POLITICS
1874-1877
The Lowells returned at once to Elmwood, which the Aldrich family had
relinquished on the first of July, and were welcomed by Mrs. Burnett and
the first grandson, who had come down from Southborough to greet them.
“He is as strong and good-natured as a young mastiff,” Lowell wrote a
week after his return, to Mr. Hughes. “I am already stupidly in love
with him and miss all day long the tramp tramp of his sturdy feet along
the entry.”
“Thus far,” he writes to Mr. Godkin, 16 July, 1874, “I have nothing to
complain of at home but the heat, which takes hold like a bulldog after
that toothless summer of England, where they have on the whole the best
climate this side of Dante’s terrestrial paradise. The air there always
seems native to my lungs. As for my grandson, he is a noble fellow and
does me great credit. Such is human nature that I find myself skipping
the intermediate generation (which certainly in some obscure way
contributed to his begetting, as I am ready to admit when modestly
argued) and looking upon him as the authentic result of my own loins. I
am going to Southborough to-day on a visit to him, for I miss him
woundily. If you wish to taste the real _bouquet_ of life, I advise you
to procure yourself a grandson, whether by adoption or theft. The cases
of child-stealing one reads of in the newspapers now and then may all, I
am satisfied, be traced to this natural and healthy instinct. A grandson
is one of the necessities of middle life, and may be innocently
purloined (or taken by right of eminent domain) on the _tabula in
naufragio_ principle. Get one, and the _Nation_ will no longer offend
anybody. You will feel at peace with all the world.”
The summer was spent happily in the old familiar home. Lowell had no
impulse to stir. He never could find any reason for escaping to the
resorts in the White Mountains. “Why the deuce people fly to the
mountains before the Last Day,” he wrote to Mr. Aldrich, “I can’t
conceive, but when you get over your insanity and come back to the
breezy plains again (thermometer 70° at half-past eight this morning), I
shall hope to see you. My catbird saved one sonata for the first day of
my home-coming and has been dumb ever since.”
Lowell fell to work at once in his study, giving laborious days to Old
French and Old English and feeling a confidence which he expressed
naïvely by saying that he used a pen instead of a pencil in his notes in
his books. When the college term opened in the fall, he renewed his
connection, walking up and down to his class-room and resuming his
teaching of Dante and Old French. After his death the
[Illustration: _Mr. Lowell in his Study_]
more valuable part of his library came into the possession of the
college either by his bequest[57] or by purchase, and the student having
recourse to these books is constantly reminded of the care with which
Lowell read them, pencil or pen in hand, going over the text as if it
were proof-sheets requiring revision, and jotting down now textual
criticism, now ingenious comparison with words and phrases in other
languages. Sometimes he had two texts by him, and revised one by the
other, sometimes his better knowledge or his mother wit enabled him to
supply emendations to some careless editor’s work. The annotations show
his keen philological interest. A word, whether in Old French, English,
or Yankee was at once a lively image and an article in a museum. He
never tired of pursuing the ancestry or the kin or the progeny of these
winged creatures, and the very wealth of his puns testified to the quick
association which his mind kept up with all the material of
language.[58]
So far as the interpretation of mediæval literature went, Lowell’s
intuitive perception and quick poetic sympathy enabled him to touch into
life what to many scholars was a mere cadaver to be dissected; but in
the historical treatment, and more especially in the comparative method,
he was at the disadvantage of entering upon the study before the great
work had been done in this field. It was probably on this account that
though he covered a good deal of ground in his lectures to his classes,
he did not avail himself of this work for publication.
Besides his academic work, Lowell took up also some writing,
contributing verses during the next few months to the _Atlantic_ and the
_Nation_ and making the last of his studies in great literature in an
article on Spenser. A large part of the pleasure of these papers for him
was the opportunity it gave him for a fresh reading of his author. “I
have been very busy with Spenser,” he writes to Mrs. T. S. Perry, 28
February, 1875, “about whom I hope to have something in the next N. A.
R. I have been reading him _through_ again. It is as good as lying on
one’s back in the summer woods.” To another friend he had written just
before: “I have had a bath of Spenser. Your Turkish are nothing to him.”
It is an illustration of the thoroughness with which he revised his work
that this article on Spenser started as a lecture, but when he came to
turn the lecture into a paper, he retained only a passage or two of the
original form.
He confessed in a letter written in the summer of 1875 that he had
become a quicker writer in verse and slower in prose than when he was
younger. The confession may well have grown out of his experience in
writing the two centennial odes for which he was called on this year,
that “For the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Fight at Concord Bridge,”
and that “Read at Cambridge on the Hundredth Anniversary of Washington’s
Taking Command of the American Army, 3rd July, 1775.” Both were very
nearly improvisations, the former being written in the two days before
the celebration, and the latter at short notice after Dr. Holmes could
not be had. The lyrical character of the Concord ode makes it sing a
little more quickly to the ear of youth, and I think that while there
are in it slight allusions to the dead Hawthorne and Thoreau, there is
also a faint echo of the living Emerson. It would be strange indeed if
Lowell, called thus to celebrate the fight which had already been
celebrated in the noblest patriotic hymn in our literature, had not had
the vision of Emerson before him as he wrote. What Emerson, who must
have been present, said of the ode we do not know, but in a letter
written after “Under the Old Elm” had been delivered and printed, Lowell
quotes his comment on the second Ode. “I went,” he says, “to club on
Saturday and nominated----, whom Emerson seconded. Longfellow was there
and James and Quincy and Dr. Howe and Carter and Charlie L. and I. We
had a very jolly club and good talk. Emerson was tenderly affectionate.
