MINISTER TO ENGLAND
Mr. Lowell had declined the suggestion that he should go to England
when Mr. Hayes’s administration came in. But one need not say that when
he now determined to go to England, he went there with the pleasure
with which every one of our race visits what we still call the “mother
country.” His ancestry, his education, and the studies in which he had
taken the very broadest interest, all made him love England.
He was an American through and through, and, as his own celebrated
address, which I shall speak of again, showed to the world, he
comprehended democracy in its possibilities, in its future, and in its
present better than almost any man of his time. He was better able to
show it to the leaders of the feudal communities in which he lived,
better than any other American who could have been chosen. For all
this,—it would be better to say because of this,—he went and came in
England with that sort of delight which Mr. Edward Everett fifty years
before described so well:—
“An American looks at Westminster Abbey and Stratford-on-Avon with an
enthusiasm which the Englishman laughs at as a sort of provincial
rawness.”
This enthusiasm of the American in England is so genuine that one may
not speak with adequate contempt of the sneers with which banished
Irishmen ridiculed it, when they had occasion to speak of Mr. Lowell
while he stayed in the home of his ancestors.
As minister to England Mr. Lowell rendered essential service to his
country. His firmness, serenity, courtesy, and diligence enabled him to
keep on the best terms with the members of the English cabinet with
whom he had to do. He was to a remarkable degree, as we shall see, a
favorite with all classes of the English people. He satisfied the
administration of President Hayes, who sent him. He did not satisfy the
more talkative leaders of the Irish-Americans, who, to use a happy
phrase of his, were like an actor who “takes alternately the characters
of a pair of twins who are never seen on the stage simultaneously.”
But nobody could have satisfied them. They were in a false position,—so
false that even diplomacy of the old fashion could not have satisfied
it. No man can serve two masters, and no man can be a citizen of two
nations at the same time. So those gentlemen found out who, while, as
Irishmen, they pressed the Irish people to revolt, fell back under the
ægis of America when they got into trouble. For the others, for those
who had really made themselves Americans, and meant to remain such, Mr.
Lowell was more than the advocate. He was their fearless guardian. And
in such guardianship he was always successful. Here, let it be said,
first and last, he knew nothing of the morals of that diplomacy of the
older fashion. He might have directed a dispatch wrong, so that Lord
Granville should read what was meant for Mr. Evarts, and Mr. Evarts
what was meant for Lord Granville, and no harm would have been done.
That was his way,—as, be it said, it is the way of gentlemen, and, in
general, of our national negotiations.
At the same time Lowell made friends in England among all classes of
people. For a generation the line of American ministers had generally
been good. From time to time we sent one or two fools there, usually to
get them out of the way of home aspirations and ambitions. But Mr.
Everett, Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Bancroft, Mr. Adams, Mr. Welsh, and Mr.
Motley were all conscientious, intelligent gentlemen, who really were
as much interested in English history and English literature as
Englishmen were, and “really, you know, they spoke English very well,
with almost no accent, you know.”
Diplomacy, and the whole business of ambassadory, is, in fact, about as
much out of place in our time as chain mail is, or as orders of
precedence are. But people of sense try to make a new diplomacy in
which each nation can approach, not the government of the other, but
the people. Mr. Lowell, who could think on his feet, who could speak
well in public, who had always something to say, and who, indeed, liked
to say it, had a real “calling” in this line. In his English stay he
made several public speeches which did more good than any “state
paper,” so called, could have done. In private society he was a
favorite, as he was everywhere. In 1882 somebody told me in London the
story of an invitation which Lord Granville, the foreign minister, had
sent him. Lord Granville, in a friendly note, asked him to dinner,
saying at the same time that he knew how foolish it was to give such
short notice “to the most engaged man in London.” Lowell replied that
“the most engaged man is glad to dine with the most engaging.”
Also, London is an excellent place in which to study, and to learn
without studying. And, from the first, Lowell enjoyed London and
England. Mrs. Lowell was able sometimes to receive her friends, and
even to bear the fatigue of a reception at court, and of presenting to
the queen American ladies who visited London. She made herself most
welcome in the circle, not large, whom she was able to meet in that
way. The delicacy of her health, however, prevented her husband from
attempting the more public social functions of hospitality, of that
kind that consists mostly in calling people together to dinners or
evening parties. But he was, all the same, cordial to all comers from
his own nation, ready and successful in promoting their object, while,
as has been said, he was at ease among all classes in England. His
holidays, if we may call them so, were spent privately in visits with
friends, and for six or seven summers in Whitby,—the Whitby of
“Marmion,” in the north of England,—a place of which he was very fond.
