nothing to say
against the tree in itself. I have some myself whose trunks I look on
as the most precious baggage I am responsible for in the journey of
life; but planted as they are in the yard, there ’s no chance for one
in ten. If our buildings so nobly dispute architectural preëminence
with cotton mills, perhaps it is all right that the trees should
become spindles; but I think Hesiod (who knew something of country
matters) was clearly right in his half being better than the whole,
and nowhere more so than in the matter of trees. There are two
English beeches in the yard which would become noble trees if the
elms would let ’em alone. As it is, they are in danger of starving.
Now, as you are our Kubernetes, I want you to take the ’elm in hand.
We want more variety, more grouping. We want to learn that one fine
tree is worth more than any mob of second-rate ones. We want to take
a leaf out of Chaucer’s book, and understand that in a stately grove
every tree must “stand well from his fellow apart.” A doom hangs over
us in the matter of architecture, but if we will only let a tree
alone, it will build itself with a nobleness of proportion and grace
of detail that Giotto himself might have envied. Nor should the
pruning as now be trusted to men who get all they cut off, and whose
whole notion of pruning, accordingly, is “ax and it shall be given
unto you.” Do, pray, take this matter into your own hands—for you
know how to love a tree—and give us a modern instance of a wise saw.
Be remembered among your other good things as the president that
planted the groups of evergreens for the wind to dream of the sea in
all summer, and for the snowflakes to roost on all winter, and
believe me (at the end of my sheet, though not of my sermon) always
cordially yours,
J.R. LOWELL.
ELMWOOD, December 8, 1863.
* * * * *
After President Hill’s resignation, Dr. Andrew Preston Peabody acted as
president until the appointment in 1869 of Mr. Eliot.
[Illustration]
I have already spoken, in one connection or another, of the professors
to whom Lowell was most closely drawn,—with one or two exceptions. Dr.
Asa Gray, the distinguished chief of botany in America, made his home a
centre of all that was charming and interesting in the delightful
circle of Cambridge society. Nothing could be more interesting than the
simplicity of the spirited conversation of this most learned man, and
the ease with which, while he really knew almost everything that was
worth knowing, he spoke, with utter absence of effect or visible
erudition. Where a working gardener would tell you with delight that
this or that plant was the “_Tomfoolaria eruditissima_,” Gray would
say, “Oh! that’s one of those Australian sandworts.” When he was still
as fresh and cheerful as a boy, I heard him say, “It is great fun to be
seventy years old. You do not have to know everything.”
Another of his colleagues who gave distinction to the college, in
America and in Europe, was the late Josiah Parsons Cooke, whose
position as a teacher and in the ranks of original students in
chemistry is so well known.
Lowell’s own charming poem to Agassiz will be recalled by every one who
cares for his life at Harvard. Not long after Agassiz had been invited
from Switzerland to lecture before the Lowell Institute, he was
appointed to a professorship in Cambridge, and he accepted the
appointment. He lived in Cambridge from that time until he died, loving
and beloved, in 1873. Mr. John Amory Lowell, the cousin of our Lowell,
in his plans for the Lowell Institute, engaged Louis Agassiz to deliver
one of their courses in 1847. His arrival in America may be spoken of
as marking an era in education. Indeed, if the Lowell Institute had
never done anything else for America than it did when it “imported
Agassiz,” it would have a perpetual claim for our gratitude. With his
arrival there was ended, once and forever, the poor habit of studying
Nature through the eyes of other observers. Men learned again the
lesson which makes them see where they look. For it may be fairly said
that Agassiz created here the school of original study which has for a
generation past directed the progress of natural science in America. I
believe I ought to say that the phrase “imported Agassiz,” which I have
ventured to quote, is Lowell’s own. In his address at the
Quarter-Millennial of the college he had the hardihood to say that
Harvard had not yet developed any first-rate educator, “for we imported
Agassiz.”
