Cambridge Sketches

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The most plaintive of Beethoven scherzos,--that in the Moonlight Sonata,
--says as if it were spoken in words:

"Once we were happy, now I am forlorn;
Fortune has darkened, and happiness gone."

Lowell's poetic marriage did not last quite ten years. Maria White was
always frail and delicate, and she became more so continually.
Longfellow's clear foresight noticed the danger she was in years before
her death, which took place in the autumn of 1853. She left one child,
Mabel Lowell, slender and pale like herself, and with poetical lines in
her face, too, but fortunately endowed with her father's good
constitution. Only ten years! But such ten years, worth ten centuries of
the life of a girl of fashion, who thinks she is happy because she has
everything she wants. If the truth were known we might find that in the
twilight of his life Lowell thought more of these ten years with Maria
White than of the six years when he was Ambassador to England,--with
twenty-nine dinner-parties in the month of June.

What would poets do without war? The Trojan war, or some similar
conflict, served as the ground-work of Homer's mighty epic; Virgil
followed in similar lines; Dante would never have been famous but for the
Guelph and Ghibeline struggle. Shakespeare's plays are full of war and
fighting; and the wars of Napoleon stimulated Byron, Schiller, and Goethe
to the best efforts of their lives. In dealing with men like Emerson,
Longfellow, and Lowell, who were the intellectual leaders of their time,
it is impossible to escape their influence in the anti-slavery movement,
and its influence upon them, unpopular as that subject is at present.
That was the heroic age of American history, and the truth concerning it
has not yet been written. It was as heroic to the South as to the North,
for, as Sumner said, the slaveholders would never have made their
desperate attack on the Government of this country if they had not been
themselves the slaves of their own social organization.

It was the solution of a great historical problem, like that of
Constitutional Government _versus_ the Stuarts, and it ought to be
treated from a national and not a sectional stand-point.

The live men of that time became abolitionists as inevitably as their
forefathers became supporters of the Declaration of Independence. If
Webster and Everett had been born twenty years later, they must needs
have become anti-slavery, too. Those of Lowell's friends, like George S.
Hillard and George B. Loring, who for social or political reasons took
the opposite side, afterwards found themselves left in the lurch by an
adverse public opinion.

It was the Mexican war that first aroused Lowell to the seriousness of
the extension of slavery, and it was meeting a recruiting officer in the
streets of Boston, "covered all over with brass let alone that which
nature had set on his countenance," which inspired his writing the
first of the "Biglow Papers." They were hastily and carelessly written,
and Lowell himself held them in slight estimation as literature; but they
became immediately popular, as no poetry had that he had published
previously. Their freshness and directness appealed to the manliness and
good sense of the average New Englander, and the whole community
responded to them with repeated applause. There is, after all, much
poetry in the Biglow Papers, the more genuine because unintentional; but
they are full of the keenest wit and a proverbial philosophy which, if
less profound than Emerson's, is more capable of a practical application.

The vernacular in which they are written must have been learned at
Concord,--perhaps on the front stoop of the Middlesex Hotel,--while
Lowell was listening to the pithy conversation of Yankee farmers, not
only about their crops and cattle, but also discussing church affairs and
politics, local and national. It was the grandfathers of these men who
drove the British back from Concord bridge, and it was their sons who
fought their way from the Rapidan to Richmond. With the help of country
lawyers they sent Sumner and Wilson to the Senate, and knew what they
were about when they did this. For wit, humor, and repartee,--and, it may
be added, for decent conversation,--there is no class of men like them.
Both Lowell and Emerson have testified to their intrinsic worth.

On one occasion a Concord farmer was driving a cow past Sanborn's school-
house, when an impudent boy called out, "The calf always follows the
cow." "Why aren't you behind here, then?" retorted the man, with a look
that went home like the stroke of a cane. If Lowell had been present he
would have been delighted.

The Yankee dialect which he makes use of as a vehicle in these verses is
not always as clear-cut as it might be. He says, for instance,

"Pleasure doos make us Yankee kind of winch
As if it was something paid for by the inch."