[Illustration: WHITBY]
He was presented and began on his formal duties in the winter of
1881–82. His stay in England lasted until June 10, 1885. Mrs. Lowell
had died in February of that year.
The first important matter in his negotiations was connected with the
Irish disaffection. Most general readers to-day will have forgotten
that an insurrection, or plan of insurrection, attributed to the Fenian
organization, had disturbed Ireland and frightened England not long
before. The name Fenian was taken from Fein McCoil, the _Fin_-gal of
Ossian. Lowell, who could never resist a pun which had any sense in it,
called the Fenians _Fai-néants_, which, as it proved, was fair enough,
except that they and theirs kept their English masters in alarm. I was
talking with a Liberal in England in May, 1873, and he said, “Why, if
you had landed in Ireland, you would have been in jail by this time.” I
asked what was the matter with me. He said that my crush hat and my
broad-toed shoes would have convicted me. Now the shoes had been bought
in Bristol, only three days before, and I said so. “Bristol? were they?
Well, they knew you were a Yankee.” That is to say, any one who looked
like an outsider had to run his chances with the Irish constables of
the time.
Among others who were less fortunate than I, Henry George was arrested.
He was as innocent as I, and was at once released, with proper
apologies.
The view which Lowell took, and the dilemma in which his Irish clients
acted, and even went to prison, are well explained in a dispatch from
which I will make a few short extracts. The whole collection of
dispatches shows the extreme unwillingness of Lord Granville to give
offense in America:—
MR. LOWELL TO THE AMERICAN SECRETARY.
March 14, 1882. (Received March 27.)
In concluding this dispatch I may be permitted to add that I have had
repeated assurances from the highest authority that there would be
great reluctance in arresting a naturalized citizen of the United
States, were he known to be such. But it is seldom known, and those
already arrested have acted in all respects as if they were Irishmen,
sometimes engaged in trade, sometimes in farming, and sometimes
filling positions in the local government. This, I think, is
illustrated by a phrase in one of Mr. Hart’s letters, to the effect
that he never called himself an American. He endeavors, it is true,
in a subsequent letter, to explain this away as meaning American
born; but it is obviously absurd that a man living in his native
village should need to make any such explanation. Naturalized
Irishmen seem entirely to misconceive the process through which they
have passed in assuming American citizenship, looking upon themselves
as Irishmen who have acquired a right to American protection, rather
than as Americans who have renounced a claim to Irish nationality.
Simply, the view he sustained is that which he laid down in two letters
written to Mr. Barrows, to be read to one of these prisoners, from
which here are a few extracts. They embody briefly the established
policy of our government:—
“The principles upon which I have based my action in all cases of
applications to me from naturalized citizens now imprisoned in
Ireland under the ‘Coercion’ Act are those upon which our government
has acted, and in case of need would act again. I think it important
that all such persons should be made to understand distinctly that
they cannot be Irishmen and Americans at the same time, as they now
seem to suppose, and that they are subject to the operation of the
laws of the country in which they choose to live.”
In another letter he says:—
“If British subjects are being arrested for no more illegal acts than
those which the prisoner is charged with having committed, or of the
intention to commit which he is justly suspected, it seems that,
however arbitrary and despotic we may consider the ‘Coercion’ Act to
be, we are, nevertheless, bound to submit in silence to the action
taken under it by the authorities even against our own fellow
citizens.
“It should be observed that this act is a law of the British
Parliament, the legitimate source and final arbiter of all law in
these realms, and that, as it would be manifestly futile to ask the
government here to make an exception on behalf of an American who had
brought himself within the provisions of any law thus sanctioned, so
it would be manifestly unbecoming in a diplomatic representative,
unless by express direction of his superiors, to enter upon an
argument with the government to which he is accredited as to the
policy of such a law or the necessarily arbitrary nature of its
enforcement.”
That neither he nor the American government was hard on the “suspects”
appears from several letters, of which this illustrates the tenor:—
TO OUR CONSUL AT LIMERICK.
You will please see without delay John McInerny and Patrick Slattery,
suspects claiming to be American citizens and confined in Limerick
jail, and say to each of them that “in case he should be liberated
you have authority to pay him forty pounds sterling for his passage
to the United States,” for which sum you may draw upon me at sight.