He praised my Cambridge poem, saying that when he began it he said:
‘Why, he hasn’t got his genius on, but presently I found the tears in my
eyes.’”
Into the second Ode Lowell put more thought and rose to the height of
his great theme, for he was able to look at his country from the
vantage-ground of the personality of Washington, and he read in the
great past an augury of the future which for the moment at least did not
vex his anxious mind. “I took advantage of the occasion,” he wrote to a
correspondent who was Southern born, “to hold out a hand of kindly
reconciliation to Virginia. I could do it with the profounder feeling,
that no family lost more than mine by the civil war. Three nephews (the
hope of our race) were killed in one or other of the Virginia battles,
and three cousins on other of those bloody fields.”
In these two odes as well as in the one given on the great centennial
day, the Fourth of July, 1876, Lowell spoke with no uncertain sound
regarding those eternal truths of freedom and country which made
patriotism with him a solemn passion. But so much the more impossible
was it for him to close his eyes to the signs of defection from high
ideals, or his lips when the impulse of speech came to him. In his poem
on Agassiz written while still in Europe and obliged, as he has
elsewhere said, always to be on the defensive, he gave expression to his
deep scorn in a few lines which have not lost their sting, though a
quarter of a century has passed since they were written. No one whose
memory carries him back to the days of Grant’s second administration can
forget the breathless fear of what next might be disclosed, and an
American like Lowell, compelled to read the elegant extracts of
peculation and fraud in high places which the English press in those
days culled as examples of American public life, was even more keenly
impressed than if he were in the midst of it all and could yet brace
himself with the knowledge of better things mingled with these.[59] But
the second stanza of the Agassiz was mild compared with the condensed
bitterness of “The World’s Fair, 1876,” which he printed in the
_Nation_, or the sarcastic arraignment in “Tempora Mutantur,” printed in
the same journal. The longer poem, with its etchings of Tweed and Fisk,
bitten in with an acid that is keener than any used in the “Biglow
Papers,” is preserved in “Heartsease and Rue,” a record of shame that is
wholesomely unpleasant to recall whenever one is disposed to be
complacent. The other was set up for the same volume, but afterward
withdrawn. It could well be spared from Lowell’s works, but has a
stronger claim in a record of his life and character.
THE WORLD’S FAIR, 1876.
Columbia, puzzled what she should display
Of true home-make on her Centennial Day,
Asked Brother Jonathan: he scratched his head,
Whittled a while reflectively, and said,
“Your own invention and own making, too?
Why, any child could tell ye what to do:
Show ’em your Civil Service, and explain
How all men’s loss is everybody’s gain;
Show your new patent to increase your rents
By paying quarters for collecting cents;
Show your short cut to cure financial ills
By making paper collars current bills;
Show your new bleaching-process, cheap and brief,
To wit, a jury chosen by the thief;
Show your State Legislatures; show your Rings;
And challenge Europe to produce such things
As high officials sitting half in sight
To share the plunder and to fix things right.
If that don’t fetch her, why, you only need
To show your latest style in martyrs,--Tweed:
She’ll find it hard to hide her spiteful tears
At such advance in one poor hundred years.”
These verses, as may readily be guessed, brought out wrathful
rejoinders, and Lowell was accused of having made a cheap exchange of
his democratic principles for aristocratic snobberies when absent from
his country. The situation called out a vigorous defence of Lowell in an
article by Mr. Joel Benton, entitled “Mr. Lowell’s Recent Political
Verse,” which was published in _The Christian Union_ of 10 December,
1875. Lowell acknowledged the service in a letter to Mr. Benton which
was printed after Lowell’s death in _The Century Magazine_, November,
1891. It is so valuable a witness to Lowell’s mind that I give it here
again.[60]
_To Joel Benton._
ELMWOOD, January 19, 1876.
DEAR SIR,--I thank you for the manly way in which you put yourself
at my side when I had fallen among thieves, still more for the
fitting and well-considered words with which you confirm and
maintain my side of the quarrel. At my time of life one is not apt
to vex his soul at any criticism, but I confess that in this case I
was more than annoyed, I was even saddened. For what was said was
so childish and showed such shallowness, such levity, and such
dulness of apprehension both in politics and morals on the part of
those who claim to direct public opinion (as, alas! they too often
do) as to confirm me in my gravest apprehensions. I believe “The
World’s Fair” gave the greatest offence. They had not even the wit
to see that I put my sarcasm into the mouth of Brother Jonathan,
thereby implying and meaning to imply that the common-sense of my
countrymen was awakening to the facts, and that _therefore_ things
were perhaps not so desperate as they seemed.
