CHAPTER XVI

RETURN TO PRIVATE LIFE

1885-1888

Elmwood was let, and if it had been vacant Lowell could hardly have gone

back there at once to live. There were too many ghosts in the house, he

said. He made no attempt to take up again his college work, though he

held his title of Smith Professor with _emeritus_ added, and as his

daughter had abandoned her plan of taking her children abroad, he made

his home with her at Deerfoot Farm, Southborough, Massachusetts, about

two hours by rail from Boston, in a pretty country where there was

little intrusion of manufactures. He always had also a home in Boston at

the house of his sister, Mrs. Putnam. He was at once besieged with

invitations from many friends; as he wrote to Mr. Gilder: “I have been

all these days in the condition of a bird of Paradise, unable to perch,

no matter I might wish it, and perhaps embarrassed by the number of

friendly roosts offered to my choice--yours not the least seductive

among them.” He made up his mind to attend the Commencement at Harvard,

though he dreaded both the heat and the emotion,--as he wrote: “O for a

good freezing English July day!” He found himself deluged with

letters--it was almost as bad as in London. Many he was unable to

answer, many answered themselves after Napoleon’s easy-going philosophy,

but with the return to private life and in the absence of any routine

duties, Lowell took up again with a careless prodigality the occupation

of letter-writing. He had left friends in England who had endeared

themselves to him, and whose letters to him readily drew a response, and

to his old friends he was always faithful, so that, taking Mr. Norton’s

two volumes as a gauge, we find that he wrote twice as many friendly

letters in the five years after his return to America as in the five

years just preceding.

“I am already,” he writes to Mr. Norton, 22 July, 1885, “in love with

Southborough, which is a charmingly unadulterated New England village,

and with as lovely landscapes as I ever saw.... ’Tis an odd shift in the

peep-hole of my panorama from London to this Chartreuse. For the present

I like it and find it wholesome. I fancy myself happy sometimes--I am

not sure--but then I never was for long;” and to Mrs. Clifford he wrote,

2 August: “I am planting my cabbages diligently and growing as much like

them as I can. One must have confidants of one kind or another, and

where one is cut off from women, one must follow Wordsworth’s advice and

seek an intimacy with nature in whose impartial eyes cabbages are as

interesting as--I was going to say strawberry-leaves, but remembered

that you were an Englishwoman. I _wasn’t_ going to say women, though

logically I ought. Perhaps they are as safe. I am trying to make myself

tolerable to five grandchildren, though I am not so sure that I have

enough of the Grandfather in me to go round among so many.”

There is a playful allusion in this letter to a side of Lowell’s nature

which is hinted at also in his choice of correspondents. He was

peculiarly dependent upon the companionship of women, and he attracted

to himself the wittiest and most responsive. For it was not so much the

cushioned comfort that he looked for, as the cosiness of good fellowship

and the intellectual equality which he sometimes found and always

prized. He loved the generous natures with whom he had good converse,

and his talk and letters went freely to these habitual dwellers in a

world of honest sentiment. As in so many other cases, this side of

Lowell’s life found its expression in poetry, and there is no

exaggeration in the sonnet “Nightwatches,” written after the death of

one who had stood to him in this free, intimate relation for many years.

In August he went to Washington to close his business with the State

Department, and made with great pleasure the acquaintance of Mr. Bayard,

then Secretary of State, and later like him to represent the country in

London. He met President Cleveland also, and saw in him “a legitimate

birth of Democracy and not a byblow like Butler and his kind.”

Lowell was solicited both by the editor of the _Atlantic_ and other

friends to take up again his contributions to literature, but he put

them off. He had no inclination to write--he was glad of the solace of

books and letters, but the spur to literary activity had been dulled.

Yet he kept his Muse at least as a sort of friendly companion, as when

on the seventy-fifth birthday of his neighbor and associate Dr. Asa Gray

he wrote:--

“Just Fate, prolong his life well spent,

Whose indefatigable hours

Have been as gaily innocent

And fragrant as his flowers!”

For a time he was content to drift, and to let the indolence which he

had overmastered all his life get the upper hand of him now, even though

the pressure of circumstance still lay heavy on him. “I am delighted,”

he wrote 13 December, 1885, to Mr. John W. Field, “to hear that you are

getting on so well--better than I feared--and cannot enough admire your

pluck. ’Tis all the more admirable in a man like you who have the art of

finding (or making) life worth living so much more than most of us. As

for me I am a little tired now and then, and consent to grow old only

because I can’t decently help it.... As for my coming on to

Washington--I don’t know what to say. I should like to see you and

Eliza, but don’t see how I can find the time at present. I have a great

deal to do if I could only do it. But I am beginning to feel ‘old and

slow,’ as Ulysses said to Dante. Especially do I feel slow as compared

with what I once was.... I am just now bothered with an address to be

given next week at the opening of a public library in Chelsea. When I

have done that I mean to hold my tongue for evermore. Why should I make

myself wretched when there is so much that will do it without my help?”

The address at Chelsea was the one on “Books and Libraries,” included in

his “Literary and Political Addresses,” an address, almost

conversational in its manner, marked not so much by felicity of

expression as by a sanity of tone and the easy deliverance of a full

mind.

A public function quite in accord with his academic and literary tastes

was the presidency, which he accepted, of the American Archæological

Institute. He took also the post of chairman of a committee to raise

funds for the society’s school at Athens. “I find myself a little out of

place,” he writes to Mr. Reverdy Johnson, 28 December, 1885, “but I

consented to serve because I was so thoroughly persuaded both of the

excellence of the object proposed and of the honor it has already done

and is likely to do us in convincing Europe that we are not wholly given

over as a nation to the pursuit of material good. The English school

received its final impulse from the existence and success of ours.”

At the end of January, 1886, Lowell went to Washington, at the urgent

request of the Copyright League, to advocate the cause of international

copyright. Two separate bills designed to bring this about had been

offered in the Senate by Senators Hawley and Chace, and there was to be

a hearing on them before the Committee on Patents. Several publishers,

authors, and members of the League had argued in favor of some action,

and one gentleman, the late Mr. Gardiner G. Hubbard, had appeared in

opposition. Mr. Hubbard, who was well known as the most active promoter

of the then rather new Bell telephone, argued that an author’s right in

his literary property differed from that in any other kind of property;

“that while he has the manuscript of his thoughts in his own possession,

it is his own, and that when he gives it out to the world it ceases to

be his own and becomes the property of the world.”[92] He laid great

stress, further, on the grounds of the granting of copyright by

Congress, as for the benefit of the public, and not for the benefit of

authors, and finally claimed that an international copyright would be

injurious to the public by tending to raise the price of books.

Lowell came in while Mr. Hubbard was speaking, and was called upon by

the chairman, Senator Platt of Connecticut, as soon as Mr. Hubbard had

sat down. He had not intended to address the committee other than by

answering such questions as might be put to him, but the last speaker’s

positions nettled him, and he began at once by attacking them.

“There are one or two things in the very extraordinary speech which Mr.

Hubbard has just addressed to you which, I think, call for some comment

on my part. He began by stating what is a very common fallacy, that

there could be no such thing as property in books. It is generally put

in another way, that there can be no such thing as property in an idea.

There is a feeling, I know, among a great many people that books, even

when they are printed, are like umbrellas, _feræ naturæ_; but by Mr.

Hubbard we are carried farther back than that, to the very conception of

the book.

“Now, nobody supposes that there can be property in an idea. The thing

is a fallacy on the face of it. What we do suppose is that there is a

property in the fashioning that is given to the idea, the work that a

man has put into it, and I think the Constitution has already recognized

that in granting patents. Patents are nothing but ideas fashioned in a

certain way. For instance, the Bell telephone is precisely a parallel

case to that of books, and I think there are a great many people in this

country who are interested in the Bell telephone and believe it to be

property.

“It appears to me that a great deal of what is said in opposition to the

view of those who favor an international copyright is, like the

statement of Mr. Hubbard, purely hypothetical. He tells you that it

would make books dearer. I do not think he has the slightest evidence on

which to show you that it would make books dearer. My own decided

opinion is that it would make books cheaper. When he says, also, that it

is an attempt of publishers to make large profits on small editions,

instead of small profits on large editions, I think he should have a

more general knowledge of the book trade--nay, of the modern tendencies

of trade in general--before he makes an assertion of that sort. It is

based on the practice in England of publishing one expensive edition,

and even in England the price of the book very soon falls. But the

custom there has been pretty much dictated to the publishers by the

owners of circulating libraries; and already there is a revolt against

it, which is becoming intensified on the whole, and I believe a reform

in that respect will take place there.