[Illustration: LOUIS AGASSIZ]
I have never forgotten the enthusiasm of Agassiz’s audience the first
time I ever heard him. His subject was the First Ascent of the
Jungfrau, the maiden mountain which had never been scaled by man until
Agassiz led the way. He told us, with eager memory, of all the
preparations made for what men thought the hopeless invasion of those
untrodden snows, of the personnel of the party, of their last night and
early morning start at some encampment halfway up; and then, almost
step by step, of the sheer ascent at the last, until, man by man, one
after another, each man stood alone, where two cannot stand together,
on that little triangle of rock which is the summit. “And I looked down
into Swisserland.” As I heard him utter these simple words of triumph,
I said that Mr. Lowell might take credit to himself for bringing before
our audience the noblest and best specimen, so far discovered, of that
greatest species of mammalia—long studied, but as yet little known—of
the very finest type, from the widely scattered genus of the race of
MAN.
The simplicity of Agassiz’s mode of address captivated all hearers. He
put himself at once in touch with the common-school teachers. He had
none of that absurd conceit which has sometimes parted college
professors from sympathetic work with their brothers and sisters who
have the first duty, in the district and town schools, in the infinite
work of instruction and education.
Agassiz’s Cambridge life brought into Cambridge a good many of his
European friends, and broke up the strictness of a village coterie by
the accent, not to say the customs, of cosmopolitan life. To say true,
the denizens of the forest sometimes intermixed closely with the
well-trained European scholars. There used to be a fine story of a
dinner-party at Dr. Arnold Guyot’s when he lived at Cambridge. An
admiring friend had sent Guyot as a present a black bear, which was
confined in the cellar of his house. Another friend had sent him a
little barrel of cider, which was also in the cellar. As the dinner
went on upstairs, ominous rumblings were heard below, and suddenly an
attendant rushed in on the feast, announcing that the bear had got
loose, had been drinking the cider, had got drunk, and was now coming
upstairs. The guests fled through windows and doors. I am not sure that
Lowell was one of them, but the anecdote belongs in notices of his
friends.
I should not dare speak of a “village coterie,” nor intimate that at
Cambridge there were men who had never heard of Fujiyama, or of places,
indeed, not twenty miles away, but that these anecdotes belong a
generation and more ago.
One of Lowell’s fellow professors told me this curious story, which
will illustrate the narrowness of New England observation at that time.
There appeared at Cambridge in the year 1859 a young gentleman named
Robert Todd Lincoln, who has been already quoted, and is quite well
known in this country and in England. This young man wished to enter
Harvard College, and his father, one Abraham Lincoln, who has since
been known in the larger world, had fortified him with a letter of
introduction to Dr. Walker, the president of the college. This letter
of introduction was given by one Stephen A. Douglas, who was a person
also then quite well known in political life, and he presented the
young man to Dr. Walker as being the son of his friend Abraham Lincoln,
“with whom I have lately been canvassing the State of Illinois.” When
this letter, now so curious in history, was read, Lowell said to my
friend who tells me the story, “I suppose I am the only man in this
room who has ever heard of this Abraham Lincoln; but he is the person
with whom Douglas has been traveling up and down in Illinois,
canvassing the State in their new Western fashion, as representatives
of the two parties, each of them being the candidate for the vacant
seat in the Senate.” What is more, my friend says it is probably true
that at the moment when this letter was presented by young Robert
Lincoln, none of the faculty of Harvard College, excepting Lowell, had
ever heard of Abraham Lincoln. The story is a good one, as showing how
far it was in those days possible for a circle of intelligent men to
know little or nothing of what was happening in the world beyond the
sound of their college bell.[9]
It would be almost of course that, in a series of reminiscences which
are not simply about Lowell but about his friends, I should include
some careful history of the Saturday Club, which has held its regular
meetings up to this time from the date of the dinner-party given by Mr.
Phillips, as already described in the history of the “Atlantic.” But
that story has been so well told by Mr. Morse in his memoir of Dr.
