CHAPTER XV

THE ENGLISH MISSION

1880-1885

The two and a half years that Lowell passed at Madrid formed an excellent preparation for the more important post which he was to occupy near the Court of St. James. The etiquette of a high diplomatic position does not differ greatly in the different capitals; if anything, more punctilio would be observed in Madrid than in London. It was something, at any rate, to have become wonted to the function of a minister plenipotentiary. But this was a trifle compared with the advantage which Lowell enjoyed in the possession now of self-confidence. He had tried on the coat and found it fitted him well; he could wear it in London where he would be in a far more conspicuous position. He had practised the diplomatic art in a country where the language was foreign and the race unfamiliar, and if in his short residence he could, with some assurance, analyze the internal political conditions, he might hope more quickly to be able to apprehend nice discriminations in the current politics of a country where he was at home in language, literature, and history.

It is scarcely to be doubted that his performance of diplomatic duties in Spain had made it easy for the President to appoint him to the highest foreign station. But it is also likely that the choice was made mainly upon the ground of Lowell’s fitness to act as a mediator between the two countries. With the exception of Motley, there never had been an American minister to England who was first and foremost a man of letters, and yet in no other field of human endeavor was there so great a community of intelligence. Literature had been honored in its representatives in many courts of Europe and in consular offices, but the presumption is that heretofore political and commercial relations with England had been of so complex a character that it was thought desirable to have a trained man of affairs or of law and statesmanship at the post. Moreover, it was a great political prize, and men of letters are, as a rule, non-combatants in politics. But Lowell had been initiated in Spain, and it was a far more simple process, so far as political effect might be considered, to transfer him to England than to have made that a direct appointment.

The educated men of America were delighted with the appointment. They felt at once that they had a spokesman. And it may fairly be said that Americans generally were gratified; for a man of letters who has won high recognition, especially if his work has been in the field of poetry, history, or general literature, occupies a secure place in the regard of his countrymen, and is subject to less suspicion or jealousy than one in any other conspicuous position. By its very nature a literary reputation is widespread and not local. A very great lawyer, unless he has also been in the public eye as a member of government, is taken on trust by all but his professional brethren. A great author through the process of growing great has become known to increasing numbers of his countrymen. It is doubtful if any other author, save Longfellow, would at once have been so accepted by Americans as their proper representative in London.

On the other side, though the English as a great reading body are not very familiar with American literature, the leaders of opinion, the class that stands nearest the government, know it generously, and while it would be necessary to make the acquaintance of a representative of American law, business, or politics, a representative of American letters and scholarship would already be a familiar name. Certain it is that Lowell in going to London went at once into the midst of friends. He had been there but two or three days when he wrote: “I am overwhelmed already with invitations though I have not put my arrival in the papers;” and a few days later: “I lunched with Tennyson yesterday. He is getting old and looks seedy. I am going in to take a pipe with him the first free evening. Pipes have more thawing power than anything else.”

And yet it must not be forgotten that Lowell himself had been a frank critic of England and carried in his own mind a temper which it might seem would be in the way of a perfectly cordial relation. In his political papers and in the second series of the “Biglow Papers” he had been very outspoken. His well-known article on “A Certain Condescension in Foreigners,” with its pungent sentences, was not easily to be overlooked, and there is a letter[74] which Mr. Norton prints, written in 1865, that may be taken as a truthful report of the attitude held by Lowell toward England during the great war, and modified only slightly by time. There was therefore a little consciousness on his part as if he were not wholly a _persona grata_, and also that he must stand by his colors, which gave him a certain brusqueness in his early public appearances. It did not take long, however, for him to adjust himself in his new relations, for after all it was the greater England to which he was sent, and the world with which he came immediately into contact was very hospitable. At the same time, throughout his stay in England he showed a certain vigilance as the champion of American institutions, speech, and manners which gave him the air of combativeness. An Englishman who was often his host said: “I like Mr. Lowell. I like to have him here. I keep him as long as I can, and I am always in terror lest somebody shall say something about America that would provoke an explosion.” Mr. Smalley, who quotes this, adds that Lowell had seen the inside of more country houses in England than any American who ever lived; and that there was not one in which he had not let fall some good American seed.[75]

“Sometimes,” says Max Müller, “even the most harmless remark about America would call forth very sharp replies from him. Everybody knows that the salaries paid by America to her diplomatic staff are insufficient, and no one knew it better than he himself. But when the remark was made in his presence that the United States treated their diplomatic representatives stingily, he fired up, and discoursed most eloquently on the advantages of high thoughts and humble living.”[76]

The official business which occupies an American minister in England is the formal occasion for accrediting him to the Court; but there has been a growing disposition to treat this as after all a secondary consideration beside the less tangible one of increasing good feeling between the peoples of the two countries. Special envoys, telegrams, and despatches might serve for the transaction of business, but just as the countless personal letters which pass between correspondents on both sides of the Atlantic go to make the invisible web which unites the two nations, so the personal intercourse which the American minister has with Englishmen may have a weighty effect in preserving an _entente cordiale_.

The English more than any other nation have cultivated the dinner-table and the social meeting for the purpose of exchanging ideas regarding public affairs. Where an American public man will send for a reporter of a widely read newspaper if he has some important message to deliver to his constituents or the people at large, the Englishman will accept an invitation to a dinner of some society, and take that occasion for making a speech which will be reported and commented on in all the great dailies of the city and the provinces. Dinners, unveilings, cornerstones, meetings of societies,--these all become the accepted occasions for the propagation of ideas, and the most unrhetorical people in civilization blurt out their views at such times with a certain scorn of eloquence and admiration of candor. Moreover, the smallness of the great legislative chambers conduces to the conversational tone, and thus public speakers are trained to the disuse of oratory.