This sort of correspondence ended in May, 1882. The following letter
was practically the end of it.
TO MR. FRELINGHUYSEN.
Meanwhile it is nearly certain that all the suspects, except those
charged with crimes of violence, will be very shortly set at liberty,
thus rendering nugatory the most effective argument in favor of
disorder and resistance to the law.
To turn from such correspondence to his frank relations with the people
of England, it is interesting to see how readily he accepted the modern
theory of American diplomacy. This makes the foreign minister the
representative not only of the administration, but of every individual
among the people. It recognizes the people as indeed the sovereign. In
this view, for instance, the American minister has to place rightly the
inquiries of every person in the United States who thinks that there is
a fortune waiting for him in the custody of the Court of Chancery. In
such cases the American citizen addresses “his minister” directly. On a
large scale the foreign minister has the same sort of correspondence as
the “domestic minister” at home, of whose daily mail half is made up of
the inquiries of people who have not an encyclopædia, a directory, or a
dictionary, or, having them, find it more easy to address the clergyman
whose name they first see in the newspaper. They turn to him to ask
what was the origin of the Aryan race, or what is meant by the fourth
estate.
The reader who has not delved into the diplomatic correspondence does
not readily conceive of the range of subjects which thus come under the
attention of an American minister abroad, in the present habit, which
unites the old diplomacy and the formality of old centuries with the
hustling end-of-the-century practice, in which every citizen enjoys the
attention of the minister. In Lowell’s case subjects as various as the
burial of John Howard Payne’s body, the foot-and-mouth disease in
cattle, the theological instruction in the schools of Bulgaria, the
assisted emigration to America of paupers from Ireland, and the
nationality of Patrick O’Donnell occupy one year’s correspondence.
Those of us who think that the old diplomacy is as much outside modern
life as chain mail is, or the quintessences of old chemistry, might
well take the body of John Howard Payne as an object-lesson.
(1) John Howard Payne wrote “Home Sweet Home.”
(2) 1852. He died and was buried in Tunis, where he represented the
United States.
(3) 1882. Mr. W.W. Corcoran thought he should like to bury his body in
America, with a proper monument.
(4) October. Mr. Corcoran asks the coöperation of Mr. Frelinghuysen,
our Secretary of State.
(5) October. Mr. Frelinghuysen writes to Mr. Lowell to ask for the
intervention of the British government, because we have no
representative in Tunis.
(6) November. Mr. Lowell writes to Lord Granville, the English foreign
secretary.
(7) November. Lord Granville bids Mr. Lister attend to it.
(8) November. Mr. Lister writes to Mr. Reade and to Mr. Lowell to say
he has done so.
(9) January, 1883. Mr. Lowell writes to Mr. Frelinghuysen to say how
far they have all got.
(10) January. Mr. Frelinghuysen writes to Mr. Lowell to ask that the
body may be sent to Marseilles.
(11) January. Mr. Lowell writes this to Lord Granville.
(12) January. Lord Granville telegraphs to Mr. Reade at Tunis, and
writes to Mr. Lowell that he has done so.
Meanwhile they become impatient at Washington, and the Assistant
Secretary telegraphs:—
January 2. “Have you received news from Tunis relative to Payne’s
remains?”
Mr. Lowell telegraphs back, much as if it were the answer in the “Forty
Thieves:”—
January 3. “Not yet, but presently.”
On the same day, apparently, or
January 1. Lord Granville receives a telegram from Tunis, to say that
all has been done, and that the remains would be shipped to Marseilles.
January 6. Mr. Reade explains all to Lord Granville, and also to Mr.
Taylor. Every one was present at the disinterment who should have been.
January 12. Mr. Lowell thanks Lord Granville and Mr. Currie and Mr.
Reade and all the other officials.
February 9. Mr. Frelinghuysen asks Mr. Lowell to thank everybody; and
it is to be presumed he does so.
Very well. This required a good deal of red tape. But it was very nice
of Mr. Corcoran to put a monument to the poet of “Home,” and somebody
must do something.
It is interesting to see how wide are the consequences of such
courtesies, and how important they may be.