I had just come home from a two years’ stay in Europe, so it was
discovered that I had been corrupted by association with foreign
aristocracies! I need not say to you that the society I frequented
in Europe was what it is at home--that of my wife, my studies, and
the best nature and art within my reach. But I confess that I was
embittered by my experience. Wherever I went I was put on the
defensive. Whatever extracts I saw from American papers told of
some new fraud or defalcation, public or private. It was sixteen
years since my last visit abroad, and I found a very striking
change in the feeling towards America and Americans. An Englishman
was everywhere treated with a certain deference: Americans were at
best tolerated. The example of America was everywhere urged in
France as an argument against republican forms of government. It
was fruitless to say that the people were still sound when the Body
Politic which draws its life from them showed such blotches and
sores. I came home, and instead of wrath at such abominations, I
found banter. I was profoundly shocked; for I had received my
earliest impressions in a community the most virtuous, I believe,
that ever existed.... On my return I found that community
struggling half hopelessly to prevent General Butler from being put
in its highest office against the will of all its best citizens. I
found Boutwell, one of its senators, a chief obstacle to
Civil-Service reform (our main hope).... I saw Banks returned by a
larger majority than any other member of the lower house.... In the
Commonwealth that built the first free school and the first
college, I heard culture openly derided. I suppose I like to be
liked as well as other men. Certainly I would rather be left to my
studies than meddle with politics. But I had attained to some
consideration, and my duty was plain. I wrote what I did in the
plainest way, that he who ran might read, and that I hit the mark I
aimed at is proved by the attacks against which you so generously
defend me. These fellows have no notion what love of country means.
It is in my very blood and bones. If I am not an American, who ever
was?
I am no pessimist, nor ever was, ... but is not the Beecher horror
disheartening? Is not Delano discouraging? and Babcock atop of
him?... What fills me with doubt and dismay is the degradation of
the moral tone. Is it or is it not a result of Democracy? Is ours a
“government of the people by the people for the people,” or a
Kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of
fools? Democracy is, after all, nothing more than an experiment
like another, and I know only one way of judging it--by its
results. Democracy in itself is no more sacred than monarchy. It is
Man who is sacred: it is his duties and opportunities, not his
rights, that nowadays need reinforcement. It is honor, justice,
culture, that make liberty invaluable, else worse than worthless if
it mean only freedom to be base and brutal. As things have been
going lately, it would surprise no one if the officers who had
Tweed in charge should demand a reward for their connivance in the
evasion of that popular hero. I am old enough to remember many
things, and what I remember I meditate upon. My opinions do not
live from hand to mouth. And so long as I live I will be no writer
of birthday odes to King Demos any more than I would be to King
Log, nor shall I think _our_ cant any more sacred than any other.
Let us all work together (and the task will need us all) to make
Democracy possible. It certainly is no invention to go of itself
any more than the perpetual motion.
Forgive me for this long letter of justification, which I am
willing to write for your friendly eye, though I should scorn to
make any public defence. Let the tenor of my life and writings
defend me.
Cordially yours,
J. R. LOWELL.
The article on Spenser, as I have said, was the last of the series of
considerable studies of great authors which Lowell had been writing for
the past ten years, and he now gathered the final sheaf into a second
series of “Among My Books,” which he had hoped to bring out in the fall
of 1875, but which did not appear until the spring of 1876. His activity
in literature, and the accumulation of his published writings, were
making him more steadily a conspicuous figure and calling out
appreciation and criticisms. To Mrs. Herrick, who had been collecting
material for an article on him, and had applied to him for facts and
dates, he wrote, 6 October, 1875, after the appearance of her article:
“If I were not pleased with what you have written about me, I must
indeed be _difficult_, as the French say. It is not for me to comment on
your discrimination, but I cannot be insensible to the truly feminine
grace and delicate fervor of sympathy which run through the whole
article.... You have given me a real pleasure and a real encouragement.
I have never seen any of Mr. Wilkinson’s criticisms upon me,[61] but I
know no reason to suspect any personal spite. He is ludicrously wide of
the mark in what he says of the early reception of my writings at home
and the later in England. I never belonged to any clique here, and the
highest appreciation I ever received in England (degrees from Oxford and
Cambridge) were when the Geneva delegation had left a very bitter
feeling against everything American. I say this only for your friendly
ears. I dare say I may seem to contradict myself sometimes, for my
temper of mind is such that I never have the patience to read over again
what I have once printed. As for my grammar, you may be quite easy. I
know quite as much about English as Mr. W. is likely to do, and
inherited my grammar, which is the best way of getting it. I think (from
what others have told me) that you hit the nail on the head in saying
that I have a kind of ‘vitality.’ But it is not wise to discuss one’s
own qualities. I will only say that if nature had made me as strong in
the _driving_ as in the _conceptive_ faculties I should have done more
and better.
“I am glad your article is fairly over and out of the way, for now I can
enjoy the pleasure of your friendship without any feeling of
awkwardness. That I have been a help to you is a help to myself, and I
thank you for telling me of it so frankly.
“When I wrote you last I was still very far from well. I am now (though
not recovered) very much better, and my wits are beginning to clear
again.”
His birthday in 1876 found him reflecting on the degree to which he was
absconding from active life. “I get so absorbed,” he writes, “in the
pretty shadows on the surface of Time, that I never notice the flowing
of the current, and while I am musing, behold it has brought Next Year
abreast of me.... I am going to dine with Gray, C. J., this afternoon to
meet the Friday Club. I am invited to join it, and have been pondering
over my answer these six weeks. I feel as if it might shake me up a
little, for solitude is gradually making me numb. But I don’t know. I
have the best possible Swift in my head, if I could only get him out. I
have half written it twice, and am now going to begin again. You don’t
believe me when I tell you that my mind is sluggish, but it is.”