It was natural that Lowell should be in demand on such occasions, and it was inevitable that he should make a remarkable impression. He had for years cultivated the art of speaking to small assemblies when he had a congenial subject and a responsive audience. He had the readiness of a practised writer, and he had above all a spontaneousness of nature which made him one of the best of conversationalists. It was but a slight remove from his lecture-room at Harvard, or his study at Elmwood, to an English dinner-table, and the themes on which he was called upon to speak were very familiar to him. Literature, the common elements of English and American life, the distinctiveness of America, these were subjects on which he was at home, and he brought to his task a manner quiet yet finished by years of practice. Had set orations been his business, he would scarcely have made so remarkable an impression as he made by his off-hand speeches. Yet it must not be supposed that these were careless, impromptu affairs. He was helped by his readiness, but he did not rely upon it. He thought out carefully his little address, and sometimes wrote it out in advance even when he made no use of manuscript. It was not unalloyed pleasure. “I am to speak at the Academy dinner to-morrow,” he writes to a friend, after he had had a couple of years practice in such functions, “which does not make me happy,--and not a fit word to say has yet occurred to me. They think I like to speak, I ‘do it so easily.’” He was not one to rise with the declaration that he had nothing to say, and then to say it. He respected his audience, and above all, with all his bonhomie, he never forgot that he was not a private guest, but the representative of a great nation. Not that he always harped on the one string of a community of nature and interest in the two countries, but he remembered that he was invited not simply as a man of letters but as the American minister.

When Lowell went to England he apprehended difficulty in maintaining the position of an American minister on his salary, which could not greatly be increased from his modest fortune. Indeed, he said frankly that it would have been quite impossible to play the host as it should be played, except for the unhappy fortune which compelled Mrs. Lowell to withdraw from society. His friends told him, with that candor which makes English society at once so refreshing and so amusing, that since Mrs. Lowell could not entertain, he was quite at liberty to accept all manner of invitations, and be under no obligation to return them. So his public duties called him in many directions socially, and he was able, besides doing a little business by the way in these diversions, to see the best of the intellectual life of the day. He had a choice group of friends who had known him before he was a public man, and his position gave shim the entrée in all society, but he whispered: “I think on the whole I find no society so good as what I have been accustomed to at home.”

All this brought him, moreover, an endless correspondence which quite effectually interfered with the friendly letters which had been so natural an outlet of his moods. “Did you ever happen,” he writes to Mr. Field, 20 August, 1880, “to be watching the top of a post when a snowstorm was beginning? You would have seen first a solitary flake come wavering down and make a lodgment, then another and another, till finally a white nightcap covered the whole knob. My head is very like that wooden protuberance, and that’s the way letters descend upon it. While I am answering one a dozen more have fallen, and if I let a day go by, I am overwhelmed. And days go by without my knowing it. You tell Mabel that five have passed since you wrote--which is simply absurd. I think it was about fifteen minutes ago that I got it.”

“During Mr. Lowell’s service as Minister to England,” writes Mr. R. R. Bowker, who was at this time resident in London, “Mrs. Lowell was constantly an invalid, as the after effect of typhus fever while in Spain, and it was delightful to see Mr. Lowell’s gallantry--for no other word expresses it--as she was brought down in her invalid chair to the dining-room or drawing-room. But she never lost the happy laugh so characteristic of her, and her charm of direct and pleasant manner. Her condition made it impossible for Mr. Lowell to give receptions or large dinners, so that his household guests were confined to a few Americans. In an invitation to dine on Christmas day of 1880, he writes: ‘We shan’t be very jolly, but there will be a spice of home.’ It was at that dinner, I think, that Mrs. Lowell had quite set her heart on having cranberry sauce with the turkey, and so had obtained from that wonderful American storehouse at 45 Piccadilly a supply of cranberries. But the servants, who had mostly come with the Lowells from Spain, could not be made to understand what was wanted, and it was only when, two or three courses after the turkey, Mrs. Lowell hit upon calling for the ‘compote rouge’ that we obtained our cranberry sauce as a separate course....

“Mr. Lowell was always charmingly gallant, and on one occasion at the house in Lowndes Square there was present a young American actress from whom he asked some recitation. She offered to read the balcony scene from ‘Romeo and Juliet’ but said she had no Romeo, whereupon Mr. Lowell volunteered, the Juliet reciting from behind the sofa, and the most charming of Romeos, though somewhat elderly for the part, reading from in front.”

The duties of his office in the first part of his service were not onerous except as multitudinous details bring weariness, but the long illness of President Garfield during the summer of 1881 brought a strain upon the emotions, and called for the constant exercise of a refined courtesy. For, aside from the formal exchange of sympathy which would be inevitable under such circumstances, there was that spontaneous and varied expression of grief on all sides, to which Lowell refers with so much feeling and such exquisite reserve of speech in the address on Garfield which was given at the Memorial Meeting in Exeter Hall, 24 September, 1881, and is preserved in “Literary and Political Addresses.” Lowell was there speaking to Americans in the presence, as it were, of all England, and the note of sobriety and deep feeling and strong faith which he struck still has the beauty and richness with which it fell on the ears of his sympathetic audience. He was constantly called upon during that anxious season of the President’s illness to respond to letters of sympathy. A despatch which he sent to the Secretary of State a fortnight after the blow shows the same dignity in his official communication, and illustrates also the atmosphere in which he was living throughout the summer. It is No. 219, and is dated 16 July, 1881:--

“Warm expressions of sympathy with the President, with Mrs. Garfield, and with the people of the United States, and of abhorrence of the atrocious attempt on the President’s life have reached this Legation from all parts of England and Scotland. From the Queen to the artisan, the feeling has been universal and very striking in its manifestation. The first question in the morning and the last at night for the first ten days after the news came was always: ‘How is the President?’ Had the President’s life not been spared, the demonstration of feeling would have been comparable with that which followed the assassination of Mr. Lincoln.

“The interest of the Queen was shown in an unusually marked way, and was unmistakable in its sincerity and warmth. By her special request all our telegrams were at once forwarded to her at Windsor. At Marlborough House, on the 14th she sent for me, in order to express in person her very great satisfaction that the condition of the President was so encouraging.

“I need not waste words in telling you with what profound anxiety your telegrams were awaited, nor how much encouragement and consolation were brought by the later ones. I may be permitted to thank you, however, for the entire composure which characterized them, and which enabled me to maintain my own while prophets of evil were hourly sending me imaginary news.