“I have one practical example to offer on the other side. For instance,

Mr. Douglas, of Edinburgh, reprints a great many American books and pays

a copyright for them. He prints them beautifully in little volumes of

most convenient size, and sells them for a shilling. That is not very

dear. He pays his copyright, remember. I myself am perfectly satisfied

that the reading public in America, being much larger than in England,

and demanding cheap books, the result of a copyright law, if we ever get

one, will be to transfer the great bulk of the book trade from England

to this country, and with it the publishing of books. That is my firm

belief. But that is purely hypothetical, like Mr. Hubbard’s argument.

Yet it seems to me there would be certain reasons for thinking so in

what we know of the instincts and tendencies of trade. If the larger

market be here, and if books have to be printed in a cheaper form in

order to suit that market, I think they will be so printed and so far as

the American public is concerned, it appears to me that if they get

their books cheaply it does not so much matter where they are printed.

“I, myself, take the moral view of the question. I believe that this is

a simple question of morality and justice; that many of the arguments

which Mr. Hubbard used are arguments which might be used for picking a

man’s pocket. One could live a great deal cheaper, undoubtedly, if he

could supply himself from other people without any labor or cost. But at

the same time,--well, it was not called honest when I was young, and

that is all I can say. I cannot help thinking that a book which was, I

believe, more read when I was young than it is now, is quite right when

it says that ‘righteousness exalteth a nation.’ I believe this is a

question of righteousness. I do not wish to urge that too far, because

that is considered a little too ideal, I believe. But that is my view of

it, and if I were asked what book is better than a cheap book, I should

answer that there is one book better than a cheap book, and that is a

book honestly come by. That would be my feeling.”

A series of questions and answers followed which travelled over a good

deal of space, from the habit of book-buying in the two countries to the

rights and wrongs involved in copyright, and Lowell drew upon personal

experience and observation in a way to confirm emphatically the title

which he once gave himself, “I am a bookman.” “My own impression is,” he

said in the course of this conversation, “that the gathering of private

libraries is diminishing; at least I think it is on the whole, according

to my own observation. I mean to say that fewer persons, in proportion

to the number of educated people in a community, collect libraries now

than formerly, because large libraries are now more readily within the

reach of so many people.... There [in England] the collection of

libraries has also diminished very much, but is still large in country

houses and so on. People who are rich wish to have a handsome copy of a

book in their library, and for that purpose this handsome edition is

published. But if you will pardon me for digressing for a moment from

this subject, it seems to me there are a great many ways in which our

laws about books are very disadvantageous to the country. I think,

myself, that the tax on books is a barbarism.” Senator Teller here asked

him if he meant the revenue tax. “Yes; it has prevented me from buying a

great many books in the course of my life which would have been very

valuable to me, and the imprints [reprints?][93] were comparatively

valueless when I got them. I cannot at this moment as I could if I lived

in any other country of the world, even Turkey, subscribe to a foreign

society and receive its publications without the trouble of going to the

post-office and paying the duty; and, as I happen to live up in the

country now, that is very inconvenient. To be sure, as they know me, I

am able to get the books sent up to the post-office of the town where I

am living and pay my tax there, but it seems to me a very bad system.”

The chairman asked Lowell if people who read the cheap reprints of

English books preserved them to any extent; to which he replied: “No, I

think they are not preserved at all. It is a marvel where they go to.

Those books get out of print quickly. I remember that I religiously

preserved all the books that were sent me early in my life in order to

give them to the college library, because I said, whether worthless or

not they will disappear; and many of those books have disappeared, and

cannot be bought at all, or procured, except the copies preserved there.

They go back to the paper maker as waste paper. I wish to say before I

sit down, in reference to the gentleman who is to follow me,[94] that I

doubt if there is a class in the community who have a more profound

sympathy with the typographical unions than we have. It is not that we

wish to deprive them of their bread. I personally have a very strong

sympathy with all labor organizations, and I think, as I have said, the

result of a copyright law will be to give them more work rather than

less.”

Both authors and those publishers who sympathized with the movement were

concentrating their efforts at this time to secure the passage of an act

which should effect international copyright. There was considerable

diversity of opinion, especially regarding the clause which required all

foreign books to be set up and printed in this country, if they were to

be protected by copyright, but the largest support was given to the bill

introduced by Senator Chace and stands now as law, practically as then

drawn. The editors of the _Century_ collected vigorous expressions of

opinion from the most representative writers and published the testimony

in the number for February, 1886. In response to the request for an

opinion, Lowell came into the editor’s office one day, said he had

something in his head, and wanted a pen with which to write it out. Then

he sat down and wrote the famous scorcher:--

“In vain we call old notions fudge,

And bend our conscience to our dealing;

The Ten Commandments will not budge,

And stealing will continue stealing.”

This was printed in facsimile at the head of the testimony. But though

Lowell was an uncompromising advocate of justice in this matter, perhaps

because he was so uncompromising, the most active advocates of the bill

had to use a good deal of _finesse_ in making his support available. The

act for securing international copyright was not a partisan measure, but

it was in the hands of the Republicans in Congress, mainly, and Lowell

with his emphatic independence in politics was not at this time a

_persona grata_ with Republican politicians, who were incensed by the

falling out of the ranks of men of character and influence. The act was

passed finally 3 March, 1891.

There was one form of public appearance which Lowell reluctantly allowed

himself to take up in this winter of 1886. The rage for Authors’

Readings had set in, and under the guise of charity of one sort or

another, society compelled its favorites to stand and deliver their old

poems. “I am having proof sheets,” he wrote to Mr. Field, 30 March,

1886, “and I have been reading in public with O. W. H. and oh, don’t I

wish I had never written a verse! Take warning by me, old boy, and if

you make a rhyme by accident, duck yourself in holy water to wash the

Devil clean out of you,--or they’ll have you on a platform before you

can say Jack Robinson, or even d--n.” A keener thrust came to him now

and then when he was urged to read poems which others could read, it

might be, with equanimity, but which were for him like raising the lid

of a coffin.

The proof sheets to which he refers in this letter were of the small

volume “Democracy and other Addresses,” a volume which appeared in the

spring of 1886, just before Lowell went back to England for the summer.

Here he gave himself up to those pleasures which he could enjoy but

sparingly when he was in the official harness. His friends welcomed him

most cordially, and he made a round of visits. He looked on upon the

game of English politics with the eye of a trained observer, but

resisted all enticements to write or speak for the English public,

though he did preside at one dinner. “I made an epigram (extempore) one

day on the G. O. M.,” he writes to his daughter, “and repeated it to

Lord Acton.

His greatness not so much in genius lies

As in adroitness, when occasions rise,

Lifelong convictions to extemporize.

This morning I find the last lines quoted by Auberon Herbert in a

letter to the _Times_, but luckily without my name. It is a warning.”

“I am living a futile life here,” he writes to Mr. Norton, “but am as

fond of London as Charles Lamb. The rattle of a hansom shakes new life

into my old bones, and I ruin myself in them. I love such evanescent and

unimportunate glimpses of the world as I catch from my flying perch. I

envy the birds no longer, and learn better to converse with them. Our

views of life are the same.” It was the summer also when Dr. Holmes made

his royal progress through England, and Lowell had the pleasure of

seeing the hearty welcome his old friend received. To Mr. Field he

wrote, 27 July, 1886:--

“I met Mrs. Archibald Forbes the other day and had much talk with her

about you. She did not give me much comfort,--except in telling me that

you had gone away from Washington for the summer. This means, I suppose,

that you are well enough to go to Ashfield, which I take as a good sign.

I constantly meet old friends of yours here who ask after you

affectionately. I give them what comfort I can by telling them how

bravely both of you bear up under your common sorrow....

“Old Mrs. Proctor told me a good story lately which may amuse you. She

was breakfasting with Rogers. Thackeray and Kinglake were there among

others. So was Abraham Hayward, who began abusing Houghton (then Monkton

Milnes), a great favorite of hers. Kinglake tried in vain to divert or

stop him. At last Mrs. P. in a pause broke out with, ‘Mr. Hayward, for

the first time in my life I wish I were a man that I might call you out

and make you, for the first time in your life, a gentleman!’ She is as

young as ever and as jealous of her lovers, tolerating no rivals.