Holmes, and by Mr. Cooke in the “New England Magazine,” that I need
hardly do more than repeat what has been said before. In Morse’s “Life
of Dr. Holmes” there are two pages of admirably well-selected pictures
of some of the members best known. When the reader sees the names of
gentlemen who have attended the club more or less regularly in forty
years, he will readily understand why Emerson and Holmes and Lowell and
others of their contemporaries have spoken of the talk there as being
as good talk as they had ever heard anywhere. Holmes’s list, besides
himself, was Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Motley, Whipple,
Whittier, Professors Agassiz and Peirce; John Sullivan Dwight, Governor
Andrew, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and Charles Sumner, Presidents Felton
and Eliot, Professors Norton and Goodwin, William Hickling Prescott,
Thomas Gold Appleton, John Murray Forbes, John Elliot Cabot, Henry
James, William Dean Howells, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, William Morris
Hunt, Charles Francis Adams, Francis Parkman, James Freeman Clarke,
Judge Lowell, Judge Hoar, George Frisbie Hoar, and Bishop Brooks.
[Illustration: CHARLES ELIOT NORTON]
One of the last times when I saw Lowell and Emerson together was on the
18th of July, 1867, when Emerson delivered his second Phi Beta Kappa
address. It had never happened before, I think, that the same orator
should have spoken twice before Phi Beta Kappa with an interval of
thirty years between the orations; nor is it probable that such a thing
will ever happen again. In 1837 the word Transcendentalist was new, and
it was considered “good form” to ridicule the Transcendentalists, and
especially to ridicule Emerson. Yet he had his admirers then,
especially his admirers in college, where the recollections of his
poetry and philosophy, as shown when he was an undergraduate, had not
died out. A few years ago I printed his two Bowdoin prize
dissertations, written when he was seventeen and eighteen years of age,
and they are enough to show that the boy, at that age, was father of
the man. When he spoke in 1837, the oration was received in a certain
patronizing way by his seniors. Mr. Cabot says, “He was regarded as a
promising young beginner, from whom a fair poetical speech might be
expected,” and the address was spoken of with a gay badinage such as
could not be called criticism. I remember, at the frugal dinner-party
of Phi Beta Kappa after the oration of 1837, Mr. Edward Everett, who
was an enthusiastic Cambridge man and college man and Phi Beta man,
said with perfect good nature of the Transcendentalists, that their
utterances seemed to him to be compounded like the bolts of Jupiter,—
“Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosæ
Addiderant, rutili tres ignis, et alitis Austri,”
and made this extempore translation:—
“Three parts were raging fire, and three were whelming water,
But three were thirsty cloud, and three were empty wind!”
Emerson was too young and too modest, and had too much real regard and
respect for Everett, to make the reply which one thinks of now:
“Whatever the bolts were made of, they were thunderbolts; and from
Vulcan’s time to this time, people had better stand out from under when
a thunderbolt is falling.” I can see Emerson now, as he smiled and was
silent.
After thirty years people did not say much about “thirsty cloud” or
“empty wind.” Emerson was in the zenith of his fame. He was “the Buddha
of the West,”—that is Doctor Holmes’s phrase. He was “the Yankee
Plato,”—I believe that is Lowell’s. And Phi Beta made amends for any
vague questioning in the past by the enthusiasm with which it received
him for the second time.
A queer thing happened on that morning. Emerson had a passion to the
last for changing the order of his utterances. He would put the tenth
sheet in place of the fifth, and the fifth in place of the fifteenth,
up to the issue of the last “extra” of an oration. It was Miss Ellen
Emerson, I think, who took upon herself the duty of putting these
sheets in order on this occasion, and sewing them so stiffly together
that they could not be twitched apart by any sudden movement at the
desk. But the fact that they were sewed together was an embarrassment
to him. What was worse was that he met his brother, William Emerson,
that morning. I think they looked over the address together, and in
doing so it happened that Waldo Emerson took William Emerson’s glasses
and William took Waldo’s. Waldo did not discover his error till he
stood in the pulpit before the assembly. Worse than either, perhaps,
some too careful janitor had carried away the high desk from the pulpit
of the church, and had left Emerson, tall and with the wrong
spectacles, to read the address far below his eyes. It was not till the
first passage of the address was finished that this difficulty of the
desk could be rectified; but the whole audience was in sympathy with
him, and the little hitch, if one may call it so, which this made
seemed only to bring them closer together.