“The impression produced here by the President’s dignity and fortitude may be almost called a political event, for I believe that it has done more to make a juster estimate of American character possible here than many years of commercial or even social intercourse would have done.”

It was with a great sense of relief from tension, after the death of the President, that Lowell took a leave of absence, and made a short trip to Italy. “I am just starting,” he writes to T. W. Higginson, 8 October, 1881, “for the continent on a leave of absence which I sorely need. Wish me joy, I am going to Italy! Whether I may not find somebody else in my chair at the Legation when I come back is one of those problems that I cannot solve, and care little about, though now that I have made friendships here I should like to stay on a little longer. Did you know that I have five grandchildren?”

Unfortunately Mrs. Lowell was not sufficiently restored to health to accompany him, but he had the good fortune to find Mr. and Mrs. Field at the end of his journey. “We reached Flushing,” he wrote Mrs. Lowell from Frankfort, 10 October, “at half-past six in the morning and there took the train for this place. We travelled several thousand miles, as it seemed to me, through Holland, every now and then seeing a hunchbacked church gathering its village under its wings like a clucking hen when she sees the hawk in the air, at every turn a windmill and low fields bordered with trees that always look just beginning to grow--Heaven knows why. After crossing the Prussian frontier, the dead level continued as far as Cologne. The only difference was that the trees were larger and often one saw pretty linden-alleys leading up to the little towns. The railway officials had a more close-buttoned military air, and were always saluting invisible superiors.”

On the 12th he wrote from Weimar: “I left Frankfort at noon on Monday and got here towards seven in the evening. The first half of the journey was through one of the loveliest valleys (of the broad and basking kind) I ever saw. The only name I recognized in this part of the way was Offenbach, where Goethe had his adventures with Lilli a hundred and more years ago, but after passing Elm the names grew more familiar and famous. _Fulda_, Gotha, Erfurt, _Eisenach_. Weimar is a neat little capital which looks about as large as Salem, and where the one stranger is as much stared at as there. _Why_ it is a capital, and especially why it should be where it is, puzzles me. The park is really delightful, with fine trees and one of the most beautiful streams running through it I ever saw. The water is so clear as to seem almost luminous, the water-mosses are as green as those of the sea, and some horse-chestnuts that had fallen in shone like live coals. I walked about the town all the forenoon.”

He paid a visit to Goethe’s house and the next day went on to Dresden, where he reflected that it was just twenty-five years since he was living there, a young man then, an old man now, but that he should find the Sistine Madonna and a few other old friends as young as ever. From Dresden he went to Venice, and there he found his friend Mr. Field. “He is as young and social as ever,” he wrote to Mr. Norton, 31 October; “has made the acquaintance here of everybody he didn’t know before, and goes with me to Florence on Thursday. The Brownings have also been here, but go to-morrow morning. The weather has been _brutto assai_, only two partly fine days during the time I have been here, and to-day it rains. We hear of three inches of snow at Vicenza, and I can well believe it, so cold has it been. _Che tempo straongante!_ Still, Venice has been beautiful and dear for all that. Browning begins to show his seventy years (he will be seventy next February) a little, though his natural [force] be not abated. I hear that I am to stay in England, all rumors to the contrary notwithstanding.[77] Fanny continues better. She did not venture to come with me. I shall probably go on as far as Rome, and get back to London in time for the best fogs.”

To Mrs. Lowell be wrote from Venice, 1 November: “To-day the sky is bright for the third time since my arrival. All the other days have been cloudy or rainy, with a cold _tramontana_ blowing steadily and strongly.... You remember that Lady Gordon told me I should find a _bateau mouche_ plying on the Grand Canal. I did not expect to be personally inconvenienced by it; but as it lessened the custom of the gondoliers they have all struck work this morning, and one can’t get a _barca_ for love or money. Poor fellows, they will find, as others have done, that steam is stronger than they.... I have given up Rimini owing to the cold, and shall start for Florence day after to-morrow with Field, who is younger and livelier than ever,--and makes more acquaintances every day than I should in a year.”

The two spent a week in Florence and then went to Rome where they foregathered with Story, and after a few days there Lowell set out alone on his return to London. He made a brief stay in Paris, and wrote thence to Mr. Field, 29 November, 1881: “I walked a good deal yesterday and felt very well, but to-day my head aches and things have come back. I met young Longfellow, who was to start for London last evening; also Thornton Lothrop, who came back with me to my hotel (where, by the way, I have a small suite--drawing-room, dining-room, two bedrooms with their own door of entrance on the staircase--first floor--for twenty-five francs, _service y compris_), and gave me heaps of Boston and Cambridge news. I am going to breakfast with him at the Bristol presently. I called at the Hôtel de Lorraine[78] and met the Revolution in person. The whole Hôtel de France part--the whole inside that is--was a heap of rubbish in the street. With some trouble I penetrated to Madame Guillaume, who led me into a tiny cavern in the rear, where I found Madame Garrier transformed into a cave-dweller. I expected to hear the growl of the _ursus speluncæ_, or whatever they call him. The darkness of a pocket (without any _chink_ in it) would be illumination compared with it.... But Madame was very cordial. Presently Marie came in grown a tall girl and with very pretty manners. I took her out into the light and found her the image of her father. Him I did not see. Doubtless he was talking politics or taking snuff with some gossip or other of his. I remember he always disappeared in moments of crisis like the repair of the _salle à manger_ which took place in my time. He is a singed cat, having seen two revolutions and the Commune.”