“I am to meet Doña Emilia next Friday at dinner, and shall take upon

myself to give her your kindest regards. I fear she is not very well,

but she is so fond of London that it will be better for her than a

course of the waters at Wiesbaden. I shall be very glad to see her

again. I last met her in London four years ago.... By the way, I saw Don

Palo (Francisco) Giher at Oxford whither I went to help Holmes on with

his gown. It was a pleasant surprise to me when he rushed forward with

both hands outstretched in the Master’s drawing-room at Balliol and

began at me in Spanish. As the window was behind him I could not see his

face and did not at once recognize him. My Spanish naturally creaked a

little on its hinges after such long disuse, but, with that _hidalquia_

which is common to all his race, he told somebody afterwards that I

spoke the most exquisite Castilian! Even at twenty I shouldn’t have

believed--and at sixty-seven!

“I have been whirling round like a marble on the van of a windmill and

am worn as smooth. I roll off on the slightest incline. But I can lie

still on the lap of an old friendship such as ours. Good-by and God

bless you.”

When Lowell went abroad in the spring of 1886 he had been asked to give

the address in November at the 250th anniversary of the founding of

Harvard University. The thought of it harassed him during the summer. “I

am distressed with the thought of that abominable address,” he wrote

near the end of July. “I have not yet accepted and would decline could I

give any better reason than that I have nothing to say. Nobody ever

thinks _that_ of any importance! What have I done to have this fly

thrust into my pot of ointment which grows more precious every day by

diminution like the Sibyl’s leaves?” And after his return to Deerfoot

Farm late in September, when he could not avoid his destiny, he wrote:

“I am in direful dumps about my address,--the muse obstinately dumb.”

Once more, 6 October, he wrote: “I have been mulling over my address and

to-day mean to break into it in earnest by blocking out an exordium. It

doesn’t take hold of me, and I always feared it wouldn’t. It isn’t

exactly in my line. To fill so large a bowl as an hour I shall have to

draw on the cow with the iron tail,--and pumping is an exercise that

always wearies me beyond most.”

His equanimity was further shaken by a disagreeable experience when the

son of an old friend, making a show of a friendly visit, led him on into

discourse about England and English affairs, and then, relying on his

memory, decanted the conversation into an article for a New York paper

with which he was connected. “If he had reported what I really said,

instead of his version of it, I should not feel so bitterly,” was

Lowell’s comment, and to a friend he wrote: “As for ---- he _knew_ that I

didn’t know he was interviewing me. To any sane man the shimble-shamble

stuff he has made me utter is proof of it. I say ‘made me utter’

deliberately, because, though he has remembered some of the subjects

(none of my choosing) which we talked about, he has wholly

misrepresented the tone and sometimes falsified the substance of what I

said.... The worst of ----’s infidelity (I mean to keep my temper) is

that it is like a dead rat in the wall,--an awful stink and no cure.”

It is not easy to say just what gave rise to the peculiarly American

academic custom of making a celebration to consist of an oration and a

poem, but Harvard was fortunate in being able to summon from her

graduates Holmes to deliver a poem and Lowell an oration. To Lowell

himself the occasion was stimulating, not only because of the pride and

loyalty with which he regarded the college, but because he had given it

twenty years of service, and came back to it now after nearly a decade

in which he had abundant opportunity for comparison of its fruit with

that which hung on the boughs of older institutions. As one reads again

an address which was listened to with eagerness, one follows the course

which Lowell’s thought took with a deepening sense that he was speaking

out of a full mind, not so much upon the specific questions of

university education as upon the large aspects of education and life

which rose to view as an historical survey laid them bare. The address

was the outcome of Lowell’s life as a scholar broadening into the

experience of a man who had had to do with the affairs of a great world.

The affectionate pride which he had in New England as exemplified in his

historic study, “New England Two Centuries Ago,” had grown into a

feeling of reverence which leads him in the opening passages of his

address to set forth the founders of the college in a manner to leave on

the minds of his hearers the impression of an august body chosen out of

the greatest of their time to lay the foundation of a noble institution;

and toward the close of his address he returns to this theme and

presents it anew with an eloquence and beauty of phrase that make the

passage one which may be read without fear beside the sonorous Latin

which faced the audience in Sanders Theatre.

“They who, on a tiny clearing pared from the edge of the woods, built

here, most probably with the timber hewed from the trees they felled,

our earliest hall, with the solitude of ocean behind them, the mystery

of forest before them, and all about them a desolation, most surely (_si

quis animis celestibus locus_) share our gladness and our gratitude at

the splendid fulfilment of their vision. If we could have but preserved

the humble roof which housed so great a future, Mr. Ruskin himself would

almost have admitted that no castle or cathedral was ever richer in

sacred associations, in pathos of the past, and in moral significance.

They who reared it had the sublime prescience of that courage which

fears only God, and could say confidently in the face of all

discouragement and doubt, ‘He hath led me forth into a large place;

because He delighted in me, He hath delivered me.’ We cannot honor them

too much; we can repay them only by showing, as occasions rise, that we

do not undervalue the worth of their example.”

It was out of this natural consideration of the origin of the University

that Lowell passed by an historical process to an analysis of the

objects had in founding it and the spirit in which these objects had

been pursued. He troubled himself not at all with the external affairs

of the college and used no time in tracing its material development. He

had found its chief office to be that of maintaining and handing down

the traditions “of how excellent a thing Learning was,” and his main

contention was that the chief office of the University still is to train

in learning rather than in knowledge. It was in urging this that he made

a plea for the broad and not the special interpretation of the term

Learning. As the result of his own study and observation he contended

earnestly for the Humanities as the paramount interest.

Lowell admitted in a letter he wrote to G. H. Palmer, one of the most

intelligent advocates of those new methods in education which found

their fullest expression in what is known as the “elective system,” that

he based some parts of his address rather on his experience as a teacher

there than on the later conditions of teaching in the college; but

after all his dispute was with the elective system, for he distrusted

what looked to him like a departure from the “unbroken experience and

practice of mankind.” One does not need to doubt or believe in this

particular collegiate method to give full assent to Lowell’s dictum that

“the most precious property of culture and of a college as its trustee

is to maintain higher ideals of life and its purpose, to keep trimmed

and burning the lamps of that pharos, built by wiser than we, that warns

from the reef and shallows of popular doctrine.” For as he moves forward

in his address, he is drawn inevitably into a consideration of what was,

first and last, the fundamental social question with him, the democratic

idea. He had refrained, as we have seen, from touching in his English

address on Democracy upon the perils which beset it in its American

stronghold, but here, at home, in the very heart of its stoutest

defence, he must needs use these perils to emphasize his doctrine that

the prime business of the college is to “set free, to supple, and to

train the faculties in such wise as shall make them most effective for

whatever task life may afterwards set them, for the duties of life

rather than for its business, and to open windows on every side of the

mind where thickness of wall does not prevent it.”

The whole address is an exemplification of how surely Lowell’s mind had

come to base all speculations on the broad bottom of a political

organism. And as he was still unequivocally an idealist, the very

melancholy of his foreboding, cropping out in this and other addresses,

bore testimony not to his faintheartedness but to his apprehension of

the distance which prevailed between his ideal and the fact. He saw in

the whole the sum of the particulars, and, as individual character

working in freedom was the ultimate end in persons, he would listen to

nothing else when he applied his ear to the movement of the people; and

thus it was that he distrusted any departure of the University in its

methods from that line which had resulted in the historic democracy that

he believed to have found its true exemplar in New England.

When Lowell was in England in the summer of 1886 he had written to Mr.

Gilder that his friend Miss Mary Boyle had some letters of Landor which

she had intrusted to him for publication, and he proposed to preface

them with an introduction of his own if Mr. Gilder would publish the

paper in the _Century_. His letters show that he was moved not by any

desire to write on Landor, but to help an old friend, and now that his

Harvard address was off his hands, he applied himself to the task. He

had the curiosity to look up his early paper on Landor in the

_Massachusetts Quarterly_,[95] in which he remarks he found one good

sentence and one other that he could not understand.[96] He sent the

paper to Mr. Gilder, 23 December, 1886: “I send you a Christmas gift. I

have made more of it than I expected, but you may eat only the plums if

you like and give to the poor the pudding in which I have hidden them.

The letters, thank Heaven, are better than I thought. The last (on

Powers’s death) is charming. I have arranged them as well as I could

without books. There is one on the Chinese War which I could date could

I remember the year of that outrage--1841 or 2? You might find out.

“Have I added too much of my own? And is it dull? _I_ am, but that’s

nothing to the purpose. I could easily have held my peace, but I

promised to play the Master of Ceremonies and must proclaim the rank of

my guests.

“I am sorry that some of the letters are copied on both sides. Most of

them are in proper form. Send me proof here unless I say otherwise.