Lowell really wanted to serve the American people, and any intelligent
question addressed to him found a courteous and intelligent reply. It
would not be difficult to give a hundred instances, and if any of the
diplomats of to-day sometimes groan under the burden of such
correspondence, let me encourage them by copying an autograph letter of
his which a friend has sent to me this morning. A public-spirited
gentleman in Minnesota had determined that there should be a school of
forestry in that State. He knew there was such a school in India at
Dehradun. He wanted the report of that school, and so he sent to the
United States legation in London to ask for it. Here is Mr. Lowell’s
reply, and it is interesting to know from Mr. Andrews that it was of
real service in the establishment of the first school of forestry of
America:—
LEGATION OF THE UNITED STATES,
LONDON, March 10, 1882.
DEAR SIR,—On receiving your letter of the 17th of February I at once
wrote to Lord Hartington, who the next day sent me the report, which
I now have the pleasure of forwarding to you, and especially if it
helps you in awakening public opinion to the conservation of our
forests ere it be too late. I foresee a time when our game and forest
laws will be Draconian in proportion to their present culpable laxity.
Faithfully yours,
J.R. LOWELL.
Hon. C.C. ANDREWS.
A foreign minister of America once said to me that Diplomacy meant
Society, and Society Diplomacy. He meant that the important things are
done in personal conversation between man and man, as they sip their
coffee after a dinner-party, perhaps. The conclusions thus arrived at
get themselves put into form afterwards in dispatches. In this view of
diplomacy it was fortunate for all parties that Mr. Lowell and Lord
Granville were the correspondents who had American affairs in hand,
from such “emblems” as the American flag on Lord Mayor’s Day round to
the nationality of Mr. O’Connor. Fortunate, because the two liked each
other.
Lord Granville’s term of office as foreign secretary was almost the
same as Lowell’s as American minister. Granville came in with the
Gladstone ministry in April, 1882, and he went out of office with them
in 1885. Lowell’s personal relations with him were those of great
intimacy. He not only regarded Lord Granville with cordial respect, but
knew him as an intimate friend. In 1886 he visited Lord Granville at
Holmbury, at a time when Mr. Gladstone was also visiting there. “I saw
Gladstone the other day, and he was as buoyant (_boy_ant) as when I
stayed with him at Holmbury, just before he started for Scotland. I
think the Fates are with him, and that the Tories will have to take up
Home Rule where he left it.”
Lord Granville was very young when he entered Parliament, as Mr.
Levison Gower, member for Morpeth. He is said to have regretted the
change of work in the House of Lords when he became Lord Granville. In
1859, when he was not forty-five years old, the queen asked him to form
a cabinet, and in 1880 she consulted him with the same view again; but
he did not become chief of the ministry at either time. He served under
Lord Palmerston and under Mr. Gladstone, as he had done under Lord John
Russell. He was, while he lived, the leader of the Liberals in the
House of Lords, always in the minority, whatever the policy of the
hour, but always cordial, amiable, and conciliatory. On Gladstone’s
retirement in 1878 he was spoken of as the real leader of the Liberal
party. It is said of him that he always kept a friend who was once a
friend,—that he was willing to yield small points in controversy rather
than to keep a quarrel in existence, and always “sacrificed his
personal interests to those of his party.”
Such a man is a friend whom one likes to have; and such a character
gives point to Lowell’s joke, which I have cited, which calls him the
most engaging man in London. I remember with pleasure the first time I
saw him. He was acting as chancellor of the University of London—as
long ago as 1873. He was presenting the diplomas to those who had
passed the examinations for degrees of that university. This means that
two or three hundred young men, from all parts of Great Britain, were
presented to him, by the heads of perhaps twenty different colleges, to
receive this distinction. Now, such a formality may be merely a
function, as stupid to see as stupid to go through. In this case there
was genuine personal contact between the chancellor and the neophyte.
As each one of those youths, proud or timid, came up, and as Lord
Granville gave the diploma to each, he detained him, for the moment, by
some personal word or inquiry,—such as you could guess the man who was
entering life would always remember. With such a man Lowell would be
sure to be on sympathetic terms. And I suppose they met each other, or
were in close correspondence, almost every day in the “season.”
But Lowell was not only the minister from the people; he was a
messenger to the people. And he had sense enough and historical
knowledge enough to know that since there has been an America on the
western side of the Atlantic, the people of England—the rank and
file—have been in sympathy with the thought and feeling and purposes of
that American people. When my brother Charles was in London in 1863,
and the English government was acting, on the whole, as badly as it
dared toward the United States, a member of the cabinet said to him one
day, “The clubs are against you, Mr. Hale, but the people of England
are with you.” This was true then; it was true in the American
Revolution; it was true in Cromwell’s time,—he has no title which is
more sure than that of the “Friend of New England.” The same thing is
true to-day.