It was after his return to London that Lowell was in the thickest of the contention which began not long after his appointment to the post of American minister and continued through more than half of his term, as long, that is, as the period of acute disturbance of the relations between England and Ireland. Other international questions arose during his term of service, but none that called for the exercise of so much sound diplomatic discretion, or gave rise to so much angry criticism. Lowell’s judgment regarding Irish affairs was not the result merely of what he now saw and heard in London. No American who had followed public questions at home could escape the formation of some opinion respecting the Irish character and the relation in which Ireland stood to England, and through her emigrants to America. In 1848, when Smith O’Brien, Meagher, and other Irish leaders were agitating for reform through insurrection, Lowell commented on the situation in one of his editorial articles in the _National Anti-Slavery Standard_. He had no faith in the measures which these leaders proposed; he thought the only radical cure for the evils of Ireland lay in peasant proprietorship and education. “The only permanent safeguard,” he writes, “against famine is to give the people a deeper interest in the soil they cultivate and the crops they raise. It is the constant sense of insecurity that has made the Irish the shiftless and prodigal people which they are represented to be by all travellers. Education will be of no avail unless at the same time something be given them on which they can bring it to a practical bearing. Take away English opposition and the present insurrection is directed against--what? We confess ourselves at a loss for an answer. The only insurrection which has done Ireland any real service was the one headed by Father Mathew. The true office of the Irish Washington would be to head a rebellion against thriftlessness, superstition, and dirt. The sooner the barricades are thrown up against these the better. Ireland is in want of a revolution which shall render troops less necessary rather than more so.”

When Lowell was earnestly opposing the suicidal course of the South before the actual outbreak of the war for the Union, secession being then the shibboleth, he took Scotland and Ireland in their relation to Great Britain for parallel historic instances in support of his position. “There is no such antipathy,” he wrote, “between the North and the South as men ambitious of a consideration in the new republic, which their talents and character have failed to secure them in the old, would fain call into existence by asserting that it exists. The misunderstanding and dislike between them is not so great as they were within living memory between England and Scotland, as they are now between England and Ireland. There is no difference of race, language, or religion. Yet, after a dissatisfaction of near a century and two rebellions, there is no part of the British dominion more loyal than Scotland, no British subjects who would be more loath to part with the substantial advantages of their imperial connection than the Scotch; and even in Ireland, after a longer and more deadly feud, there is no sane man who would consent to see his country irrevocably cut off from power and consideration to obtain an independence which would be nothing but Donnybrook Fair multiplied by every city, town, and village in the island. The same considerations of policy and advantage, which render the union of Scotland and Ireland with England a necessity, apply with even more force to the several States of our Union.”[79]

When, therefore, Lowell found himself in England as the representative of the United States at a period when the chronic irritation between England and Ireland was at an acute stage through the operation of the so-called coercion act, it is not surprising that be should take a very lively interest in affairs. As a part of his diplomatic duty, he kept his government informed not so much of the facts which were the news of the day, as of the interpretation to be put upon the political situation. Accordingly, on 7 January, 1881, he wrote to Mr. Evarts, then Secretary of State:--

“Seldom has a session of Parliament begun under more critical circumstances. The abnormal condition of Ireland and the question of what remedy should be sought for it have deeply divided and embittered public opinion. Not only has the law been rendered powerless and order disturbed (both of them things almost superstitiously sacred in England), but the sensitive nerve of property has been rudely touched. The opposition have clamored for coercion, but while they have persisted in this it is clear that a change has been gradually going on in their opinion as to how great concessions would be needful. It seems now to be granted on all sides that the Irish people have wrongs to be redressed and just claims for rights to be granted. I think that the government have at least gained so much by the expectant and humane policy which they have persevered in under very great difficulties, and in spite of a criticism the more harassing as it seemed to have some foundation in principles hitherto supposed to be self-evident.

“Added to this was the fact (at least I believe it to be a fact) that there was a division of opinion in the Cabinet itself. This probably led to the one mistake in policy that has been made by the prosecution of Mr. Parnell and some of his associates--a mistake, because, in the exceedingly improbable contingency of the jury agreeing to convict, the belief will be universal in Ireland that they have been packed, and the government will have a dozen martyrs on its hands of whom it would be at a loss how to dispose,--a half-ludicrous position which could not fail to involve a loss of prestige.

“There can be no doubt that Mr. Parnell was unpleasantly surprised by the land league, and has been compelled to identify himself with a movement having other and more comprehensive (perhaps more desperate) aims than that which he originated. So far as can be judged, a great deal of the agitation in Ireland is factitious, and large numbers of persons have been driven by timidity to profess a sympathy with it which they do not feel. This, of course, strengthens the probability of its being possible to allay it by generally acceptable measures of reform. I am sure that the reasonable leaders or representatives of Irish opinion see the folly of expecting that England would ever peaceably consent to the independence of Ireland; that they do not themselves desire it; and that they would be content with a thorough reform of the land laws and a certain amount of local self-government. Both of these measures, you will observe, are suggested in the speech from the throne. You will readily divine that one of the great difficulties with which the ministry has had to struggle has been the presentiment that a change in the conditions of land tenure in Ireland will be followed by something similar, certainly by an agitation for something similar, on this aide the Irish channel.

“The Cabinet, I am safe in saying, are earnestly desirous of doing justice to Ireland, and not only that, but of so shaping reform as to make the cure as lasting as such a cure can be. No government can consent to revolution (though this was deemed possible in some quarters as respects some governments twenty years ago), but the present ministry are willing to go all lengths that are feasible and wise in the way of reform and reparation. Their greatest obstacle will be the overweening expectations and inconsiderate temper of the Irish themselves, both of them the result of artificial rather than natural causes. For no reform will be effectual that does not gradually nullify the unhappy effects produced by the influence, through many generations, of the pitiable travesty of feudal relations between landlord and tenant, making that relation personal instead of mercantile, and thus insensibly debauching both.

“The condition of Ireland is not so disturbed now as it has been at several periods during the last eighty years, and precisely the same system of organization was brought to bear against the collection of tithes fifty years ago that has now been revived to resist the payment of what are considered excessive rents. The landlords are represented as the minions of a foreign and hated domination, and the use of the epithet _foreign_ has at least this justification, that there is certainly an imperfect sympathy between the English and Irish characters which prevents each from comprehending either the better qualities of the other or, what is worse, the manner of their manifestion.