If the hunting up of Christmas gifts hasn’t killed her,

Give my love to Mrs. Gilder.”[97]

The paper, which is included in “Latest Literary Essays and Addresses,”

was a most agreeable compound of criticism and personal reminiscence,

and contains what Lowell rarely ventured on in his printed work, but now

and then in his letters with real success--the portraiture of a man.

The article did not appear for a year; meanwhile he was in

correspondence with Mr. Aldrich respecting some poems, and he had

engaged to write the introduction to a subscription book, “The World’s

Progress.” He had the assurance that the work thus introduced was a

serious one, but his introduction had no special relation to it; it was

an independent paper. “It rather attracts me,” he wrote, “through my

sense of humor. It will be pure creation made out of nothing, not even

nebula or star-dust,” and he added, what was indeed the secret of his

undertaking the work, “the money it will fetch me will be a great

medicine. Grandfathers get miserly. I never saved a penny till I had two

[grandchildren].” As the new year opened, and he found himself in the

midst of this set task: “I don’t get on with the world at all since I

half promised to write an introduction to ‘The World’s Progress,’ a

megatherium of a book in two volumes, quarto. I hear their heavy

footfall behind me wherever I go, and am sure they will trample me into

the mud at last.”

The Introduction, though undertaken apparently with a reluctant rather

than an eager mind, and bearing indeed some marks of a perfunctory

performance, is yet not only interesting in itself but valuable as a

mirror in which to catch a passing reflection of its author’s mind.

Aware that the book to follow would deal largely with those advances in

civilization which publishers and writers in their bookkeeping like to

record to the credit of the world, he cannot forbear at the outset

gently reminding his readers that with all our statistics we cannot

“make ourselves independent of the inextinguishable lamps of heaven,”

and with a sort of under-the-breath doubt if he may not be letting his

own temperament get in the way of more exact standards of measurement,

he allows himself for a moment to pause over the changes in

civilization, which accepted as progress do yet obliterate some very

wonderful prints which the foot of man has made. It is the old song of

_laudator temporis acti_, sung to the air of his own brooding age.

But having thus, as it were, satisfied his conscience by discharging the

debt he owed to his own personal taste in the matter of what constitutes

progress, he takes up the real business of the Introcduction and quickly

becomes forgetful of himself the philosopher in the pleasure which the

poet and artist in him may take with a very large and plastic substance.

Near the close of the paper he writes: “Should the doctrines of Natural

Selection, Survival of the Fittest, and Heredity, be accepted as Laws of

Nature, they must profoundly modify the thought of men and,

consequently, their action.” He himself, with his aversion to the

speculations of science, had but a bowing acquaintance with those

investigations of Darwin and Huxley and their fellows which brought

about so great a revolution of thought in his lifetime, and clearly was

impatient of what he regarded as the encroachment of science upon the

humanities in the formation of intellectual beliefs; but he was, after

all, a child of his time, and his thought had been, whether he would or

no, modified by the results of scientific investigation. At any rate, he

had the poet’s faculty for appropriating results, and the picture which

he draws in this Introduction of the evolution of the earth and of man’s

early mastery of it is a striking piece of imaginative writing, touched

here and there with a dash of wit which one almost fancies was Lowell’s

intellectual aside to the Balaam-like prophecy he was compelled to

deliver.

It is, however, when he emerges in his thought upon those great plains

of society where his mind was most wont to dwell, that Lowell falls into

an earnestness of tone which quite as surely indicates that he had been

warmed by the fire he had kindled into a healthy and natural vigor, and

when, from a rapid survey of the world’s past growing more and more

present under his touch, he comes to forecast the world’s future, it is

with a voice familiar through his recent addresses and poems and letters

that we hear him speak. Again he recurs to that significant element in

modern life about which his mind was constantly revolving, the

political organization of men in its relation to their individual

character, and his definitions of Democracy are here more precise, more

carefully formulated than in any of his writings. The main passage is so

notable that it deserves to be read again, apart from its context, as

the last statement made by one whose whole life was, in a measure,

occupied with an exposition of the truths here laid down.

“In casting the figure of the World’s future, many new elements, many

disturbing forces, must be taken into account. First of all is

Democracy, which, within the memory of men yet living, has assumed

almost the privilege of a Law of Nature, and seems to be making constant

advances towards universal dominion. Its ideal is to substitute the

interest of the many for that of the few as the test of what is wise in

polity and administration, and the opinion of the many for that of the

few as the rule of conduct in public affairs. That the interest of the

many is the object of whatever social organization man has hitherto been

able to effect seems unquestionable; whether their opinions are so safe

a guide as the opinions of the few, and whether it will ever be

possible, or wise if possible, to substitute the one for the other in

the hegemony of the World, is a question still open for debate. Whether

there was ever such a thing as a Social Contract or not, as has been

somewhat otiosely discussed, this, at least, is certain,--that the basis

of all Society is the putting of the force of all at the disposal of

all, by means of some arrangement assented to by all, for the

protection of all, and this under certain prescribed forms. This has

always been, consciously or unconsciously, the object for which men have

striven, and which they have more or less clumsily accomplished. The

State--some established Order of Things, under whatever name--has always

been, and must always be, the supremely important thing; because in it

the interests of all are invested, by it the duties of all imposed and

exacted. In point of fact, though it be often strangely overlooked, the

claim to any selfish hereditary privilege because you are born a man is

as absurd as the same claim because you are born a noble. In a last

analysis, there is but one natural right; and that is the right of

superior force. This primary right having been found unworkable in

practice, has been deposited, for the convenience of all, with the

State, from which, as the maker, guardian, and executor of Law, and as a

common fund for the use of all, the rights of each are derived, and man

thus made as free as he can be without harm to his neighbor. It was this

surrender of private jurisdiction which made civilization possible, and

keeps it so. The abrogation of the right of private war has done more to

secure the rights of man, properly understood,--and, consequently, for

his well-being,--than all the theories spun from the brain of the most

subtle speculator, who, finding himself cramped by the actual conditions

of life, fancies it as easy to make a better world than God intended, as

it has been proved difficult to keep in running order the world that

man has made out of his fragmentary conception of the divine thought.

The great peril of democracy is that the assertion of private right

should be pushed to the obscuring of the superior obligation of public

duty.”

Having thus discoursed upon what is most fundamental in political

thinking, he passes, after a brief reflection upon the growing function

of the press, to enquire into that new factor in the problem of the

future which takes the name of Socialism. He distinguishes here, as

elsewhere, between socialism as a new reading of the law of rights and

duties, and State Socialism. He repeats his warning against this form

which he holds destructive of a genuine democracy, for he distrusts the

robbery of man’s freedom of development in character for the sake of

paying him back in the paper promises of security from misfortune. The

whole latter part of this Introduction, in spite of its hurried manner,

is a footnote to the history of Lowell’s thought on some of the greatest

of themes.

The intimation given above, that Lowell could not quite afford the

luxury of being a bystander in his old age, reminds us how close he

sailed to the wind throughout his life, yet how faithfully he kept off

the reefs of debt. At times he had enough to live on comfortably; when

he could not live what is called comfortably, he simply drew in, and at

least knew not the discomfort of living beyond his means. He had not now

the resources of his professorship, and he was fain to increase the

income which his small estate and his copyrights brought him by such

tasks as the Introduction we have considered, and other more congenial

literary labors. His reputation, fortunately, had now turned capital so

far as the quick assets of his writing went. He could command good

prices from editors, but by a not uncommon fortune periodical work

yielded him much better return than his accumulating books. In a letter

written to Thomas Hughes, 10 January, 1887, he makes this frank

statement of his affairs: “Rejoice with me that I am getting popular in

my old age, and hope to pay my this year’s trip to the dear old Home

without defrauding my grandchildren.[98] I get twenty-five cents, I

think it is, on copies [of “Democracy”] sold during the first eight

months after publication, and then it goes into my general copyright,

for which I am paid £400 a year. Not much after nearly fifty years of

authorship, but enough to keep me from the almshouse.”

His friends sometimes chided him for not reckoning in his price the

worth of his name, but he had it not in him to drive sharp bargains.

Still, now and then he braced himself, as when he wrote to a friendly

editor respecting a poem he had sent him: “Another magazine would have

given me----. I am not speaking of intrinsic but of commercial values,

of course. I think one ought to make hay while the sun shines, and mine,

after a good deal of cloudy weather, seems to be shining now. As I don’t

know how long this meteoric phenomenon is to last, I must be diligent

with my windrows and cocks that my crop may be in the mow before a

change of weather. As an author, you will sympathize with me, while as

editor, you will ask me blandly how flint-skins are quoted in the last

prices current. I fancy you with that dual expression of countenance

typified by Hamlet as ‘one dropping and one auspicious eye’--only I see

that I have got the epithets in the wrong order for the metre.”