Now, Lowell never said to himself, “Go to, I will address myself to the
people of Great Britain,” or, “The people of Great Britain is one
thing, and the clubs of London another.” But because he was the man he
was, he was always glad to meet the people and the men of the people,
and let them really know what America is. It is not the America of
interviewers, of excursionists, of _nouveaux riches_ millionaires, or
of namby-pamby philanthropists attendant on international conventions.
These are the individuals whom the people of England are most apt to
see. But the people of America, at home, have wider interests than
theirs, and affairs more important than they have. Lowell felt this in
every fibre of his life, and if the Workingmen’s College in London, or
some public meeting at Birmingham, or a Coleridge monument, gave him a
chance to give to the people of England his notion of what the people
of America are, and have in hand, why, he was most glad to do so.
This is no place in which to describe or discuss his successes as a
public speaker in England. It was a matter of course that, as soon as
he spoke once, whoever heard him would be glad to hear him again; and
he must have had proposals without number for his assistance in public
dinners, at the unveiling of monuments, and in addresses of wider range
and of more permanent importance.
In the two volumes of admirable memoirs of English life which Mr.
Smalley has published, one chapter is given quite in detail to the
description of Lowell’s remarkable welcome among Englishmen of every
degree. In that chapter, which I suppose is made from one or two
letters published at the time, Mr. Smalley quotes “The Spectator,” as
saying that Englishmen, whether they knew Mr. Lowell or not, looked on
him as a personal friend.
Of all the various addresses which contributed, each in its place, to
his reputation as a public speaker, that which I have alluded to, which
was delivered at Birmingham, on “Democracy,” is the most remarkable. It
has, indeed, become a classic. It deserves its reputation; and it
undoubtedly states with careful accuracy Lowell’s foundation feeling as
to the institutions of this country, and what may be expected if
democracy is fairly understood and fairly applied. No one who was
familiar with him or with his letters, or had really studied his more
serious poems, will regard any of the utterances in this great address
as being new. They were the words of a careful scholar who was born
under favorable circumstances in the midst of democracy admirably well
applied. His training was all the better because the original people of
Massachusetts are, so to speak, democratic in their origin and in the
habit of their thought, without having formed many abstract theories on
the subject, and being always, indeed, quite indifferent as to what the
speculative theory might be.
An American minister abroad must not be often or long absent from his
post. But there are methods by which four fortnights of permitted
absence may be added together, and your outing taken at once. In some
way Lowell was thus free for a tour through the Continent to Italy in
the autumn of 1881. In Italy he and Story and Mr. Richard Dana met.
Dana was at the Wells School with him when they were little boys, and
in Italy they had that most agreeable of companions, Mr. John W. Field.
Dana died the next winter, and Lowell writes to Field, “The lesson for
us is to close up”—“if a year or two older than I, he belonged more
immediately to my own set, and I had known him life long.”
In the summer of 1882, returning from Spain to America, I spent a
month in London. I told Lowell one day that I was one of the
“round-the-world” correspondents of the Murray Dictionary, and that I
wanted to call on Dr. Murray. He said he had been trying to do the
same thing, and proposed to take me,—an invitation which, of course,
I accepted.
The reader ought to know that the Oxford Dictionary, now nearly half
finished, was undertaken forty-one years ago,—as early as 1857. The
first suggestion was made by Dean Trench, and, at the vote of the
Philological Society, several hundred readers agreed to contribute
notes made in their reading of English books, for the materials of such
a dictionary. After twenty-one years some specimen pages were prepared
from the notes collected by such readers, and submitted by Dr. Murray
to the Clarendon Press in Oxford. Dr. Murray is now known through the
English-speaking world for his charge of this magnificent work, which,
I think, men will always call “Murray’s Dictionary.”
The directors of the Clarendon Press agreed to assume the immense cost
and charge of publication, and in 1888 the first volume of the great
series, now as far forward as H and I, appeared. The contributors’
names make a very valuable list of people interested in good English.
And the volumes thus far published are the treasury to which all other
dictionary-makers rush as their great storehouse of materials.