Apparently he had planned a paper on Swift of the proportions of one of
his _North American_ articles; what actually appeared was a brief review
of Forster’s “Life of Swift” in the _Nation_. He wrote but little
verse, though he was not neglectful of the work of others. “By the way,”
he wrote to Mr. Howells, 21 March, 1875, “who is Edgar Fawcett? Those
‘Immortelles’ of his in the last _Atlantic_ are in my judgment easily
the best poetry in the number. I have been taken with things of his
before, I remember. Why _did_ you let the other man (whose name I have
forgotten) spoil a charming little poem by writing Ac’tæon? I doubt if
Artemis would have wasted an arrow in him--but Pallas Athene would have
given him the ferule. It was so light and pretty, all the rest of it.”
In a nature like Lowell’s there is more the appearance of sluggishness
than the reality. His industry is evident enough when one adds his
published and uncollected writings to his regular academic duties. What
may easily have provoked the popular notion of his indolence was the
privacy of his life, the fact that he himself was little _en evidence_,
and the casual on-looker seeing him sitting for hours over his books and
pipe, taking his social recreation only in the seclusion of his own
cherished home, and the libraries and dining-rooms of a very small
circle of friends, hardly ever going even to Boston, and drawn when on
his feet rather to Beaver Brook than to the pavements,--such an one
might fancy him almost a scholarly recluse, living anywhere but in the
American present.
But a great deal of the bustle of other men’s lives had its sphere of
activity in Lowell’s mind. He was wont to retreat within himself, but it
was to reflect on what he saw in the world about him. As has been seen
already, he had commented on public affairs in verse which was not to be
credited to his poetic sense so much as to his moral and political
insight, and the tide of feeling was rising in his soul. It needed
occasion only to bring him more actively into the current of affairs.
The changing of the time of which he had written so caustically had
brought about what many to-day are disposed to regard as the lowest ebb
of politics within the memory of man. As Grant’s second administration
drew near its close, there began to be a stirring in the minds of men,
and a resolution to reform the administration of government. The
spectacle especially of the Southern States held in control by a
combination of Northern carpet-baggers and negro politicians, backed by
the Federal army, was one which filled with dismay those who had seen in
the abolition of slavery the beginning of a new life for the nation; and
the sordid view of public life which had resulted from this and from the
unchecked abuse of political power in the distribution of public offices
as rewards for party service, was leading to a determined effort at a
reform of the whole civil service.
Lowell’s letters at this time indicate how deeply he felt the needs of
the hour. In the spring of 1876 a number of young Cambridge men were
inspired with a zeal to better the morale of the Republican party, which
was the party in power and the one whose traditions made its better
element ardent to purify it from the corruption which seemed to be
fastening upon it. The effect of this rally was to call a large public
meeting, and Lowell was invited to preside.
“Though I don’t think the function you wish me to perform,” he wrote in
reply, “quite in my line, I am willing to do _anything_ which may be
thought helpful in a movement of which I heartily approve. I am not so
hopeful, I confess, as I was thirty years ago; yet, if there be any
hope, it is in getting independent thinkers to be independent voters.”
Here Lowell struck the note which had been the key of his political
writing in the agitation against slavery, and that in which all his
active political life after this was to be pitched. Independence, not in
politics only but in the entire domain of human thought, had indeed been
characteristic of all his work heretofore, and it was the solitariness
of a life thus attuned which led to this slight expression of dejection.
But he had been for all that a leader of the intellectual and thoughtful
class in America, and it was a happy omen that collegians were in the
group which was now to call him from his study into the field of
political life.
Lowell not only presided at the meeting in Cambridge, but he became
permanent chairman of the committee then formed for the organization of
voters in Cambridge, a function which had been performed hitherto by
office-holders under the government. The Congressional district to which
Cambridge belonged then included also Jamaica Plain, and similar action
was taken there under the leadership of the Rev. James Freeman Clarke.
As a result of the movement Lowell and Dr. Clarke were selected at the
district convention as delegates to the Republican convention in
Cincinnati which was to nominate a candidate for the presidency.[62]
Lowell was very much interested in the position in which he found
himself, nor could he help looking at himself in this new rôle with an
amusing distrust. “Last night,” he wrote to Leslie Stephen, 10 April,
1876, “I appeared in a new capacity as chairman of a political meeting,
where I fear I made an ass of myself. It was got up by young men who
wish to rouse people to their duty in attending caucuses and getting
them out of the hands of the professionals.... I think the row is likely
to do good, however, in getting us better candidates in the next
presidential election, and waking everybody up to the screaming
necessity of reform in our Civil Service.”
It was about this time also, apparently, that Lowell’s name began to be
connected with the diplomatic service of the country. It would seem as
if his old friend Robert Carter had interested himself in the matter. At
any rate, Lowell wrote him 13 April, 1876: “I am much obliged to you for
your friendly interest, but you misunderstood my note to Page. I wrote
it in haste to save the mail at John’s room, borrowing therefor his last
sheet of paper. 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.” A
glimpse of his financial embarrassment at this time is seen in a letter
to the same correspondent two days later, when, replying to the request
for the gift, apparently, of his Fourth of July Ode to a newspaper, he
says: “I can’t afford to give it away. The greater part of my income was
from Western railroad bonds that have stopped payment, and the
_Atlantic_ (to which I have promised what I may write) will pay me $300
for it.” On the 19th of April, he writes again to Mr. Carter: “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 it was offered to L[ongfellow] 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.”