In the letter to Mr. Hughes last quoted, Lowell says: “I am going to

talk on politics to the people of Chicago on my next birthday,” and he

went to Chicago to fulfil this engagement. The Union League Club of that

city had proposed to celebrate Washington’s birthday by public exercises

in Music Hall, consisting mainly of Lowell’s address, which was

announced to be on “American Politics.” The house was completely filled

and Lowell was given a hearty welcome. The audience, however, was

greatly taken aback at the first words of the speaker, for he said when

he came forward that he had changed his subject and would speak not on

“American Politics,” but upon the principles of literary criticism as

illustrated by Shakespeare’s Richard III., a paper which he had read in

1883 before the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution, and which was

included, after his death, in “Latest Literary Essays and Addresses.” He

went on to say that in announcing politics as the subject of his address

he had not fully realized the conditions under which it was to be

delivered; that he was accustomed to speak frankly, but that he found

himself the guest and, in a manner, the representative of the Club. What

he had to say would plainly give offence to his hosts, and he was thus

compelled on the score of courtesy to change his subject.

The situation was one which might have led those present to detect some

irony in Lowell’s politeness. The Union League Club was a Republican

organization under the control of the Blaine wing of the party. It had

succeeded in getting rid of those Republicans who had been hostile to

Blaine, amongst whom was the gentleman who was Lowell’s host. But Lowell

had made no concealment of the position he occupied. He made it clear

enough at this time, a couple of days later when he was a guest of the

Harvard Club of Chicago: “I stood outside of party,” he then said, “for

nearly twenty-five years, and I was perfectly happy, I assure you....

Party organization, no doubt, is a very convenient thing, but a great

many people, and I feel very strongly with them, feel that when loyalty

to party means worse disloyalty to conscience, it is then asking more

than any good man or any good citizen ought to concede.”

Upon his return from Chicago Lowell gave six lectures on the Old

Dramatists before the Lowell Institute. Though in accepting the

invitation he was returning to an early love he had never forsaken, the

preparation was a burden. “I haven’t time for a word more,” he wrote to

Mr. Gilder, 3 March, 1887, “for I begin a course of lectures next

Tuesday and haven’t yet begun to write them, though I have done a deil

o’ thinking,” and to Mr. Higginson on 8 March: “I am fagged to death. I

never ought to have consented to the Lowell Lectures. If I get over them

without breaking down, I shall be happy. After they are (if _I_ am not)

over, I will try to do what you ask. But my brains are husks just now.”

Perhaps there was no better barometer of Lowell’s spirits than his

temper regarding out of door life. Time was when the frosty winter air

was elixir to him, but now he writes: “It is growing colder as my legs

inform me--for I have had no fire to-day. I look out of window and see

that the sun is gone behind a cloud, and the white lines of snow along

the walls marking out the landscape as if for a tennis-court of Anakim.

I don’t like winter so well as I used. It tempts the rheumatism out of

all its ambushes, as the sun thaws out snakes. And the walking is like

bad verses.” The confession gains force when one considers that all his

life Lowell had been indifferent to the need of a top coat, and

preferred to work in his study at a temperature of 60°.

In his first lecture Lowell said that he should have preferred to

entitle his course “Readings from the Old English Dramatists with

illustrative comments,” and that is practically what he made of his

work. The slim volume in which, after his death, the six lectures were

contained, does not at all stand for six hours’ entertainment of his

audience; long passages which he read from printed books do not appear

at all, as there were no passages in his written lectures which

introduced or followed them. Lowell was recurring to a familiar theme,

and his intention plainly was to speak freely out of a full mind. He

does not appear to have re-read his early “Conversations;” he had not

seen it, he said, for many years, and he was not quite sure just what

its subjects were. A comparison of the two treatments separated by

forty-four years shows curious likenesses and differences. As will be

remembered, the young critic was so zealous over his ideas of reform

that Chapman and Ford, the only dramatists he treated, and Chaucer, were

often no more than mere prompters in the discussion of some current

phase of morals or society. A little of this disposition to vagrancy

reappears in these later talks, for they are quite as informal in their

way as were the earlier Conversations. But in place of the topics

connected with reform, there are more cognate themes. Since he is to

speak of Marlowe, he finds it easy to make, by way of preface, an

enquiry into the refinement which had been going on in the language, and

so, by natural association, to one of his old themes, the sanctity of

the English tongue. In introducing Webster also, he has some quiet

criticism on the function of Form; and when he passes to Chapman, an

enquiry into the personal element in literature leads him into some

remarks on biographies, autobiographies, and the modern zest for

intimacies in the lives of men, remarks which gain some earnestness, no

doubt, from experiences which he had undergone.

But for the most part, he keeps closely to his business of inviting his

hearers to share with him the enjoyment of the dramatists whom he reads

and comments on, and when we compare the actual appreciation and

criticism in the two books, the difference is mainly in the mellowness

and quiet assurance which pervade the later treatment, and in the fact

that in the earlier book he was more concerned with what in

old-fashioned terms were the “beauties” of the poets, in the later, with

the art and the constructive faculty.

In his half-homeless condition, Lowell looked with eagerness to his

summers in England. There he had in its leisurely form the social life

which had come to be a real solace to him, and there too he found the

world arranged for the ease and comfort of a solitary. He sailed for

England this year on the 21st of April, and found himself shortly in his

familiar lodgings in London. He liked the sense of world activity which

he felt in the heart of that great city. “Nothing can be more

bewildering,” he wrote to his daughter, “than the sudden change in my

habits and surroundings. Were it merely from the dumbness of

Southborough to the clatter and chatter of London, it would be queer

enough; from the rising and falling murmur of the mill to this roar of

the human torrent. But I can hardly help laughing sometimes when I think

how a single step from my hermitage takes me into Babylon. Meanwhile it

amuses and interests me. My own vitality seems to reënforce itself as if

by some unconscious transfusion of the blood from these ever-throbbing

arteries of life into my own.”[99]

There were two places in England, outside of London, in which he

especially delighted: one was St. Ives in Cornwall, the resort of his

friends Mr. and Mrs. Leslie Stephen, the other was Whitby in Yorkshire.

For six years, with the exception of 1885, he had made a summer stay in

Whitby. It was then a quiet, primitive place; now it knows the flood of

summer excursionists. Lowell liked the folk he met there, who reminded

him of New England country folk. He liked the walks in the neighborhood

and the sounding sea, and he was wont to invite to his lodgings friends

whose companionship he cared for. An appreciative follower in Lowell’s

footsteps has made an agreeable record of the memories he left behind in

Whitby, especially with the two Misses Gallillee, with whom he

lodged.[100] The paper deals with the picturesque properties of the

little village, and has also a faint fragrance from the very human

reminiscences of Lowell that remained in the minds of those who came

near to him. “In the eyes of the positive little person--an innate

Yankee of Yorkshire blood--whose duty it was to change the courses on

these occasions, literary men as such have no glamour at all. Her

acquaintance includes a number, and her North Country vocabulary has

terms wherewith to dispose of them briefly. But there is neither

reservation nor qualification in the tone in which she says of the

conclusion of a certain discussion, listened to between times in the

serving, ‘I never forgot it.’ It had wound up in a round-robin

agreement, according to which each person present was to say by what he

should best like to be remembered. The host spoke last, and the sentence

in which his admiring hearer puts him on record is, ‘By kindly acts and

helpful deeds.’”

Yet much at home as he was in Whitby, Lowell could not well resist the

contagion which attacks all summer wanderers. As he wrote to Lady

Lyttleton from Whitby, 7 September: “I am a bird of passage now, and

that makes me feel unsettled wherever I am, but I have enjoyed my stay

here, and the hogsheads of fresh air I have drunk have done me good....

I go down to Somersetshire on Saturday to Mr. Hobhouse, who has promised

to show me Wells Cathedral, the only one in England I have not seen.

Thence I go to the Stephens.” During this summer he was fitfully engaged

in bringing together such poems as he had written since the volume

“Under the Willows,” or had written before but had not included in that

volume, and he continued his work upon it after his return to Deerfoot

Farm in the fall. He pondered over what he should include, what leave

out, and the medley which resulted caused him, in the volume “Heartsease

and Rue,” to distribute the contents without regard to chronology under

a variety of headings,--Friendship, Sentiment, Fancy, Humor and Satire,

Epigrams. “My book will be a raft manned by the press-gang, I fear,” he

wrote. “There will be some hitherto unprinted things in it--many of them

trifles--some of which, however, please my fancy and may another’s here

and there.” As he went on with the work of collection, he grew more and

more distrustful. “I feel,” he wrote 22 December, 1887, “like a young

author at his first venture. I think there will be some nice things in

the book, but fear that _my_ kind of thing is a little old-fashioned.