The true New England countryman never flattens a vowel; if he changes it
he always makes it sharp. He would be more likely to say: "Pleasure does
make us Yankee kind er winch, as if 'twas suthin' paid for by the inch."
There are other instances of similar sort; but, nevertheless, if the
primitive Yankee should become extinct, as now seems very probable,
Lowell's masterly portrait of him will remain, and future generations can
reconstruct him from it, as Agassiz reconstructed an extinct species of
mammal from fossil bones.

Lowell did not join the Free-soilers, who were now bearing the brunt of
the anti-slavery conflict, but attached himself to the more aristocratic
wing of the old abolitionists, which was led by Edmund Quincy, Maria
Chapman, and L. Maria Child. Lowell was far from being a non-resistant.
In fact, he might be called a fighting-man, although he disapproved of
duelling; and this served to keep him at a distance from Garrison, of
whom he wisely remarked that "the nearer public opinion approached to him
the further he retreated into the isolation of his own private opinions."
He wrote regularly for the _Anti-Slavery Standard_ until 1851, when
the death of his father-in-law supplied the long-desired means for a
journey to Italy,--more desired perhaps for his wife's health than for
his own gratification. It may be the fault of his biographers, but I
cannot discover that Lowell took any share in the opposition to the
Fugitive Slave bill, or in the election of Sumner, which was the signal
event that followed it. In his whole life Lowell never made the
acquaintance of a practical statesman, while Whittier was in constant
communication with prominent members of the Free-soil and Republican
parties. Sumner went to hear Lowell's lecture on Milton, and praised it
as a work of genius.

I have heard the "Vision of Sir Launfal" spoken of more frequently than
any other of Lowell's poems. Some of the descriptive passages in it would
seem to have flowed from his pen as readily as ink from a quill; and
there are others which appear to have been evolved with much thought and
ingenuity. One cannot help feeling the sudden change from a June morning
at Elmwood to a mediaeval castle in Europe as somewhat abrupt; but when
we think of it subjectively as a poetic vision which came to Lowell
himself seated on his own door-step, this disillusion vanishes, and we
sympathize heartily with the writer. There is no place in the world where
June seems so beautiful as in New England, on account of the dismal,
cutthroat weather in the months that precede it. Perhaps it is so in
reality; for what nature makes us suffer from at one time she commonly
atones for it another.

The "Fable for Critics" is written in an easy, nonchalant manner, which
helps to mitigate its severity. Thoreau could not have liked very well
being called an imitator of Emerson; but the wit of it is inimitable. "T.
never purloins the apples from Emerson's trees; it is only the windfalls
that he carries off and passes for his own fruit." Emerson remarked on
this, that Thoreau was sufficiently original in his own way; and he
always spoke of Lowell in a friendly and appreciative manner. The whole
poem is filled with such homely comparisons, which hit the nail exactly
on the head. The most subtle piece of analysis, however, is Lowell's
comparison between Emerson and Carlyle:

"There are persons, mole-blind to the soul's make and style,
Who insist on a likeness 'twixt him and Carlyle;
To compare him with Plato would be vastly fairer,
Carlyle's the more burly, but E. is the rarer;
He sees fewer objects, but clearlier, truelier,
If C.'s as original, E.'s more peculiar;
That he's more of a man you might say of the one,
Of the other he's more of an Emerson;
C.'s the Titan, as shaggy of mind as of limb,--
E. the clear-eyed Olympian, rapid and slim;
The one's two-thirds Norseman, the other half Greek,
Where the one's most abounding, the other's to seek."

It was the fashion in England at that time to disparage Emerson as an
imitator of Carlyle; and this was Lowell's reply to it.

He told Professor Hedge an amusing incident that happened during his
first visit to Rome. Lowell and his wife took lodgings with a respectable
elderly Italian woman whose husband was in a sickly condition. One
morning she met him in the passageway with tearful eyes and said: "_Un
gran' disgrazie_ happened last night,--my poor husband went to
heaven." Lowell wondered why there was a pope in Rome if going to heaven
was considered a disgrace there.

Longfellow's resignation of his professorship at Harvard was a rare piece
of good fortune for Lowell; for it was the only position of the kind that
he could have obtained there or anywhere else. In fact, it was a question
whether the appointment would be confirmed on account of his
transcendental tendencies, and his connection with the _Anti-slavery
Standard_; but Longfellow threw the whole weight of his influence in
Lowell's favor, and this would seem to have decided it. From this time
till 1873 Lowell was more of a prose-writer than a poet, and his essays
on Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and other English poets are the best of
their kind,--not brilliant, but appreciative, penetrating, and well-
considered. Wasson said of him that no other critic in the English tongue
came so near to expressing the inexpressible as Lowell.