For the purpose of systematic coöperation, each reader was prepared
with formal printed blanks. Each of these was to have, as far as his
special reading showed, the history of one word. That word in large
letters was the head of the completed blank. The reader is not
necessarily an authority in language. He is a scout or truffle-dog who
brings the result of his explorations to the authorities for comparison
with other results.
Mill Hill, where the dictionary was then—shall I say manufactured?—is
about ten miles, more or less, from the house which Lowell lived in. As
we entered the cab which was to take us, he said that he should bid the
cabby carry us through the back of the Park, a region which I had never
seen. I have been amused since to see how many traveling Americans can
say the same thing. Lowell evidently knew its turns and corners and
bosks and deserts well. Ragged, barefoot boys were playing cricket in
their improvised way with the most primitive of tools, such as they had
constructed from the spoils of the streets. No policeman bade them
leave the place, no sign intimated that they were to keep off the
grass; an admirable loafers’ paradise for the real children of the
public, such as there is not in our tidy Common in Boston, and such as
I never saw in the Central Park of New York. It was pleasant to see how
thoroughly at home Lowell was there. To such retreats in London he
alludes again and again in his letters: “I have only to walk a hundred
yards from my door to be in Hyde Park, where, and in Kensington
Gardens, I can tread on green turf and hear the thrushes sing all
winter.... As for the climate, it suits me better than any I have ever
lived in.”
Spare a moment, dear reader, to find what greeted us at the Dictionary
House. I doubt if they have yet invented any such name as Apotheka, or
Powerhouse, or Granary. As why should they, seeing this is the only
such house in the world? A circular house of corrugated iron,
originally built for a church, I believe, perhaps fifty feet in
diameter, perhaps twenty-five feet high, lighted from the top. It
reminded me, at the instant, of the great reading-room of the British
Museum, though not so large. Here was Dr. Murray, the distinguished
director, at work with his staff of gentlemen and ladies. Of course he
was delighted to see Lowell on the spot, and in the simplest and
kindest way he showed us the method of the work.
Every day’s mail brought to this curious temple of language its new
tribute to the history of the English tongue. The slips which I have
tried to describe come from Cranberry Centre and Big Lick, from
Edinburgh and from Hongkong. Once a month each of the thousand or more
readers mails his budgets, so there would be every day a new parcel to
be assorted; and we were ready for them at Mill Hill. Here were twenty
or thirty thousand pamphlet-boxes into which these slips were at once
sorted. The boxes were arranged in alphabetical order, beginning with
that which held the slips of the title word A, and only ending, say,
with box 33,333, with the box of ZYX—if there be so convenient a word
in the English language.
All which I describe in this detail, because I should be glad if the
reader will imagine the gay, bright, wise, and instructive talk which
followed—oh, for an hour, perhaps hours—between Dr. Murray, the first
authority as to English words, and Lowell, the authority most to be
relied on as to the language of New England. It was not far from the
time when Lowell told the Oxford gentlemen at a public dinner that they
spoke English almost as well as their cousins in America. No, I do not
remember what were the words these gentlemen discussed. But each was as
eager as the other. Was it “doddered” or “daddock”? I do not know.
“Miss Mary, will you have the goodness to bring us ‘dodder’?” And Miss
Mary puts up a light ladder to her D O shelf and returns with the
pasteboard box which has five and twenty uses of “dodder” between the
days of Wiclif and Besant, and the two scholars dissect and discuss.
You would think that Lowell had never thought of anything else. And yet
it is the same Lowell who in a quiet corner of Mrs. Leo Hunter’s
to-night will be discussing with Lord Granville the amount and quality
of the theology which the Great Powers shall permit in the secondary
schools of Bulgaria!
I must not try to give any account in detail of the company of literary
men and women whom Lowell found in London. Two careful and interesting
papers by Mr. Bowker, published in “Harper’s” in 1888 and 1889, are
well worth the reader’s attention. From these papers I have made some
lists of people, almost any one of whom you would be glad to have met,
who worked their pens in London, or printed their books there, in those
years. Mr. Bowker himself, as the English representative of “Harper’s,”
was living there, and his personal notes of these people are valuable
as they are entertaining. Of novelists alone he gives a list in which
are these names:—
Wilkie Collins, Richard Doddridge Blackmore, Miss Braddon (Mrs.
Maxwell), Dinah M. Craik, Thomas Hardy, Walter Besant, James Payn,
David Christie Murray, Henry Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson,
Clark Russell.