“I cannot perceive that the public opinion of the country has withdrawn itself in any appreciable measure from sympathy with the Cabinet, though there is considerable regret among thoughtful liberals that coercion should have been deemed necessary and that the proposed reforms should not have gone farther. If the Irish could only be brought to have as much faith in Mr. Gladstone as he has desire for their welfare, there might be more hope than I can now see for a permanent solution of the Irish question.”

Mr. Evarts acknowledged the despatch with commendation for its lucid treatment of the subject, but Lowell soon found himself involved in something closer at hand than academic discussion. About three weeks after this despatch, he had occasion to write again of the state of affairs, and to note the final passage of the so-called coercion bill. At the close of this despatch his wrote: “The wild and whirling words of some Irishmen and others from America have done harm to something more than the cause of Irish peasantry, by becoming associated in the public mind with the country whose citizenship they put off or put on as may be most convenient. In connection with this, I beg leave to call your attention to an extraordinary passage in the letter of Mr. Parnell to the Irish National Land League, dated Paris, February 18, 1881, in which he makes a distinction between ‘the American people’ and ‘the Irish nation in America.’ This double nationality is likely to be of great practical inconvenience whenever the coercion bill becomes law. The same actor takes alternately the characters of a pair of twins who are never on the stage simultaneously.”[80]

In his capacity of critic, Lowell heartily condemned the measure taken by the British government. In a letter to the American consul in Cork, he wrote: “The ‘coercion act,’ so-called, is an exceptional and arbitrary measure. Its chief object is to enable the authorities to arrest persons whom they suspect of illegal conduct, without being obliged to produce any proof of their guilt. Its very substance and main purpose are to deprive suspected persons of the speedy trial they desire. This law is, of course, contrary to the spirit and foundation principles of both English and American jurisprudence; but it is the law of the land and it controls all parties domiciled in the proclaimed districts of Ireland, whether they are British subjects or not, and it is manifestly entirely futile to claim that naturalized citizens of the United States should be excepted from its operation.”[81]

But Lowell was not a mere looker-on in London, He was charged with the very delicate duty of discriminating between men who were American citizens and innocent of any infraction of British laws and men who used the cloak of naturalization, whether genuine or pretended, to cover illicit actions and designs. He had to uphold the real dignity of the American citizen, and at the same time to avoid entangling his country and Great Britain by an unwary protection of some one who had no title to protection. The cases which now began to succeed each other with confusing rapidity involved not only a mass of correspondence and the sifting of evidence, but the application constantly of personal judgment, and the exercise of much ingenuity in the reading of character. An illustration may be found in a despatch of Lowell to his government, dated 4 June, 1881. After an analysis of the political situation, he says:--

“I think that the necessity of a radical and prompt reform in the relations of landlord and tenant in Ireland is forcing conviction into the mind of even the Conservative Party, though the violence of language and the incitement to violence of action on the part of those who claim to be the true friends of Ireland are doing much to endanger the success of remedial measures.

“Among the most violent are often the Irishmen who have been naturalized in America, and then gone back to Ireland with the hope, and sometimes, I am justified in saying, with the deliberate intention, of disturbing the friendly relations between the United States and England. Such a one called upon me the other day. His name was----, naturalized in 1875 at Baltimore, and going over to Ireland immediately after on the plea that his health could not resist the American climate. He is now at least a remarkably robust and florid man. He told me that he was a draper in Charleville, County Cork, and hearing that a warrant was out for his arrest, he had come over to London to claim my protection. He had been acting as treasurer of the Land League in that place. He professed not to know on what grounds the warrant had been issued, but I satisfied myself in the course of our conversation that he knew perfectly well it was for seditious language and incitement to violence. He favored me with a good deal of this sort of rhetoric with a manner that implied no earnestness of conviction, and as if repeating something he had learned by rote. He several times repeated that the ‘best thing would be a war between England and the United States.’ After hearing this man’s talk, my belief was that he had purposely exposed himself to the chances of arrest in the hope of adding to the difficulties of the government. I asked him if he had considered the enormous interests at stake, quite apart from any moral consideration, and that England was our greatest customer for cattle, corn, and cotton? He merely repeated what he had said before as to the desirability of war. ---- declared that he meant to return to America whenever his health would permit, but admitted that it would take at least five years to wind up his business, and I think his intention may fairly be questioned. As he declared himself ready to be quiet for the future if not arrested, I thought it prudent to mention his name unofficially to Lord Granville, and to suggest that the warrant should not be put in force unless further offence were given.

“I have spoken at some length of his case, because I think it of some importance that the Department should be informed as to the kind of persons who may ask its intervention, and as to the doctrines they preach. Under ordinary circumstances they would be harmless, and are made mischievous only by the excited state of the country. My own judgment is that the ministry have gone to the extreme limit of public opinion in their concessions to Irish necessities; that they are perfectly honest in their desire to be generously just; and that the best friends of Ireland are not those who, however sincerely, throw obstacles in their way. The real cure, which I believe to be a larger measure of Home Rule, will be made easier by the better state of things which, in the opinion of those best competent to judge, is likely to result from the passage of the Land Bill.”

In the early stages of what proved to be a long and vexatious series of Irish-American cases, Lowell laid down a course of action which he seems to have adhered to consistently. The United States consul at Dublin had on his hands a case which was especially troublesome, because the claim of the arrested man to American protection rested on statements of citizenship which were contradictory, and created naturally a suspicion as to the validity of the claim. After cautioning the consul to make certain enquiries, he adds: “If the fact of his American citizenship should thus be ascertained to your satisfaction, I desire then that you should carefully examine into the grounds of his arrest, and if the precise facts justify the belief that no substantial charge of his complicity with treasonable or seditious objects can be made out, you will communicate this to the authorities in Ireland and request his discharge or to be informed why he is detained. You will please intimate, in respectful terms and without any warmth or suggestion of threats, that you are making these enquiries under my instructions, and are acting precisely as British consuls in the United States acted soon after the civil war, under the directions of the British minister at Washington, in cases of summary arrests of British subjects. It is my duty to protect, so far as I can, all citizens of the United States, whether native or naturalized, who are shown to be innocent of designs to subvert civil order, and I should not perhaps require in such cases evidence of innocence so full and conclusive as that which might be required in a court of law. At the same time I shall by no means try to screen any persons who are evidently guilty of offending against the criminal laws of Great Britain.”