The address will be found in the eighth volume of his works, and will
be remembered by every one who heard it; but, on the whole, what
impresses me the most in memory is the hearty thoroughness and
cordiality of Lowell’s congratulations when Emerson turned round after
finishing the oration. “_Par nobile fratrum_,” as one said; and one
felt glad to have seen two such men together on such a day. Lowell
himself said of it, a few days later:—
“Emerson’s oration was more disjointed than usual even with him. It
began nowhere and ended everywhere; and yet, as always with that
divine man, it left you feeling that something beautiful had passed
that way, something more beautiful than anything else, like the
rising and setting of stars. Every possible criticism might have been
made on it, except that it was not noble. There was a tone in it that
awakened all elevating associations. He boggled, he lost his place,
he had to put on his glasses; but it was as if a creature from some
fairer world had lost his way in our fogs, and it was our fault and
not his. It was chaotic, but it was all such stuff as stars are made
of, and you could not help feeling that if you waited awhile all that
was nebulous would be hurled into planets, and would assume the
mathematical gravity of system. All through it I felt something in me
that cried, ‘Ha, ha! to the sound of trumpets!’”
On the 9th of July, 1872, Lowell and Mrs. Lowell sailed for Europe,
without any plans, as he himself says. They remained abroad two years.
They landed in England, but early in the winter he established himself,
for six months as it proved, in Paris. They were in a nice little hotel
there, where he is still remembered cordially,—the Hotel de France et
Lorraine. Here they lived quietly from November to the next summer.
He was in Paris in the last years of M. Thiers. The interests of
politics centred on the relations between President Thiers and the
Commission of Thirty,—long since, I am afraid, forgotten by this
reader. Lowell writes of Thiers’s resignation, which closed his long
career of public life, “I think it was the egotism of Thiers that
overset him rather than any policy he was supposed to have.”
Of this sojourn in Paris a near friend of his gives me the following
pleasant note:—
“In the little office of the Hotel France et Lorraine, Rue de Beaune,
Paris, hangs a fairly good likeness of James Russell Lowell, a large
photograph, I think, taken some years before his death. It is, and
has been for twenty years and more, the presiding presence of the
little sanctum where Madame and Monsieur sit and make out their (very
reasonable) bills and count their gains. The hotel is still a most
attractive retreat for a certain class of us, who like quiet and
comfort without display. Rue de Beaune is a narrow little street
leading off the Quai Voltaire, which runs parallel to the Seine. On
the opposite shore of the river are the fine buildings of the
Tuileries and the Louvre; between flows the steady stream, covered
with little steamers, pleasure-boats, bateaux-mouches, tugs. The
great Pont-Royal crosses the river, very near Rue de Beaune, to the
Rue des Pyramides through the gardens of the Tuileries. It is one of
the prettiest though not the gayest parts of Paris. The bridge and
adjoining streets are crowded with life on foot and on omnibus; but
take one step into Rue de Beaune, and you find silence, peace, and
repose.
“In the winter of 1872-73 Mr. and Mrs. Lowell were living at this
modest but well-known hotel, in its grandest apartments _au premier_.
Somewhat dark and dingy even then, more so now, but neat and
comfortable. The house must be very old. It is built round a little
_cour_, or rather two little courts; and a winding staircase leads up
through the principal part to the landings of the several stories.
There were two parlors, if I remember, communicating. The walls were
lined with bookcases, filled with Mr. Lowell’s books, and other
furniture of the cosy, comfortable order, when they established
themselves in these congenial quarters.
“Here they lived, read, wrote, talked, enjoyed themselves. Mr. Lowell
was probably writing something of importance, but he had at that time
no public or official business, no pressing engagements. He was, in
fact, doing just what he pleased all the time. Of course his
acquaintance was large in the American colony and among the best
French society of Paris, but I do not think he troubled himself about
it much. He delighted in prowling about the book-stalls which abound
in the Quai Voltaire, where old rubbish in print is displayed along
the parapet of the river in tempting openness, and where a real
book-worm may rummage and find something really valuable among
apparently hopeless stuff. He loved a quiet little dinner (in their
rooms) _à quatre_, or, still better, _à trois_, where the food was
good enough, and the talk excellent; his cigar came afterwards. Mrs.