Take those ten names only, and you say, as a lady once said to me, “Any
one of them would make the fortune of a reception.” But Mr. Bowker’s
next ten do not pale in comparison:—
F.W. Robinson, George Macdonald, George Meredith, W.E. Norris, Mrs.
Ritchie (Anne Thackeray), Mrs. Oliphant, Amelia Blandford Edwards, Mrs.
Elizabeth Lynn Linton, Miss Yonge, and Mrs. Macquoid. Observe, these
twenty are only some of the novelists.
Among other men and women of letters, there are Tennyson, Browning,
Hughes, Bailey, both Morrises, Domett, Taylor, Mallock, Kinglake, our
dear old Martin Tupper, Stephen, Walter H. Pater, Addington Symonds,
Swinburne, Buchanan, the Rossettis, Jean Ingelow, Owen Meredith,
Matthew Arnold, Austin Dobson, Alfred Austin, Coventry Patmore, Gerald
Massey, Max Müller, Spencer, Tyndall and Huxley, Lubbock, and the two
Cardinals, Manning and Newman. Other clergyman are Farrar, Haweis, and
Spurgeon. Besides these, among men who have done more than write books,
there are, in Mr. Bowker’s lists, Froude, McCarthy, and Lecky to
represent history, and Dr. Smith, king of dictionaries. Smiles, the
self-help man, Colvin, and Hamilton are others.
[Illustration: THOMAS HUGHES]
I think I may say that Lowell knew personally all the more
distinguished of the persons in these very interesting groups before he
left London. He formed some very tender friendships among them, and in
the collection of his letters none are more affectionate, none are more
entertaining, than are those to his English friends. Besides those
named in the lists above there are ladies,—Mrs. Stephen, the Misses
Lawrence, Mrs. Clifford; and Gordon, Du Maurier, Lord Dufferin, are
mentioned as people with whom he was in pleasant relations. Lady
Lyttelton was a most intimate friend of Mr. and Mrs. Lowell.
Among other intimate friends, Judge Hughes and Mrs. Hughes. Dr. Hughes,
as every one knows, had been a guest at Elmwood, and Mr. Lowell during
his residence as our minister in England, and in his visits there
afterwards, would have thought a summer wasted indeed if he had not
received the welcome of these dear friends.
With the election of Mr. Cleveland in the autumn of 1884 Lowell knew
that his stay in England would come to a close. For ten or fifteen
years, indeed, he had been in public antagonism to Mr. Blaine, and he
would never have served under him as President in the English legation.
More than this, however, Mrs. Lowell died in the spring of 1885,
unexpectedly, of course, for death is always unexpected. “We had taken
it for granted together that she would outlive me, and that would have
been best.” How many a man and woman have had to say something like
that!
She had been an invalid, with critical ups and downs. But her unfailing
sympathy for him and his work had never yielded, and those who remember
him in the closest intimacies of London life always speak of her with
tenderness. She was almost always shut up at home, and he was
everywhere, among people of all sorts and conditions. But the very
difference of their lives when they were parted seemed to make their
companionship more tender when they were at home.
Of his departure from England, his cousin, Mr. Abbott Lawrence Lowell,
says, with truth:—
“But his usefulness as a minister far transcended the import of any
specific questions that arose. It was his personal presence there,
winning the respect and admiration of the English for all that is
best in America, that was most valuable. Among the many surprises in
Mr. Lowell’s life none is perhaps greater than that, after writing so
bitterly about Mason and Slidell, he should have been instrumental in
soothing the irritation between England and America that arose out of
the civil war; but such is the case, and it is not too much to say
that he did more than any one else towards removing the prejudice
which the upper classes in England had for the United States.”
And Mr. Smalley at the time wrote from London:—
“The announcement of Mr. Lowell’s recall gives rise to many
expressions of regret and good will besides those which appear in the
newspapers. Nor is the expression of good will a new thing. His
writings, his speeches, and his public services had brought him so
close to all English-speaking people that their feeling toward him
was one of affection; in short, there were ninety millions who would
rejoice in any good fortune that befell him, and sympathize with him
in trouble. The solicitude to know whether he was to remain minister
has been general. ‘Will President Cleveland keep Mr. Lowell in
London?’ is the question which every American in London has been
asked over and over again since last November; perhaps twice a day on
an average. And when the inquiring Briton was told that Mr. Lowell
would have to go, the next question generally was, ‘What, then, did
the President mean by Civil Service Reform?’”
What indeed?
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