One could wish that his studies in Shakespeare had been more extended. He
treats the subject as if he felt it was too great for him; but he was the
first to take notice that the play of Richard III. indicated in its
main extent a different hand, and it is now generally admitted to have
been the work of Fletcher. With the keenest insight he noticed that the
magician Prospero was an impersonation of Shakespeare himself; and George
Brandes, the most thoroughgoing of Shakespearean scholars, afterwards
came to the same conclusion.

Lowell was the gentlemanly instructor. He appealed to the gentleman in
the students who sat before him, and he rarely appealed in vain. Like
Longfellow he carried an atmosphere of politeness about him, which was
sufficient to protect him from everything rude and common. He would say
to his class in Italian: "I shall not mark you if you are tardy, but I
hope you will all be here on time." This was a safer procedure with a
small division of Juniors than it would have been with a large division
of Freshmen or Sophomores. Neither did he take much personal interest in
his classes. He always invited them to an entertainment at Elmwood in
June, but two or three years later he could not remember their faces
unless they remained in or about Cambridge. In regard to his efficiency
as an instructor and lecturer there was a difference of opinion.

He attended the meetings of the college faculty quite regularly
considering the distance of Elmwood from the college grounds; and he was
once heard to say that there seemed to be more bad weather on Monday
nights than at any other time in the week. His presence might have been
dispensed with for the most part. He rarely spoke in conclave, and when
the question came up in regard to the suspension of students he often
declined to vote. His decorum was perfect, but now and then a humorous
look could be observed in his eyes, and it may be suspected that he had a
quiet laugh all to himself on the way homeward. On one occasion, before
the meeting had been called to order, Professor Cutler said to him: "Do
you not dread B.'s forthcoming translation of the Iliad?" But Lowell,
seeing that he was watched, replied: "Oh, no, not at all," at the same
time nodding to Cutler with his brows.

He was always well-dressed, and pretty close to the conventional in his
ways,--noted specially for the nicety of his gloves. This was a kind of
safeguard to him. Insidious persons suggested that he perfumed his beard,
but I do not believe it. He does not appear to have been fond of walking,
for we never met him in any part of Cambridge except on the direct road
from Elmwood to the college gate. He had a characteristic gait of his
own--walking slowly in rather a dreamy manner, and keeping time to the
movement of his feet with his arms and shoulders. He was not, however,
lost in contemplation, for he often scrutinized those who passed him as
closely as a portrait painter might.

If one could meet Lowell in a fairly empty horse-car, he would be quite
sociable and entertaining; but if the horse-car filled up, he would
become reticent again. He clung to his old friends, his classmates, and
others with whom he had grown up, and did not easily make new ones. The
modesty of his ambition is conspicuous in the fact that he was quite
satisfied with the small salary paid him by the college,--at first only
twelve hundred dollars. He evidently did not care for luxury.

Lowell's second marriage was as simple and inevitable as the first. Miss
Dunlap was not an ordinary housekeeper, but the sister of one of Maria
Lowell's most intimate friends, and she was such a pleasant, attractive
lady that the wonder is rather he should have waited four years before
concluding to offer himself. She was compared to the Greek bust called
Clyte, because her hair grew so low down upon her forehead, and this was
considered an additional charm.

Louisa Alcott had a story that at first she refused Lowell's offer on
account of what people might say; and that then he composed a poem
answering her objections in the form of an allegory, and that this
finally convinced her. If he had considered material interests he would
have married differently.

In November, 1857, the firm of Phillips & Sampson issued the first number
of the _Atlantic Monthly_ in the cause of high-minded literature,--a
cause which ultimately proved to be their ruin. Lowell accepted the
position of editor, and such a periodical as it proved to be under his
guidance could not have been found in England, and perhaps not in the
whole of Europe; but it could not be made to pay, and two years later
Phillips & Sampson failed,--partly on that account, and partially the
victims of a piratical opposition.