Lowell, his sympathetic and congenial companion, sat smiling and
interested at such times, like the proper wife of a good talker, not
talking much herself, but showing in her pleasant, refined face that
she appreciated and enjoyed the fun. Although her health, even then,
was delicate, she was strong enough to share his life and interests.
What they both liked the most was the quiet of their own fireside,
and the unmolested pursuit of literary pleasures, stimulated by all
the resources of the great city, without any parade, or the burden of
a crowd of engagements. They might have been any humdrum couple of
small means, passing the winter in the most delightful city in the
world, with all the resources in themselves of wit, intelligence, and
mutual affection.”
While Lowell was in Europe, King Amadeo, the Italian sovereign of
Spain, abdicated, and the republic of Castelar was born. Lowell was in
Venice in November, 1873, at the time of the Virginius massacre. But he
does not seem to have known, better than any others of his countrymen
in Europe, how near we were to war with the Spanish republic. Yet in
that month Mr. Fish had instructed Mr. Sickles to break off relations
with the Spanish government unless they could reform their Cuban
administration. “If Spain cannot redress these outrages, the United
States will.” Such were the words in his telegram to Madrid of November
15, 1873.
Lowell had once and again visited his old friend William Story in his
residence in Italy. The Storys had visited America in 1865. With Mrs.
Lowell he now had an opportunity to visit them in Rome.
Since Mr. Story went to Rome with his wife in 1847 he had been devoting
himself to sculpture, but he had never forgotten his American friends;
and his light pen kept him in the memory of many of those who did not
see his statues. His Cleopatra had won general approval. When the
Lowells visited Rome in 1873 Story’s Alkestis was new, and Lowell
writes of it with genuine pleasure. “It was so pleasant to be able to
say frankly, ‘You have done something really fine, and which everybody
will like.’ I wonder whether I shall ever give that pleasure to
anybody.” This, observe, dear reader, as late as 1874.
Lowell returned to America in the summer of that year, arriving in
Elmwood on the Fourth of July.
I myself do not believe that a long residence in Europe is of great
help to an American gentleman or lady so far as an estimate of one’s
own country goes. They are apt to read the London “Times’s” view of
America, or that contained in Galignani’s newspaper, or possibly the
Paris edition of the New York “Herald.” These utterances from day to
day are not encouraging; but if they were true and adequate, one need
not complain of discouragement. The truth is, however, that they are
not adequate, and therefore they are not true. For one month when I was
in Europe in 1873 the daily American dispatch in the “Times” was
confined to the fortunes of some wretched Modoc Indians in California,
who were hiding among their rocks and were being killed one by one by
sharpshooters. For the rest there was practically nothing,—nothing
which showed me that brave boys were growing into brave men, that good
girls were growing into pure women, that universities and libraries and
Chautauquas and summer schools were giving a liberal education to half
my country, that merchants were telling the truth and acting the truth,
and inventors were renewing the world.
I go a little out of the way to say this, because I observe that Mr. A.
Lawrence Lowell, in his admirable notice of his cousin’s life, suggests
that his stay in Europe in 1872-73 to a certain extent modified his
notion with regard to America and American politics. Mr. A. Lawrence
Lowell uses the following words:—
“During his stay in Europe Lowell had been distressed at the
condition of politics in this country, and annoyed at the expressions
of contempt for America it had called forth on the other side of the
Atlantic. On his return he was horrified by the lack of indignation
at corruption in public life, for the intense party feeling
engendered by the war was still too strong to permit independent
judgment in politics. He expressed his disgust in a couple of poems
in ‘The Nation,’ called ‘The World’s Fair’ and ‘Tempora Mutantur.’
The verses were not of a high order of poetry, and at first one
regrets that Hosea Biglow did not come out once more to do battle
with the spoils system, as he had with the slave power long ago; but
the subject was not one that made it possible. Among the archaic
sculptures buried on the Acropolis after the sack of Athens by
Xerxes, and recently unearthed, is a fragment of a pediment
representing Hercules and the Hydra. The hero is on all fours
alongside the monster in a cave, a fitting type of the way political
corruption must be fought at the present day. The war with slavery,
like that of Perseus with the dragon, could be waged on wings with a
flashing sword; but the modern reformer must go down on his hands and
knees and struggle with reptiles in the dark.”