People want sensation rather than sense nowadays.” Again, 4 January,

1888, he writes: “I am wondering more and more if my poems are good for

anything after all. They are old-fashioned in their simplicity and

straightforwardness of style,--and everybody writes so plaguily well

nowadays. I fear that I left off my diet of bee bread too long and have

written too much prose. A poet shouldn’t be, nay, he can’t be anything

else without loss to him as poet, however much he may gain as man.”

Yet he liked the little task of collecting the volume, and there was a

pleasurable content in his uneventful country life with his books and

pipe. “My mind is busy,” he wrote, “and I like it. I am sitting in the

sun without fire and I like that. My pipe tastes good and I like that

too, for it enables me to treat with indifference some alarums and

incursions of the gout which I was sharply aware of yesterday and this

morning. No weather-sign is so truthful as this: If your pipe is savory,

nothing is the matter with you. Put that in _your_ pipe and smoke it!”

Lowell’s friendliness showed itself in the informal visits he liked to

make to his friends when he was in town, and the familiar letters he

wrote from the country. He was rather more ready to entertain a

correspondent with a bit of criticism than to heed the calls made on him

by editors for the same kind of writing done with formal purpose. Thus

he writes to Mrs. Bell from Deerfoot Farm, Thanksgiving Day, 1887: “A

second-rate author two hundred years old has a great advantage over his

juniors of our own day. If he himself have not the merit of originality,

his language has that of quaintness which sometimes gives him a charm

similar in its effect though very inferior in quality. I think this is

true of Feltham, though it be now more than twenty years since I have

looked into him. I had read him in the day of my superstition when one

takes all established reputations for granted, and read him over again

after Experience had let fall her fatal clarifying drops into my eyes.

Woe’s me, how he has dwarfed! I wrote my opinion of him on the flyleaf

of my little quarto edition, and all I can recollect of him is that I

called his style ‘lousy with Latinisms.’ Pardon me. Swift was still read

when I was young, and how resist the alliteration? I can pardon Browne’s

Latinisms, nay, his Græcisms too, and even like them. They are resolved

in the powerful menstruum of his thought. They are farsought and yet

seem not farfetched. Feltham’s are stuck-in like plums in his poor

pudding and make the dough more dismal by contrast. He hasn’t _stoned_

them and we crush between our teeth something hard and out of place

that leaves an acrid taste behind it. I remember one phrase of his that

tickled me--the ‘spacious ears’ of the elephant. It fits another animal,

and sometimes when I have been assfixiated by an audience I have been

tempted to beg of them to ‘lend me their spacious ears.’

“I think it possible that I gave Longfellow the references to him, for I

was reading him about the time the Dante translation was going on. I

could tell if I had my copy here and could take a look at the flyleaves.

“I may do Feltham wrong. The _navicella di nostro ingenio_ draws more

water as we grow older, and grounds in the shallows where we found good

water-fowling in our youth.

“No doubt the book is in the Athenæum,--but wait, please, till I can

lend you my copy. It is at Elmwood, and I can get it after I come back

from New York, whither I go to be baited for the benefit of the

International Copyright League. I wish there were a concise and elegant

Latinism for D--n! I would bring it in gracefully here.

“I didn’t mean to write all this and shouldn’t if I hadn’t had something

else I ought to be doing. How tempting the duty that lies farthest from

us always is, to be sure!”

It may have struck the reader how little comment, comparatively, Lowell

made during his life upon his fellows in American literature. We must

except of course his poetic criticism in “A Fable for Critics” and

“Agassiz;” but in his prose criticism he occupied himself most

constantly with the dead, not the living. When, later, he spoke on “Our

Literature” at the Washington Centennial in New York he confined himself

to generalities. It is worth noting, therefore, that on an occasion when

he was called on to preside at an Authors’ Reading for the benefit of

the Copyright League[101] he prefaced his argument for an international

copyright act with a résumé of the course of American literature, and

some more specific characterization of the contemporaries with whom his

own name always will be associated. As a somewhat unwonted personal

sketch, even though scarcely more than an off-hand deliverance, it may

well be given here as one of the last of Lowell’s public addresses.

“When I was beginning life, as it is called,--as if we were not always

beginning it!--the question ‘Who reads an American book?’ still roused

in the not too numerous cultivated class among us a feeling of resentful

but helpless anger. The pens of our periodical writers fairly sputtered

with rage, and many a hardly suppressed imprecation might be read

between their lines. Their position was, in truth, somewhat difficult.

We had had Jonathan Edwards, no doubt; and people were still living who

thought Barlow’s ‘Hasty Pudding’ a lightsome _jeu d’esprit_, and who

believed that Dwight’s ‘Conquest of Canaan’ was a long stride towards

that of posterity and the conversion of the heathen there. We had had

Freneau, who wrote a single line,--

‘The hunter and the deer a shade,’

which had charmed the ear and cheated the memory of Scott (I think it

was) till he mistook it for his own. We had the ‘Star Spangled Banner,’

and two or three naval ballads which, to my ear, have the true rough and

ready tone. Philip Cook, of Virginia, had written a few graceful and

musical lyrics. We had ‘McFingal,’ as near its model as any imitation of

the inimitable can be, but far indeed from that intricate subtlety of

wit which makes ‘Hudibras’ a metaphysical study as well as an

intellectual delight. We had in the ‘Federalist’ a mine of political

wisdom by which even Burke might have profited, and whose golden veins

are not yet exhausted, as foreign statists and jurists are beginning to

discover. But of true literature we had next to nothing. Of what we had,

Duyckinck’s scholarly ‘Cyclopædia of American Literature’ gives us an

almost too satisfactory notion. Of what we had not, there was none to

tell us, for there were no critics. We had no national unity, and

therefore no national consciousness, and it is one of the first

conditions of a virile and characteristic literature that it should feel

solid and familiar earth under its feet. New England had indeed a kind

of unity, but it was a provincial unity, and those hardy commonwealths

that invented democracy were not and could not yet be quite in sympathy

with the new America that was to adopt and expand it. Literature thrives

in an air laden with tradition, in a soil ripe with immemorial culture,

in the temperature, steady and stimulating, of historic associations.

We had none of these. What semblance we had of them was English, and we

long continued to bring earth from the mother-country to pot our

imported plants with, as the crusaders brought home that of Palestine to

be buried in. And all this time our native oak was dropping its unheeded

acorns into the crannies of the rock where by and by their sturdy roots

would make room for themselves and find fitting nourishment.

“Never was young nation on its way to seek its fortune so dumfounded as

Brother Jonathan when John Bull, presenting what seemed to his startled

eyes a blunderbuss, cried gruffly from the roadside, ‘Stand, and deliver

a literature!’ He was in a ‘pretty fix,’ as he himself would have called

it. After fumbling in all his pockets, he was obliged to confess that he

hadn’t one about him at the moment, but vowed that he had left a

beautiful one at home which he would have fetched along--only it was so

everlasting heavy. If he had but known it, he carried with him the

pledge of what he was seeking in that vernacular phrase ‘fix,’ which

showed that he could invent a new word for a new need without asking

leave of anybody.