Lowell went to the National Convention at Cincinnati, like others of the
same mind, with the hope of securing the nomination for the presidency
for Mr. Bristow of Kentucky, who as a member of Grant’s cabinet had
shown himself very active in the prosecution of malfeasants. The fact,
moreover, that he came from Kentucky was an additional reason in
Lowell’s mind. “I believed,” he wrote, that a Kentucky candidate might
at least give the starting-point for a party at the South whose line of
division should be other than sectional, and by which the natural
sympathy between reasonable and honest men at the North and the South
should have a fair chance to reassert itself. We failed, but at least
succeeded in preventing the nomination of a man[63] whose success in the
Convention (he would have been beaten disastrously at the polls) would
have been a lesson to American youth that selfish partisanship is a
set-off for vulgarity of character and obtuseness of moral sense. I am
proud to say that it was New England that defeated the New England
candidate.”[64]
In a letter written at two different times in the summer of 1876, to
Thomas Hughes,[65] Lowell dwells at length upon the political situation
and his own hopes and fears. His attitude toward public affairs was that
of one who had not abandoned his fundamental beliefs but was questioning
the methods of carrying them out, and was distrustful of existing
machinery. He reiterates his conviction that the war was fought for
nationality, and that emancipation was a very welcome incident. Hence he
is inclined to lay the emphasis in reunion on the need of reconciliation
with the Southern whites rather than on the protection of the blacks. He
is disposed to sympathize with the Democratic party at the South but
cannot overcome his distrust of the party as a whole. He bids his
correspondent go slow in England in extending the suffrage, but he
reasserts his unshaken faith in the people of his country. As the summer
wears away he is more impatient over the confusion of issues, but on the
whole thinks he shall vote for Hayes.
Lowell’s new interest in politics and his slight active part led his
neighbors to wish to send him to Congress as representative from his
district, and he was urged to stand, but he resolutely refused,
confident that he had not the true qualifications for the office, though
he was touched by the confidence shown in him. He did, however, accept
the honorable position of presidential elector on the Republican ballot.
He let off a little of his mind in the first draft of the verses “In an
Album,” where the last four lines of the first stanza read:--
“While many a page of bard and sage
Deemed once the world’s immortal gain
Lost from Time’s ark, leaves no more mark
Than Conkling, Cameron, or Blaine.”
It was in the late summer and early fall of 1876, also, when the
political fight was hottest, that Lowell peppered the enemy with the
half-dozen epigrams of which he preserved only one, “A Misconception.”
The allusions in some were to passing incidents, so that footnotes to
his two-line epigrams would now be needed. Some with good memory will
need no key to unlock this:--
THE WIDOW’S MITE.
Where currency’s debased, all coins will pass.
Ask you for proof? The Widow’s might is brass.
But the most definite public expression of his political thought at this
time may be found in the draft of a speech at a caucus in Cambridge
which Lowell preserved among his papers. Apparently Lowell wrote this
out in advance, but it is not likely that he imported into a political
caucus the very academic method of reading a speech.
“I do not propose,” he says, “to make a speech. Still less shall I try
to captivate your ears or win your applauses by any of those appeals to
passion and prejudice which are so tempting and so unwise. Politics are
the most serious of all human affairs, and I prefer the approval of your
understandings to that of your hands and feet.
“The presidential contest of this year is in some respects unlike any
other that I remember. Both parties claim to be in favor of the same
reforms in our currency and our civil service, and both have nominated
men of character and ability for the highest office in our government.
Meanwhile there is a much larger class of voters than usual who are
resolved to cast their ballots less in reference to party ties than to
what in their judgment is the interest of the whole country. The two
parties are so evenly balanced that the action of this class is of
supreme importance. Among these are doubtless some wrongheaded men, some
disappointed ones, and some who think that any change, no matter what,
may be for the better and cannot be for the worse. But in general these
dissatisfied persons are men of more than average thoughtfulness, weight
of character, and influence. They feel profoundly that the great
weakness of the democratical form of government, as they have studied
its workings in this country, is a great and growing want of
responsibility in officials, whether to the head of the government or to
the country, a great and growing indifference (in the selection of
candidates) to the claims of character as compared with those of
partisan efficiency or unscrupulousness. We hear, to be sure, of
responsibility to the People, but in practice this amounts to very
little. Just before election the politicians become tenderly aware of
the existence of the People, they recognize their long lost brother, and
rush into his arms with more than fraternal fervor. In the same way,
just before the 17th of March they show a surprising familiarity with
the history of St. Patrick, though at other times we should hardly
suspect that their favorite study was the lives of the saints. During
the rest of the year the people are busy about their own affairs, and
have neither the leisure nor the inclination to be scrutinizing the
conduct of their public servants. A responsibility to many is
practically a responsibility to none. Now you all know that in battling
with the cankerworm, it is around the stem of the tree that we apply our
preventives, because that is the highway by which the grubs climb to lay
their eggs. The eggs once laid there is no remedy. The stem by which
our political grubs have gone up to deposit the germs of devastation has
been our primary meetings and conventions, the adroit management of
which has too often given us candidates without that self-respect which
makes men responsible to their own conscience, and without that respect
for the better sentiment of the country which might spring from the fear
of lost repute and diminished consideration. They fear no loss of what
they never had. The discontented class of which I have spoken are
resolved to make candidates feel their responsibility at the polls, the
only point at which they are sensitive. I confess that I share largely
in the feeling that leads them to this determination.