Mr. Blaine, who had succeeded Mr. Evarts as Secretary of State, on being advised of Lowell’s action in this case, wrote that it received “the entire commendation of the Department as discreet and proper.” And a few weeks later, as the case became somewhat more involved, he wrote again: “The prudence you have shown in dealing with ----’s claim to citizenship is commendable, and the statements as to the law in his case, made in your letters to him, are in full accord with the interpretation of this Department.” Mr. Blaine then laid down instructions to meet certain hypothetical cases, and not long after had occasion to call Lowell’s attention to another apparent act of injustice in the arrest of a naturalized American citizen. The friends of the man in America had besieged Mr. Blaine in his behalf, and Mr. Blaine wrote an eloquent despatch to Lowell, in which he said: “If American citizens while within British jurisdiction offend against British laws, this government will not seek to shield them from the legal consequences of their acts, but it must insist upon the application to their cases of those common principles of criminal jurisprudence which in the United States secure to every man who offends against its laws, whether he be an American citizen or a foreign subject, those incidents to a criminal prosecution which afford the best safeguard to personal liberty and the strongest protection against oppression under the forms of law, which might otherwise be practised through excessive zeal.”

Lowell replied somewhat dryly: “It will give me great pleasure to communicate to Lord Granville the views you have so clearly and eloquently expressed as to the injustice of some of the features of the so-called ‘Protection act,’[82] and especially its retroactive character. But I would respectfully suggest whether any step would be gained toward the speedy trial or release of ---- by an argument against the law itself under which he was apprehended. So long as Lord Granville expressly declines to make any distinction between British subjects and American citizens in the application of this law, a position which I presume may be justified by precedents in our own diplomatic history, I submit to your better judgment whether the only arguments I can use in favor of ---- must not be founded upon some exceptional injustice in the way in which he has been treated. If this shall appear by the report of the consul to have been practised, I shall press for his trial or release with great earnestness. But if it shall be shown that he has experienced no more harshness than the majority of his fellow-prisoners have suffered, I do not feel by any means sure that your instructions would authorize me to make any special application on his behalf.” Lowell finally secured the release of the man by pointing out that his health was suffering by his imprisonment, and it is not unlikely that Lord Granville was glad of so good an excuse to remove one of the perplexities by which his government was embarrassed.

The whole unhappy business may be said to have been at its height when, in February, 1882, a resolution of the House of Representatives called upon the President for detailed information respecting the arrest of American citizens in Ireland. The State Department accordingly called on the American minister in London to furnish this information, and in his despatch dated 14 March, 1882, Lowell recounts all the cases which up to that time had come under his notice, with all the correspondence relating thereto. There were ten, and the number was increased by a few more before the business was settled. At the close of the despatch, enumerating the ten cases, Lowell says very pertinently:--

“I may be permitted to add that I have had repeated assurances from the highest authority that there would be great reluctance in arresting a naturalized citizen of the United States were he known to be such. But it is seldom known, and those already arrested have acted in all respects as if they were Irishmen, sometimes engaged in trade, sometimes in farming, and sometimes filling positions in the local government. This I think is illustrated by a phrase in one of Mr. ----’s letters, to the effect that he never called himself an American. He endeavors, it is true, in a subsequent letter, to explain this away as meaning _American born_; but it is obviously absurd that a man living in his native village should need to make any such explanation. Naturalized Irishmen seem entirely to misconceive the process through which they have passed in assuming American citizenship, looking upon themselves as Irishmen who have acquired a right to American protection, rather than as Americans who have renounced a claim to Irish nationality.”

It is not surprising that the whole affair caused much fury of words both in Congress and out. An organization existed which was bent on making all the trouble it could for the British government, and there was still plenty of political capital in Irish wrongs. A great mass-meeting was held in New York at which Lowell was denounced severely, and from this time till his return from England every opportunity was taken by a certain class of men to sneer at him for what they were pleased to regard as his apostasy from American principles. He was defended, however, both in Congress and in the press. His course was well summed up in an editorial article, in which the writer says:--

“Mr. Lowell, who has been denounced by Mr. Randall for his ‘sickening sycophancy to English influence,’ has treated the matter not as an English, Irish, or American question, but purely as a point of international law. He has had no sympathy with the coercion legislation, and has even taken pains to characterize it as exceptional and arbitrary.... That law [the ‘protection’ law] legalized the arrest of the suspects in districts where the writ of _habeas corpus_ had been suspended, and where the natives were not allowed the privilege of a jury trial. To have demanded their unconditional release, when no discrimination had been made between them and the natives, would have been an open affront to a friendly power. What Mr. Lowell did was to follow the best precedents of criminal jurisdiction in international cases, several of which had been established during the American civil war, when British subjects were arbitrarily arrested and denied the privilege of trial. At the same time, he has conducted the negotiations with the Foreign Office with so much tact and decision that we are inclined to expect a speedy clearance of the Irish jails from suspects whose citizenship in the United States is authenticated.” And the next day the same journal said: “Mr. Lowell’s negotiations for the release of the Irish-American suspects have been crowned with partial success. Before the mass-meeting at Cooper Institute disgraced itself by heaping reproaches upon him, the Department of State had received official information that all but three of these prisoners had been set at liberty in response to the request of the United States minister.... Mr. Frelinghuysen[83] reports that the negotiations have been carried on between the two governments for some time ‘in a spirit of entire friendship.’ This result had been promoted by the cordial relations existing between Lord Granville and Mr. Lowell. The fact that our government has been represented in these negotiations by one of our foremost men of letters has been a most fortunate circumstance. Mr. Lowell had won the respect and admiration of the best men in English public life, and when he came to plead for these suspects his personal character and popularity were of direct service to them.... Mr. Mr. Lowell made, as our cable despatches have stated, every effort consistent with diplomatic usage, and at the same time performed a most delicate duty with such consummate tact as to remove all sources of irritation.”[84]