“Meanwhile the answer to Sydney Smith’s scornful question was shaping

itself. Already we had Irving, who after humorously satirizing the

poverty of our annals in his ‘Knickerbocker,’ forced to feel the pensive

beauty of what is ancient by the painful absence of it, first tried to

create an artificial antiquity as a substitute, and then sought in the

old world a kindlier atmosphere and themes more sympathetic with the

dainty and carefully shaded phrase he loved. He first taught us the

everliving charm of style, most invaluable and most difficult of

lessons. Almost wholly English, he is yet our earliest classic, still

loved in the Old Home and the New. Then came Cooper, our first radically

American author, with the defects of style that come of half-culture,

but a man of robust genius who, after a false start, looked about him to

recognize in the New Man of the New World an unhackneyed and

unconventional subject for Art. Brockden Brown had shown vivid glimpses

of genius, but of a genius haunted by the phantasms of imagination and

conscious of those substantial realities they mocked only as an opium

eater might be. His models were lay figures shabby from their long

service in the studios of Godwin and the Germans. Cooper first studied

from the life, and it was the _homo Americanus_ with our own limestone

in his bones, our own iron in his blood, that sat to him. There had been

pioneers before him, like Belknap and Breckenridge, who had, in

woodman’s phrase, blazed the way for him, but he found new figures in

the forest, autochthonous figures, and on the ocean, whose romance he

was the first to divine, he touched a nerve of patriotic pride that

still vibrates. I open upon my boyhood when I chance on a page of his

best. In prose we had also Channing, who uttered the perceptions, at

once delicate and penetrating like root fibres, of a singularly

intuitive mind in a diction of sober fervor where the artist sometimes

elbows aside the preacher; and Webster, the massive simplicity of whose

language and the unwavering force of whose argument, flashing into

eloquent flame as it heated, recalled to those who listened and saw

before them one of the most august shapes manhood ever put on, no

inadequate image of Pericles. We had little more. Emerson was still

letting grow or trying in short flights those wings that were to lift

him and us to Heaven’s sweetest air. Hawthorne, scarce out of his teens,

had given in ‘Fanshawe’ some inkling of his instinct for style and of

the direction his maturer genius was to choose, but no glimpse of that

creative imagination, the most original and profound of these latter

days. Our masters of historical narration were yet to come.

“In poetry we were still to seek. Byrant’s ‘Waterfowl’ had begun that

immortal flight that will be followed by many a delighted eye long after

ours shall have been darkened; Dana had written some verses which showed

a velleity for better and sincerer things; Willis was frittering away a

natural and genuine gift; Longfellow was preluding that sweet, pure, and

sympathetic song which persuaded so many Englishmen that he must be a

countrymen of theirs. In his case the question certainly became not ‘Who

reads an American book?’ but ‘Who does _not_ read one?’ Holmes had

written one imperishable poem.

“This was the state of things when I was a boy. That old question, once

so cruelly irritating, because it was so cruelly to the point, has long

ago lost its sting. When I look round me on this platform, I see a

company of authors whose books are read wherever English is read, and

some whose books are read in languages that are other than their own.

The American who lounges over an English railway-book-stall while his

train is making-up sees almost as many volumes with names of his

countrymen on their backs as he sees of native authors. American

Literature has asserted and made good its claim to a definite place in

the world. Sixty years ago there were only two American authors, Irving

and Cooper, who could have lived by their literary incomes, and they

fortunately had other sources of revenue. There are now scores who find

in letters a handsome estate. Our literature has developed itself out of

English literature, as our political forms have developed themselves out

of English political forms, but with a difference. Not as parasitic

plants fed from the parent stock, but only as new growths from seeds the

mother tree has dropped, could they have prospered as they have done.

And so our literature is a part of English literature and must always

continue to be so, but, as I have said, with a difference. What that

difference is, it would be very hard to define, though it be something

of which we are very sensible when we read an American book. We are, I

think, especially sensible of it in the biography of any of our

countrymen, as I could not help feeling as I read that admirable one of

Emerson by Mr. Cabot. There was nothing English in the conditions which

shaped the earlier part of Emerson’s life. Something Scottish there

was, it may be said, but the later life at Concord which was so

beautiful in its noble simplicity, in its frugality never parsimonious,

and practised to secure not wealth but independence, that is--or must we

say was?--thoroughly American. Without pretension, without swagger, with

the need of proclaiming itself, and with no affectation of that

commonness which our late politicians seem to think especially dear to a

democracy, it represented whatever was peculiar and whatever was best in

the novel inspirations of our soil. These inspirations began to make

themselves felt early in our history and I think I find traces of their

influence even so long ago as the ‘Simple Cobbler of Agawam,’ published

in 1647. Its author, Ward, had taken his second degree at Cambridge and

was a man past middle life when be came over to Massachusetts, but I

think his book would have been a different book had he written it in

England. This Americanism which is there because we cannot help it, not

put there because it is expected of us, gives, I think, a new note to

our better literature and is what makes it fresh and welcome to foreign

ears. We have developed, if we did not invent, a form of racy, popular

humor, as original as it is possible for anything to be, which has found

ideal utterance through the genius of ‘Mark Twain.’ I confess that I

look upon this general sense of the comic among our people and the ready

wit which condenses it into epigram, as one of the safeguards of our

polity. If it be irreverent it is not superstitious; it has little

respect for phrases; and no nonsense can long look it in the eye without

flinching.”

* * * * *

“Heartsease and Rue” was published in the early spring of 1888 and

immediately afterward Lowell printed in the _Atlantic_ his poem

“Turner’s Old Téméraire, under a Figure symbolizing the Church.” This

poem and “How I consulted the Oracle of the Goldfishes,” which appeared

in the _Atlantic_ for August, 1889, were printed in the thin posthumous

volume of “Last Poems,” and belong thus in the group which most

effectively represents Lowell’s mood on the profoundest themes at the

end of his life. The first poem in “Heartsease and Rue,” that on

Agassiz, which heads the section entitled Friendship, has already been

noted in connection with the time when it was written. A little of the

same pathos of parting with old friends is in the postscript of the

letter to Curtis, and in this as in the former, the poet’s mind runs on

naturally in its speculation to the new To Be. A single hint of a

thought which filled many of Lowell’s hours occurs in the poem when he

says:--

“With bits of wreck I patch the boat shall bear

Me to that unexhausted Otherwhere;”

but it is in the group of poems referred to above that one sees most

clearly a recurrence to the great underlying questions of faith. With a

half-mocking smile Lowell asks in “Credidimus Jovem regnare” if science

has found the key which religion has lost, and falls back on the

somewhat lame conclusion that he had best keep his key, which may be

but a rusty inheritance, on the chance that the door and lock may some

day be made to fit the key. Again, in the poem “How I consulted the

Oracle of the Goldfishes,” where he muses over the realities and

illusions of the spiritual world, he does not deny the doubts that have

arisen in his own mind, but after all refuses to permit even his doubts

to dismay him.

“Here shall my resolution be:

The shadow of the mystery

Is haply wholesomer for eyes

That cheat us to be over-wise,

And I am happy in my sight

To love God’s darkness as His light.”

Nor will he allow himself, even when contemplating what he regards as

the obscuration of the Church’s light, to look upon this as the last

state of organic faith. He takes that noble painting by Turner, “The

Fighting Téméraire tugged to her last berth, to be broken up,” and sees

science, “a black demon, belching fire and steam,” drag it away “to

gather weeds in the regardless stream.” Ruskin makes the picture an

unconscious expression by the painter of his own return to die by the

shore of the Thames, “the cold mists gathering over his strength, and

all men crying out against him, and dragging the old ‘Fighting

Téméraire’ out of their way, with dim, fuliginous contumely;” but surely

this is rather the passionate comment of a disciple making his master’s

work prophetic. Lowell’s poem strikes a deeper than a personal note. It

is a fine imaginative conception, a rare interpretation of a great work

of art by another work of art, and what is noticeable in the cry of the

poem is the protest which Lowell, in his instinctive faith, makes

against the finality of his own interpretation. He sees in imagination

the splendid history of the church, and no fighter under Nelson could

have witnessed this desolate funeral of the great ship with more anguish

than Lowell has thrown into his pathetic words; but as the English

sailor could have righted himself with a vision of the glories of the

future English navy, so Lowell closes his dirge with a triumphant

prophecy:--

“Shall nevermore, engendered of thy fame,

A new sea-eagle heir thy conqueror name,

And with commissioned talons wrench

From thy supplanter’s grimy clench

His sheath of steel, his wings of smoke and flame?

“This shall the pleased eyes of our children see;

For this the stars of God long even as we;

Earth listens for his wings; the Fates

Expectant lean; Faith cross-propt waits,

And the tired waves of Thought’s insurgent sea.”[102]

In taking another great painting as the prompter of his verse, Titian’s

so-called “Sacred and Profane Love,” Lowell again is not so much

interpreting the painter’s thought as he is using the canvas for a

mirror in which to read his own soul, and though in printing “Endymion”

he adds the gloss “a mystical comment,” one may guess that Lowell in

this twilight of his life, musing upon the ideals which had beckoned him

from earliest days, still saw in the heavens that vision of beauty, of

truth, and of freedom which had never been dethroned in his soul.

Faithfulness to high emprise,--that at least he could declare of himself

amidst all the doubt that beclouded his intellectual vision, and it was

fitting that the poet should, in this veiled figure of Endymion, see the

reflection of his own face and form.