“I am and have been in sympathy with the principles of the Republican
party as I understand them, but it has no sacredness for me when it
degenerates into a contrivance for putting unfit men or tainted men into
office, and for making them ‘Honorable’ by courtesy who are not so by
character. When a party becomes an organization to serve only its own
private ends, when it becomes a mere means of livelihood or distinction
on easier terms than God for our good has prescribed, it has become
noxious instead of useful. Now, fellow-citizens, it cannot be denied
that the Republican party has suffered by too long and too easy a tenure
of office. We ought to be thankful to its opponents for the
investigations which have shown us its weak points. Let it never be said
that we object to any investigation of character. Let it always be said
that we object to men who need or fear to be investigated.
“It will not do to appeal to the past history and achievements of the
party. The greatest of poets and one of the wisest of men has said
that--
‘to have done is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail
In monumental mockery.’
It is by their estimate of the chances of what the party _will_ do that
independent voters will be guided in their action. It is of no use to
tell them what it used to be, nor, when they resent its corruption, to
say that things were as bad a hundred years ago. We had hoped the world
was growing better. We would rather not need to be consoled than to have
the finest consolation that was ever manufactured out of the
commonplaces of history. At least I had hoped that we should never hear
of poor old Judas again, whose conduct, if it be an argument for
anything, would go to prove that one man in every twelve _must_ be a
knave. When our knaves follow the example of Judas by going straightway
and hanging themselves, I shall not object to the recalling of his
example from time to time. What we have to do is to purify the party
ourselves, and this we can do only by insisting that the men who are
offered for our choice shall be men of a character so well established
that they are above suspicion and incapable of temptation, at least in
its baser forms; we must insist on having such men, or acknowledge that
our system of popular government has left us none such.
“It is said that the Republican party cannot be reformed from within.
This may or may not be so, but is this less true of the Democratic
party? The first printed ballot I ever saw was in Baltimore just fifty
years ago, and I remember that it had upon it an American flag and
‘Hurrah for Old Hickory!’ That ‘Hurrah for Old Hickory’ introduced into
our civil service that evil system which has led to all the corruption
in our administration, and which, if not cured, will lead to the failure
of our democratical experiment. Many people seem to think that some such
divinity doth hedge a Democracy as was once supposed to hedge a king.
But perpetual motion is as idle a dream in political organization as in
mechanics. It is in the little wheels, in those least obvious to
inspection, that the derangement is likely to begin. Are we to expect
more vigilance from what used to be called the Jacksonian Democracy? I
must be allowed to doubt it.
“But suppose that I am mistaken, suppose that the pretensions of the two
parties as to their zeal for reforms in the Civil Service are entitled
to equal weight, there are other questions to which the answer is by no
means clear. How is it about honest money? about an unmercurial currency
that shall not rise and fall with the temperature of Wall Street, that
shall neither tempt the would-be rich to unsafe speculation nor cheat
the poor of their earnings? Though neither party has been so explicit as
I should think it wise to be, yet I believe our chance is on the whole
better with the Republicans than with their opponents.
“But there is one other argument which with me is conclusive. Nothing,
in my opinion, is more unstatesmanlike, nothing more unwise than to
revive sectional animosities for political purposes. Such expedients,
though used for temporary effect, are lasting in their disastrous
consequences. But scarcely less disastrous would be the fallacious hopes
raised in the South by the success of Mr. Tilden. We are not willing to
risk any of the results of the nation’s victory. One of the most
important of those results was the assertion of our indivisible
nationality. Mr. Tilden and the party which he directs have always been
extreme in their interpretation of the reserved rights of the individual
States, going so far even as to include that of rebellion among them.
Should such principles prevail, revolution would become constitutional,
and we should have another Mexico instead of the country we love. We
should be admitting that the war, so costly to our prosperity, so
incalculably dear in hopeful lives, was both a blunder and a crime. I
for one am not ready for an admission like this. I prefer to feel myself
the citizen of a strong country, to feel in my veins the pulses of an
invincible nationality, whereof I am a member. An indissoluble union is
the chain that holds us to our anchor. Its disjointed links would be old
iron for the junkshop.”
This is not what one looks for in a speech at a party caucus. Neither
the independence of the speaker’s attitude nor his moderate adhesion to
the party in which he enrolls himself are very effective instruments,
and it is clear that despite Lowell’s sympathy with the plain man and
his intimate acquaintance with him as illustrated in his “Biglow
Papers,” he was embarrassed when he came to speak to him in the
collectivity of a public meeting, and scarcely let his natural voice
even be heard. Much must be referred, it is true, to his inexperience
with speaking at public meetings--he was not a speaker in the old
anti-slavery days, but his inexperience was due largely to his
fastidiousness of temper which made him after all in literature rather
than in life pleased with the vision of
“The backwoods Charlemagne of empires new.”