[Illustration: THE HALL, ELMWOOD]
Whether Lowell were right or wrong in thinking that a new wave of
Philistinism had overwhelmed the administration of America is of no
great importance to us here. I think he was wrong. I think that the
American people govern America, and that the intrigues or devices of
the men who “run with the machine” are of much less importance than
very young people suppose, who read very poor though very conceited
weekly newspapers. However that may be, this country has received great
advantage from Lowell’s determined interference and interaction in our
politics in the years which followed his return in 1874. So vigorous
were his writings that he was at once recognized as a pure public
leader. I have always found that the “machine” is eager to join hands
with any man of literary, inventive, or business ability who is
willing, as the phrase is, to “go into politics.” Certainly this was so
in Lowell’s case, and in the autumn of 1876 he was asked to take a seat
in Congress which we call in Massachusetts the South Middlesex seat. It
was the seat which Edward Everett had captured years before, in the
face of the machine of his time. It was the seat which William Everett
afterwards captured, by fine audacity, although he was not even a
resident in the district. Lowell might have gone to the Congress of
1877 if he had chosen. He declined the position, estimating correctly
his abilities and inabilities as a member of a legislative body, “as it
seems to me.” But, with the same desire to show that men of character
and ability were interested in the Republican party, the nominating
convention made him an elector for the presidency.
It was in the famous election after which Hayes was declared to be
President by the electoral commission. I will say in passing that, as
acting president of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, it had been
my business to see to the transfer of two or three thousand voters from
the North into Florida in the years after the rebellion, and that it
was no matter of surprise to me, therefore, that the electoral
commission pronounced that Florida had given a Republican vote. I
believe Florida would give such a vote to-day, if there were any chance
of its being counted.
When it was clear that the election of Mr. Hayes would depend on a
single ballot in the electoral college, there were intriguers so mean
as to suggest that possibly Mr. Lowell might be persuaded—I suppose by
considerations which such men understand better than I do—to give a
vote for Mr. Tilden. Any such hopes as these Mr. Lowell very promptly
suppressed, as such a man can. That little correspondence, however,
called attention to his name, even in the somewhat dark council
chambers of the people who distrust “them littery fellers.”
Fortunately for America also, in all turns of our politics there has
been the same sense of the value of literature and of the sphere of men
of letters which has given the world about all the good diplomacy which
the world has ever had. Somewhat as Franklin was sent to France because
the French had heard of him before, quite as Motley was sent to Vienna
because he knew something about history and could speak the language of
Germany, exactly as Mr. Irving had been sent to Spain as our minister,
the new administration made advances to Mr. Lowell to ask him if he
would not represent us at one of the European courts.
The following notes may be published now, for the study of annalists,
as most of the people who are referred to are dead:—
(April 13, 1876.) “What I meant to say was that if, when the Russian
embassy was offered me, it had been the English instead, I should
have hesitated before saying no. But with the salary cut down as it
is now, I couldn’t afford to take it, for I could not support it
decently.”
(April 19, 1876.) “I return Mr. Fish’s letter. There is no more
chance of their sending me to St. James’s than to the moon, though I
might not be unwilling to go. On the old salary I might manage, and
it might do my health good. I have little doubt that it was offered
to L. with the understanding that he would decline. I have not seen
him for a few days. But it is too large a plum for anybody not
‘inside politics.’ It is the only mission where the vernacular
sufficeth. Meanwhile, you will be amused to hear that I am getting
inside politics after a fashion. I shall probably head the delegation
from our ward to the state convention.”
Four foreign missions were offered him. He declined all, but in
declining said, perhaps without much thought, that if they had offered
him the mission to Spain, he would have gone. Mr. Evarts was Secretary
of State, and it may readily be imagined that he was able “to manage
it.” And so it was that this professor in Harvard College, who had kept
his eyes so far open that he knew of the existence of Abraham Lincoln
in 1860, was appointed to represent the United States in Spain.
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