In sending “Endymion” to his publishers for insertion in the volume

“Heartsease and Rue,” Lowell had written from Deerfoot Farm, 20

December, 1887: “I hoped to have sent this [‘Endymion’] by Monday

morning’s post, but for two days after my return my head continued to be

cloggy and my vein wouldn’t flow. I have at last managed to give what

seems to me as much consecutiveness as they need to what have been a

heap of fragments in my note-books for years. Longer revolution in my

head might round it better, but take it as a meteorolite, splintery

still, but with some metallic iridescence here and there brought from

some volcanic star. Let it come among poems of sentiment, and as the

longest, first if possible.”

He was still looking forward at this time to full labors. He had been

urged by his publishers to undertake the volume on Hawthorne in the

_American Men of Letters_ series. He had signified his assent in

general, some time before, and seemed now to be deliberately

contemplating the task, for he wrote four days after the last:--

“I think there have been one or two volumes published within a few years

about _old_ Salem. I should be glad to have them sent to me at

Southborough. I have one little job of writing to finish, after which I

shall revise my poems and prose for a new edition. I don’t know whether

it be second childhood, but I am beginning to take an interest in them.

Then I mean to take up Hawthorne in earnest....”

Before “Heartsease and Rue” was published Lowell had begun the task of

setting in order all his writings. With some hesitation he published in

the spring of 1888 a volume of “Political Essays,” in which he gathered

the articles printed in the _Atlantic_ and _North American Review_

during the stormy war period, but he added as the final number his

address on “The Independent in Politics,” given in New York, 13 April,

1888. It may be noted that, with no apparent definiteness of purpose,

Lowell did in the closing years of his life sum up, in forms which

occasions for the most part suggested, his leading principles and

doctrines, as if in a series of valedictories. Thus “Democracy” was a

confession of his fundamental belief in the region of world-politics;

his address at Harvard was the one word on scholarship which at the end

of a scholar’s life he most wished to say; his address before the

Copyright League had touched on points in the great theme of literature

which had been of lifelong interest; in his serious poetry, as we have

seen, he touched upon those great themes of both worlds which, as a seer

of visions all his life, he could not fail to find deepening in his

thought; and now he took the opportunity furnished by a friendly

audience to set forth some of those principles which had formed his rule

of conduct throughout a life that had found active employment in

citizenship. There is no lack of definiteness in this address, and yet

the period just before its delivery, when he may be supposed to have

prepared it, was one of even unwonted depression.

“It isn’t pleasant to think one’s self a failure at seventy,” he wrote

27 March, 1888, “and yet that’s the way it looks to me most of the time.

I _can’t_ do my best. That’s the very torment of it. Why not reconcile

one’s self with being second-rate? Isn’t it better than nothing? No,

’tis being nowhere.” And on being expostulated with, he wrote again: “It

isn’t the praise I care for (though of course I should like it as well

as Milton did, I suppose),--I mean the praise of others,--but what I

miss is a comfortable feeling of merit in myself. I have never even

opened my new book since it was published--I haven’t dared.”

It would be idle to seek too narrowly for the causes of this

despondency. As we have had frequent occasion to note, Lowell all his

life was subject to fluctuation of moods. The most comprehensive cause

was no doubt in the very constitution of his temperament, and as he was

overclouded at times, so for him the sun when it shone was more

brilliant than to many. But one asks most anxiously, are such moods

superficial or do they trench upon the very citadel of being, sapping

and mining the walls, so that if entrance is made, the very heart stops

beating. In all the shifting of Lowell’s mind there were great

fundamental beliefs from which he would not be separated. It may be that

in those deepest laid foundations of being, where the bed-rock of faith

in spiritual realities is discovered to be a ledge of the rock of ages,

Lowell finally, as we have seen, confessed to an ultimate expression of

faith, which was that of a child in the dark; but how was it as regards

that firm belief in his country which had been a passion with him all

his days, and was in truth an elemental faith with him? It is hard to

read his last political discourse, “The Place of the Independent in

Politics,” without a little sense of pain mingled with one’s admiration

for the serenity of the temper with which Lowell made what was in effect

a confession of his political faith; for when one comes to rest his

hopes for his country in the remnant, he confesses almost to as much

doubt as confidence. It must of course be remembered that Lowell had

given expression to his large faith in democracy in his Birmingham

address, and he calls the attention of his audience to this as an

explanation of the terms in which he is to address his own countrymen.

He might properly use a note of warning among a people whose cardinal

doctrine was the democratic principle, and he was justified

unquestionably in giving frankly his impressions of the low point to

which political organizations had fallen. Still, in undertaking to

account for the evolution of the democratic idea in American life, he

was questioning whether after all opportunity had not much to do with

it, and whether now that the walls were closing about this new country,

the force of evolution had not been largely spent. The dangers imminent

in the constant inflow of an ignorant body of foreigners, in the easy

good-nature with which the American tolerated abuses, and in the

aristocratic character of a civil service as diseased as the rotten

borough of English politics,--these dangers rose before him,

threatening, alarming. He had lost faith largely in the organic action

of parties, chiefly because he saw in them the passive instruments of

unscrupulous politicians; and he found the correction of this great evil

in the increasing power of a neutral body. He even went so far as to

find the only hope of salvation in the action of the Independents. “If

the attempt should fail,” the attempt that is to reform the parties from

without, “the failure of the experiment of democracy would inevitably

follow.”

This is not the place to discuss the merits of such a question. What I

wish is to show the working of Lowell’s mind on those political subjects

which had occupied him from boyhood. He was consistent throughout in

holding lightly to any allegiance to party, and in valuing highly the

integrity of the individual conscience, and his plea, gathering force as

it proceeds, is for such a spirit of devotion to the great ideals of the

country as shall compel the union of like-minded patriots in

accomplishing the great active reforms that press upon the minds of

thoughtful men.

“What we want,” he says in conclusion, “is an active class who will

insist in season and out of season that we shall have a country ...

whose very name shall not only, as now it does, stir us as with the

sound of a trumpet, but shall call out all that is best within us by

offering us the radiant image of something better and nobler and more

enduring than we, of something that shall fulfil our own thwarted

aspiration, when we are but a handful of forgotten dust in the soil

trodden by a race whom we shall have helped to make more worthy of their

inheritance than we ourselves had the power, I might almost say the

means, to be.”

No, Lowell’s last word to his countrymen in domestic politics was not

one of despair, however it may have been tinged with a sense of

temporary defeat. It was because of his strong love that he was jealous

of the honor of his country. The sadness is that of one weary in the

fight, but the last note, as in the other instances of his

valedictories, was a call to action and the reassertion of his undying

faith in his country. Yet, as in the other instances, there is the

pathetic note of faith in spite of the evidence of sight.

Once again, a little later than this, he was called on to preside at a

dinner of the Civil Service Reform Association, and something of what he

then said may be quoted as showing how hope and courage came to the

front with him when great national issues were in question. “If I am

sometimes inclined to fancy,” he then said, “as old men will, that the

world I see about me is not so pleasant as that on which my eyes first

opened, yet I am bound to admit on cross-examining myself, that it is on

the whole a better world, better especially in the wider distribution of

the civilized and civilizing elements which compose it, better for the

increased demands made upon it by those who were once dumb and helpless

and for their increasing power to enforce those demands. But every

advance in the right direction which I have witnessed has seemed

painfully slow. And painfully slow it was, if measured, as we are apt to

measure, by the standard of our own little lives, and not, as we should,

by that larger life of the community which can afford to wait.

“Every reform like that in which we are interested has to contend with

vested interests, and of all vested interests abuses are those which are

most adroit in putting a specious gloss on their monopolies and most

unscrupulous as to the weapons to be used in their defence. The evil

system which we would fain replace with a better has gone on so long

that it almost seems part of the order of nature. It is a barbarous and

dangerous system. When I was in Spain I saw reason to think that the

decay of that noble nation, due, no doubt, to many causes, was due above

all to a Civil Service like our own that had gone farther on the

inevitable road which ours is going.

“It should seem that a reform like ours, so reasonable, so convenient,

so economical, would at once commend itself to the good sense of the

people. And I think there are manifest signs that it is more and more so

commending itself. The humanity of our day is willing (as our ancestors

were not) that the state should support its inefficient members. But did

humorist ever conceive a more wasteful way of supporting them than by

paying them salaries for performing ill the minor and more mechanical

functions of government, thus making this inefficiency costly to every

one of us in his daily affairs? Even supposing them capable of becoming

efficient, the chances are that, just when they have learned their

business, they will be dismissed to make room for other apprentices to

pass through the same routine. My own experience has convinced me that

not only our social credit, but our business interests have suffered

greatly by the theory still more or less prevalent that a man good for

nothing else was just the thing for one of the smaller foreign

consulates.”