Lowell published Emerson's "Brahma" in spite of the shallow ridicule with
which he foresaw it would be greeted; but when Emerson sent him his "Song
of Nature" he returned it on account of the single stanza:

"One in a Judaean manger,
And one by Avon stream,
One over against the mouths of Nile,
And one in the Academe."

which he declared was more than the _Atlantic_ could be held
responsible for. Emerson, who really knew little as to what the public
thought of him, was for once indignant. He said: "I did not know who had
constituted Mr. Lowell my censor, and I carried the verses to Miss
Caroline Hoar, who read them and said, that she considered those four
lines the best in the piece." He permitted Lowell, however, to publish
the poem without them, as may be seen by examining the pages of the
_Atlantic_, and afterwards published the original copy in his "May
Day."

Lowell's editorship of the _North American Review_, which followed
after this, was not so successful. It was chiefly a political magazine at
that time, and to understand politics in a large way--that is,
sufficiently to write on the subject--one must not only be a close
observer of public affairs, but also a profound student of history; and
Lowell was neither. He was not acquainted with prominent men in public
life, and depended too much on information derived at dinner-parties, or
similar occasions. During the war period Sumner, Wilson, and Andrew were
almost omnipotent in Massachusetts, for the three worked together in a
common cause; but power always engenders envy and so an inside opposition
grew up within the Republican party to which Lowell lent his assistance
without being aware of its true character. His articles in the _North
American_ on public affairs were severely criticised by Andrew and
Wilson, while Frank W. Bird frankly called them "giving aid and comfort
to the enemy." It was certainly a doubtful course to pursue at such a
critical juncture--when all patriots should have been united--and it
offended a good many Republicans without conciliating the opposition.
Lowell's successor in this editorial chair was an old Webster Whig who
had become a Democrat.

In 1873 he resigned his professorship and went to Italy for a holiday. He
said to some friends whom he met in Florence: "I am tired of being called
Professor Lowell, and I want to be plain Mr. Lowell again. Eliot wanted
to keep my name on the catalogue for the honor of the university, but I
did not like the idea." This was true republicanism and worthy of a poet.

Lowell was little known on the continent, and he travelled in a quiet,
unostentatious manner. He went to dine with his old friends, but avoided
introductions, and remained at Florence nearly two months after other
Americans had departed for Rome. The reason he alleged for this was that
Rome was a mouldy place and the ruins made him feel melancholy; also,
because he preferred oil paintings to frescos. He had just come from
Venice, and spoke with enthusiasm of the mighty works of Tintoretto,--
especially his small painting of the Visitation, above the landing of the
staircase in the Scuola of San Rocco. He did not like the easel-paintings
of Raphael on account of their hard outlines; those in the Vatican did
him better justice. This idea he may have derived from William Morris
Hunt, the Boston portrait-painter. He considered the action of the Niobe
group too strenuous to be represented in marble.

Miss Mary Felton liked the Niobe statues; so Lowell said, "Now come back
with me, and I will sit on you." Accordingly we all returned to the Niobe
hall, where Lowell lectured us on the statues without, however, entirely
convincing Miss Felton. Then we went to the hall in the Uffizi Palace,
which is called the _Tribune_. Mrs. Lowell had never been in the
_Tribune_, where the Venus de' Medici is enshrined; so her husband
opened the door wide and said, "Now go in"--as if he were opening the
gates of Paradise.

At Bologna he wished to make an excursion into the mountains, but the
100 veturino charged about twice the usual price, and though the man
afterwards reduced his demand to a reasonable figure Lowell would not go
with him at all, and told him that such practices made Americans dislike
the Italian people. It is to be feared that a strange Italian might fare
just as badly in America.

Readers of Lowell's "Fireside Travels" will have noticed that the first
of them is addressed to the "Edelmann Storg" in Rome. The true translation
of this expression is "Nobleman Story;" that is, William W. Story,
the sculptor, who modelled the statue of Edward Everett in the Boston
public garden. Lowell's biographer, however, does not appear to have
been aware of the full significance of this paraphrase of Story's name.