He found his own voice more surely in his study than on the rostrum, and
it is to his Fourth of July Ode in this centennial year that we must
look for the most comprehensive and most natural expression of his
political sentiment. In poetry he found it easiest to reiterate that
faith which he had in an elemental America, as it were, a faith which
was derived from a belief in God, and that
“Life’s bases rest
Beyond the probe of chemic test;”
but he refuses for all that to take refuge in a mere blind confidence,
admitting a little ruefully that the flight of years had won him
“this unwelcome right
To see things as they are, or shall be soon,
In the frank prose of undissembling noon!”
The democratic principle, too, which he held so stoutly comes to him now
as the manifestation of human life concretely apprehended rather than
theoretically conceived, and the development of his own maturer judgment
appears in this resolution to find the base of national life in the men
who built the nation, and not in the mere speculation of freedom and
democracy.
Lowell published the three odes called out by the centennial
celebrations in a little volume entitled “Three Memorial Poems,” which
he inscribed to Mr. Godkin “in cordial acknowledgment of his eminent
service in heightening and purifying the tone of our political thought.”
At the request of his publishers he was also assembling his poems for a
new and so far complete collection in what was to be known as the
Household Edition. Perhaps the title was in his mind when he wrote in
the fall to a correspondent who had expressed his appreciation, “I would
rather be a fireside friend and the Galeotto of household love than
anything else. I was especially pleased that you had found out how much
better the second series of the Biglow is than the first. I had not seen
them for years when I had to read them through for a new edition this
summer, and I found them entertaining.”
In February, 1877, Lowell went to Baltimore to give before the Johns
Hopkins University a course of twenty lectures on the literature of the
Romance Languages during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with
Dante as a central theme. His companion was his friend and colleague
Professor Francis J. Child, who at the same time was discoursing on
Chaucer. The tenth anniversary of the founding of the University was
observed during their stay, and both men were the recipients of
delightful hospitality, while by their lectures and readings and social
gifts they made themselves most welcome guests. “J. L.’s good looks and
insinuating ways,” wrote Mr. Child, “carry off the palm entirely from my
genius and learning, but then I am as much fascinated as anybody, and
don’t mind.” “Child goes on winning all ears and hearts,” wrote Lowell.
“I am rejoiced to have this chance of seeing so much of him, for though
I loved him before, I did not know _how_ lovable he was till this
intimacy.” A year later, Lowell writing to Child from Europe recalls the
month as one of the pleasantest of his life. Lowell stayed with his
kinsman Mr. Spence, but he found a frequent respite from the gayety in
which he was involved in a quiet luncheon with his friend Mrs. Herrick,
who tactfully forebore to make her luncheons additions to the social
functions which excited but wearied as well.
A souvenir of the enjoyment Lowell had in his visit to Baltimore is in a
sonnet which he wrote to a young daughter of President Gilman of the
university. “I shall assume,” he wrote her from Elmwood, 7 April, 1877,
“for my own convenience that there were just fourteen roses in the
lovely sheaf I found in my room when I came in for shelter from the
ill-humor of that February day, so unlike the temperature, both outward
and inward, to which Baltimore had accustomed us. I repay them in
fourteen verses, and I wish it were as easy to match the sweetness of
your sonnet as its numbers. However, I promised you that I would send it
and have not forgotten, but have had so many things to do that I have
delayed paying my debt till you have half forgotten your debtor. The two
quatrains with which my sonnet gets well under way were written on the
spot with your roses comforting two of my benumbed senses. Luckily I
wrote them on the back of an invitation which certifies to the
date--‘Saturday, 24 February.’ The concluding triplets I had partly
written down when I was interrupted, and I finished them this morning. I
wish it were better, but at least the gratitude will last, if not the
sonnet.”
TO MISS ALICE GILMAN,
WHO SENT ME ROSES, 24TH FEBY., 1877.
A handful of ripe rosebuds in my room
I found when all heaven’s mercy seemed shut out
By clouds morose that dallied with a doubt
’Tween rain and snow: meanwhile mine eyes with bloom
Were comforted, and over Summer’s tomb,
Out of your gift rose nightingales to flout
With Easter prophecies the chill without
And sing the mind clear of the season’s gloom.
So may your innocent fancy be rarest
Ever with impulses to timely deeds
Generous of sunshine, and your life be blest
With flower and fruit immortal, sprung of seeds
Sown by those singing birds that make their nest
In natures thoughtful of another’s needs!
Not long after Lowell’s return from Baltimore rumors began to fly about
that he was to have a foreign mission. Mr. Longfellow notes in his
diary, 7 April, 1877: “In the afternoon Charles Norton called. We
talked of Ruskin and Carlyle, and of Lowell’s having the English
mission.” It was not unnatural that public attention should be called to
him in connection with some diplomatic post, in view of the somewhat
peculiar circumstances connected with his relations to the recent
presidential election. He was one of the electors in Massachusetts upon
the Republican ballot, and when the issue of the election was in doubt
and many believed that Mr. Tilden was the actual choice though Mr. Hayes
was nominally chosen, there were voices that called on Lowell to use his
technical right and cast his vote for Mr. Tilden. It was a curious
comment on affairs. It implied on the part of those who proposed it a
confidence that Lowell was independent enough to use this right. I am
not sure that any other elector was named who might be expected to take
this responsibility. On the other hand, those who urged this course seem
to have been blind to the enormous violation of faith involved in such a
course. The machinery of the electoral system, however it had been
designed at first, had gradually and immutably become a mere device for
the registry of the popular choice; all initiative on the part of the
electors was totally cancelled. Lowell himself never had any hesitation.