The whole situation was plainly one that called for great tact, and for that delicate use of language in which the shadows of words are not to be left out of account. It was probably with reference to this particular encounter that the London _Spectator_ said shortly after Lowell’s death: “There was a question at one time whether the late Lord Granville or Mr. Lowell were the more accomplished and subtle in conveying, without offence, the suggestion or conviction which it might be the duty of either of them to impress on any one to whom the communication might not be welcome. And probably this is a point which would be very differently determined by different people. But though equal in courtesy and grace of manner to Lord Granville, we should say that Mr. Lowell had the greater power of the two to impress his meaning, even where it was a meaning painful and difficult to enforce, without conveying even the slightest tincture of personal discourtesy. Lord Granville was perhaps even fuller of the _suaviter in modo_, but Mr. Lowell never forgot the necessity, where the necessity existed, of conveying also the impression of the _fortiter in re_. With all his grace, there was a plainness of purpose in him which could not be mistaken.”[85]

Lowell himself, writing to Dr. Holmes shortly before leaving England, recalls the situation and says: “Some of my Irishmen had been living in their old homes seventeen years, engaged in trade or editing nationalist papers, or members of the poor-law guardians (like MacSweeney), and neither paying taxes in America nor doing any other duty as Americans. I was guided by two things--the recognized principles of international law, and the conduct of Lord Lyons when Seward was arresting and imprisoning British subjects. We kept one man in jail seven months without trial or legal process of any kind, and, but for the considerateness and moderation of Lyons, might have had war with England. I think I saved a misunderstanding here.... When I had at last procured the conditional (really unconditional) release of all the suspects, they refused to be liberated. When I spoke of this to Justin McCarthy (then the head of the Irish Parliamentary party, Parnell being in Kilmainham), he answered cheerfully, ‘Certainly: _they are there to make trouble_.’”[86] One of the intimations of what lay in his mind throughout all the delicate business may be read in a note to Mr. John W. Field, 19 January, 1884: “I wonder, by the way, when we shall see an American politician able to appreciate and shrewd enough to act on Curran’s saying about his countrymen, that ‘an Irishman is the worst fellow in the world to run away from.’”

And after his return to America, he wrote to Lady Lyttelton: “You must make up your mind to let Ireland have her head. She may no doubt choose to go over a precipice, though I don’t think that she would, and at any rate a whole legion of devils would go with her as with the Gadarene swine; at best it is all up playing Sisera, for the stars in their courses are rather beyond reach even of the newspapers.” That Lowell had a keen appreciation of the genuine spirit of patriotism which moved the Irish in America in his generation may be discerned by any one who will read the closing sentences in his address on “The Independent in Politics.”

Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton in an article[87] published just after Lowell’s death, tried to sum up his intellectual qualities in a word, and thought he found the expression in “sagacity.” “In life,” he says, “his most striking characteristic--a characteristic indicated not only by the watchful gray eyes and the apparently conscious eyebrows that overshadowed them, but in every intonation of his voice, and every movement of his limbs--was a marvellous sagacity.” “What is called his wit,” he adds, “is merely this almost preternatural sagacity in rapid movement. What is called his humor is this same sagacity at rest and in a meditative mood.” Without pushing this analysis so far, there is no doubt that in his diplomatic capacity Lowell did draw upon his native genius for quick perception and interpretation. The gift which he had multiplied by use in the criticism of literature and in the diagnosis of political situations at home, was at his service both in Madrid and London. It made him not a mere fencer in a diplomatic game, but a man of resources in the serious representation of his country’s interests. That he could couch his demands or protests in witty phrase added to his power of persuasion; and he could not associate as an equal with English statesmen without applying his sagacity to their problems even where these did not immediately concern his own people. Perhaps it was after Majuba that he wrote in one of his despatches: “I asked Lord Lyons whether he did not think suzerainty might be defined as ‘leaving to a man the privilege of carrying the saddle and bridle after you have stolen his horse.’ He assented.”

* * * * *

There was, perhaps, something in the adjustment of Lowell to his surroundings which set the springs of poetry flowing intermittently. At any rate, he was content, conscious that he was of service in a high position, happy both in his own health--“I have never seen a climate that suited me so well,” he wrote--and in his wife’s improvement, and surrounded by congenial companions. These things do not necessarily make for poetry, but Lowell had by this time come into that mellow stage when what he did had about it an absence of apparent effort, when his ripe experience and equipoise of life found easy expression, and poetry was a solace and a pastime. To be sure, there is something to make one smile behind his hand when one sees the American minister sending his “Phœbe” across the Atlantic and following it with almost daily corrections, yet one listens to the note with the feeling that the poet is putting into the reminiscence of a far-off sound not a little of his present apprehension of himself. Nay, the poem in its first form broke at last into two stanzas, wisely omitted in the final recension, which are almost bald in their apologetic confession:--

“Let who has felt compute the strain Of struggle with abuses strong, The doubtful course, the helpless pain Of seeing best intents go wrong.

“We who look on with critic eyes Exempt from action’s crucial test, Human ourselves, at least are wise In honoring one who did his best.”

On New Year’s Day, 1882, Lowell sent another poem, “Estrangement,” to Mr. Gilder for the _Century_. “I am pleased,” he wrote, “that you liked the little poem I sent you, and the more that you asked for another. Here is one you are welcome to, if you like it. I rather do, but that is nothing, and I shall like you none the less if you don’t. Treat me like a gentleman and not like a poet,--I mean as you would a gentleman and not a poet. I am tough and have myself played Herod to many an infant muse, and mine is approaching her second childhood.”

His social life drew from him occasional verses, as when he planted a tree at Inverary, or thanked Miss Dorothy Tennant, who afterward married Henry M. Stanley, for a drawing of little street Arabs, or sent a sonnet home in honor of Whittier’s seventy-fifth birthday, or gave a posset cup to a god-child. He was happy in pleasing young friends with verses, sometimes inserting them in books which he gave them, or writing them in their albums.