When King Bomba II. was expelled from Naples by Garibaldi he retired to
Rome with his private possessions, including a large number of oil
paintings. Wishing to dispose of some of these, and being aware that
Americans paid good prices, he applied to William Story to transact the
business for him. This the sculptor did in a satisfactory manner;
whereupon King Bomba, instead of rewarding Story with a cheque, conferred
on him a patent of nobility. It seems equally strange that Story should
have accepted such a dubious honor, and that Lowell should recognize it.

On his return to Cambridge the following year, Lowell found himself a
grandfather, his daughter having married a gentleman farmer in Worcester
county. He was greatly delighted, and wrote to E. L. Godkin, editor of
_The Nation_:

"If you wish to taste the real bouquet of life, I advise you to procure
yourself a grandson, whether by adoption or theft.... Get one, and the
_Nation_ will no longer offend anybody." [Footnote: Scudder's
biography, ii., 186.]

This was a pretty broad hint, but E. L. Godkin was not the man to pay
much attention to the advice of Lowell or anybody. In fact, he seems to
have won Lowell over after this to his own way of thinking.

Lowell certainly became more conservative with age. He did not support
the movement for negro citizenship, and had separated himself in a manner
from the other New England poets. After 1872 Longfellow saw little of
him, except on state occasions. In 1876 he made a political address that
showed that if he had not already gone over to the Democratic party he
was very close upon the line. Charles Francis Adams had already gone over
to Tilden, and had carried the _North American Review_ with him. It
would not do to lose Lowell also, so the Republican leaders hit upon the
shrewd device of nominating him as a presidential elector, an honor which
he could not very well decline. When the disputed election of Hayes and
Tilden came, Godkin proposed that, in order to prevent "Mexicanizing the
government," one of the Hayes electors should cast his vote for General
Bristow, which would throw the election of President into the House of
Representatives; and he endeavored to persuade Lowell to do this. Lowell
went so far as to take legal advice on the subject, but his counsellor
informed him that since the election of John Quincy Adams it had been
virtually decided that an elector must cast his vote according to the
ticket on which he was chosen. When the electors met at the Parker House
in January, 1877, Lowell deposited his ballot for Hayes and Wheeler, and
the slight applause that followed showed that his colleagues were
conscious of the position he had assumed.

When President Hayes appointed Lowell to be Minister to Spain, Lowell
remarked that he did not see why it should have come to him. It really
came to him through his friend E. E. Hoar, of Concord, who was brother-
in-law to Secretary Evarts. His friends wondered that he should accept
the position, but the truth was that Lowell at this time was
comparatively poor. His taxes had increased, and his income had
diminished. He complained to C. P. Cranch that the whole profit from the
sale of his books during the preceding year was less than a hundred
dollars, and he thought there ought to be a law for the protection of
authors. The real trouble was hard times.

He did not like Madrid, and at the end of a year wrote that it seemed
impossible for him to endure the life there any longer. Evarts gave him a
vacation, and at the end of the second year Hayes promoted him to the
Court of St. James.

Such an appointment would have been dangerous enough in 1861, but at the
time it was made the relations between the United States and Great
Britain were sufficiently peaceable to warrant it. Lowell represented his
country in a highly creditable manner. The only difficulty he experienced
was with the Fenian agitation, and he managed that with such diplomatic
tact that no one has yet been able to discover whether he was in favor of
home rule for Ireland or not.

He made a number of excellent addresses in England, besides a multitude
of after-dinner speeches. Perhaps the best of them was his address at the
Coleridge celebration, in which he levelled an attack on the English
canonization of what they call "common sense," but which is really a new
name for dogmatism. Lowell, if not a transcendentalist, was always an
idealist, and he knew that ideality was as necessary to Cromwell and
Canning as it was to Shakespeare and Scott.

He was certainly more popular in England than he had ever been in
America, and he openly admitted that he disliked to resign his position.
Professor Child said, in 1882: "Lowell's conversation is witty, with a
basis of literary cramming; and that seems to be what the English like.
He went to twenty-nine dinner parties in the month of June, and made a
speech at each one of them."

In the last years of his life he was greatly infested with imitators who,
as he said of Emerson in the "Fable for Critics," stole his fruit and
then brought it back to him on their own dishes. Some of them were too
influential to be easily disposed of, and others did not know when they
were rebuffed. An old man, failing in strength and vigor, he had to
endure them as best he could.

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