As he wrote to Mr. Leslie Stephen: “In my own judgment I have no choice,
and am bound in honor to vote for Hayes, as the people who chose me
expected me to do. They did not choose me because they had confidence in
my judgment, but because they thought they knew what that judgment
would be. If I had told them that I should vote for Tilden, they would
never have nominated me. It is a plain question of trust. The provoking
part of it is that I tried to escape nomination all I could, and only
did not decline because I thought it would be making too much fuss over
a trifle.”
The actual facts of the appointment of Lowell to the Spanish mission
have been so explicitly told by Mr. Howells, who had a grateful part to
play in the transaction, that with his permission I copy his account of
it. “I do not know whether it crossed his mind after the election of
Hayes that he might be offered some place abroad, but it certainly
crossed the minds of some of his friends, and I could not feel that I
was acting for myself alone when I used a family connection with the
President, very early in his term, to let him know that I believed
Lowell would accept a diplomatic mission. I could assure him that I was
writing wholly without Lowell’s privity or authority, and I got back
such a letter as I could wish in its delicate sense of the situation.
The President said that he had already thought of offering Lowell
something, and he gave me the pleasure, a pleasure beyond any other I
could imagine, of asking Lowell whether he would accept the mission to
Austria. I lost no time in carrying his letter to Elmwood, where I found
Lowell over his coffee at dinner. He saw me at the threshold, and called
to me through the open door to come in, and I handed him the letter,
and sat down at table while he ran it through. When he had read it, he
gave a quick ‘Ah!’ and threw it over the length of the table to Mrs.
Lowell. She read it in a smiling and loyal reticence, as if she would
not say one word of all she might wish to say in urging his acceptance,
though I could see that she was intensely eager for it. The whole
situation was of a perfect New England character in its tacit
significance; after Lowell had taken his coffee, we turned into his
study, without further allusion to the matter.
“A day or two later he came to my house to say that he could not accept
the Austrian mission, and to ask me to tell the President so for him and
make his acknowledgments, which he would also write himself. He remained
talking a little while of other things, and when he rose to go he said,
with a sigh of vague reluctance, ‘I _should_ like to see a play of
Calderon,’ as if it had nothing to do with any wish of his that could
still be fulfilled. ‘Upon this hint I acted,’ and in due time it was
found in Washington that the gentleman who had been offered the Spanish
mission would as lief go to Austria, and Lowell was sent to Madrid.”[66]
In a letter to his daughter[67] Lowell says further that he had also the
choice of going to Berlin.
Mr. Evarts, the Secretary of State, was in Boston at this time, and in a
personal conference the preliminary arrangement appears to have been
made. Mr. Hayes also came to Boston in June, and Lowell met him and his
wife, and has left a record of the impression they produced upon him, in
one of his letters written shortly afterward.[68] The anticipation of
this new chapter in his life seems to have given him a divided feeling.
The honor of the place half amused and half pleased him. With the
ingenuous pride of a college man, he thought how his name would look in
capitals in the college triennial, and wished his father, who had a high
sense of that dignity, could have enjoyed the sight. He was too fixed in
his position before the world to be over-elated at the conspicuousness
which the place brought him, and he disliked publicity so much that that
side of the business filled him with a sort of dismay. He welcomed the
opportunity for enlarging his Spanish studies, and he had an honest
desire to represent his country well. “I believe,” he wrote to his
friend Thomas Hughes, “that I can live my own life (part of the time, at
least) in Madrid, and need not have any more flummery than I choose.
What unsettled me first was that a good many people wished to see me
sent to London, and I was persuaded that I might be of some service
there by not living like a Duke, and in promoting a better understanding
between the two countries. But my friends were mistaken in supposing
that I had been thought of for England.... Things are going more to my
mind now, and President Hayes made a most agreeable impression on me
when he was here the other day. He struck me as simple, honest, and full
of good feeling, a very good American to my thinking.... By all means
come to Madrid. I shall have a house there, and a spare bed in it
always. It would be delightful to take you a drive to the Prado in my
own (hired) ambassadorial coach. My ‘Excellency’ will give me cause for
much serious meditation.”
It must not be supposed, however, that the prospect was untouched with
doubt. “I am by no means sure,” Lowell writes to Mr. Reverdy Johnson of
Baltimore, shortly after accepting the post, “that I did wisely in
accepting the Spanish mission. I really did not wish to go abroad at
all, but my friends have been urgent (Godkin among them), and I go.”
Mr. and Mrs. Lowell sailed for Liverpool on the Parthia from Boston,
Saturday, 14 July, 1877. The agent of the steamship company followed
custom in making special provisions for the send-off of a public man,
and a comment on Lowell’s incapability of filling the rôle in every
respect may be read in his good-by note to his friend Mr. Norton, who
had received one of the agent’s invitations: “You will laugh to-morrow,
I hope, when you think of me going down the harbor with the revenue
cutter and a steam tug to bring back those who can’t part with me this
side the outer light. If the agent of the Cunard line had given a
month’s meditation to devising what would annoy me most, he could have
hit on nothing to beat this. When I got his note yesterday morning, I
positively burst forth into a cold sweat. But Sunday will bring peace.”
...