Early in 1882 he was saddened by the sudden death of R. H. Dana, one of the earliest of his friends and lately fresh in his recollection since he had seen much of him in his recent stay in Rome. “We had known each other,” he wrote to Mr. George Putnam, “at least fifty-five years. He is a great loss, and the more that his career was incomplete. He never filled the place he ought in public affairs. One weakness neutralized the legitimate effect of his very remarkable abilities. Death seems to be hitting right and left among my contemporaries. So far as I am concerned, I take the warning with perfect equanimity.” It was somewhat in the same mood that he wrote to his friend Field: “I have no news except that for about a week I have been _having a head_ again. I have temporarily reformed and live cleanly like Falstaff. No wine, no black coffee, and--you won’t believe it, but ’tis true--no baccy till afternoon and then a short allowance. You see I am in earnest. At the same time that I take these precautions I confess that I don’t _hanker arter_ much more of this world, and shouldn’t mind much if--. I notice that the men in my platoon are dropping right and left. I wish I relished life as much as you. Give my love to----, who will see by the way I spell her name that I am in good humor though I feel as if I had Luke’s iron crown on.”

He was drawn in colored chalks at this time by Mr. Sandys, and another portrait also was painted by Mrs. Merritt, which now hangs in the Faculty Room in University Hall at Harvard. “I am off for private view at Academy,” he writes to Mr. Field, 28 April, 1882; “two portraits of myself there. They are very unlike each other, and my duty to the artist requires me to try and look as much like each as I can. What am I to do? They will be in different rooms doubtless, and so I can manage it perhaps.”

It was a light matter to toy with verse now and then, but as for prose, the most be attempted beyond his despatches to his government were the speeches he made now and then. Mr. Aldrich had asked for a paper on a certain subject for the _Atlantic_, and he replied, 8 May, 1882: “If I could, how gladly I would! But I am piece-mealed here with so many things to do that I cannot get a moment to brood over anything, as it must be brooded over if it is to have wings. It is as if a setting hen should have to mind the doorbell. Now, you must wait till I come home to be Boycotted in my birthplace by my Irish fellow-citizens (who are kind enough to teach me how to be American) who fought all our battles and got up all our draft-riots. Then, in the intervals of firing through my loopholes of retreat I may be able to do something for the _Atlantic_. I am now in the midst of the highly important and engrossing business of arranging for the presentation at Court of some of our fair citoyennes. Whatever else you are, never be a minister!” Mr. Bowker relates of Lowell that “at one time he had given offence to an American lady of doubtful reputation, who had asked him to present her at Court, and on his dexterously evading that responsibility, had asked him point blank whether he was unwilling because he had heard certain things about her. He could not answer in the negative, and she went off vowing vengeance. A few months afterwards, when the Irish criticisms were hottest, she reappeared and had the effrontery to tell him that she had stirred up the whole business herself, out of revenge. Mr. Lowell added, on telling this story, that he proposed to accomplish at least one thing, to keep his country respectable, even if he had to resign to do it.”

One of the most admirable of his little speeches was that on unveiling the bust of Fielding at Taunton, 4 September, 1883. He spoke as an author, as one who had reflected upon the great office of literature, and as a critic who could measure Fielding’s power by the standard of Shakespeare and Cervantes, and perhaps even more effectively as one of the English race who was enough differentiated by his American birth, and enough instructed by his familiarity with racy men of the soil, to appreciate the essential English manliness of the great writer. This address is indeed one of the most striking commentaries on the fitness of Lowell to act as a spokesman for the common Englishry of two countries. His point of view was at once that of an onlooker and of one indigenous. Three years later, when reprinting the address in his volume “Democracy and other Addresses,” he refers to one passage in the speech as follows: “I am constantly bothered by the disenchanting effect of my sense of humor (of which I speak in the Fielding address) which makes me too fair to both sides. This often makes me distrustful of myself. I am sometimes inclined to call Genius not ‘an infinite capacity for taking pains’ (though that is much), but an infinite capacity for being one-sided.”

There was a somewhat humorous episode in Lowell’s career in the autumn of 1883. It is a time-honored custom at the ancient and sturdy little University of St. Andrews for the student body to elect once a year a Lord Rector of the University whose duties are limited to a single address. There is a tacit understanding that politics shall not enter into the election, and that the choice shall be the students’ own, without interference from the officers of the faculty. This does not of course preclude an interest on the part of professors, and Shairp, Campbell, and Baynes especially took a lively interest in the proposal that Lowell should succeed Sir Theodore Martin. At first Mr. Mallock appeared as opposition candidate, but his name was withdrawn when it was found that he had been set up by some indiscreet person with a view to bettering his chances for Parliament, and the Right Hon. Edward Gibson was proposed. A protest was lodged against Lowell’s nomination on the ground that he was an alien. The whole business created a lively discussion in and out of print, and _Punch_ entered the lists with these lines:--

“An alien? Go to! If fresh, genial wit In sound Saxon speech be not genuine grit, If the wisdom and mirth he has put into verse for us Don’t make him a ‘native,’ why, so much the worse for us. Whig, Tory, and Rad should club votes, did he need ’em, To honor the writer who gave _Bird o’ Freedom_ To all English readers. A few miles of sea Make Lowell an alien? Fiddle-de-dee! ’Tis crass party spirit, Bœotian, dense, That is alien indeed--to good taste and good sense.”

The excitement ran high, and Lowell was elected by a considerable majority. But his opponents pushed the matter further, and demonstrated that he was really ineligible by reason of his “extra-territoriality.” As Lowell put it in writing to Professor Child: “My official extra-territoriality will, perhaps, prevent my being rector at St. Andrews, because it puts me beyond the reach of the Scottish Courts in case of malversation in office. How to rob a Scottish University suggests a serious problem.” To avoid further complications Lowell resigned. He good-humoredly told his friends at home that his only regret was in being prevented from adding the dignified line “Univ. Sanct. Andr-Scot-Dom. Rect.” to his name in the Harvard catalogue. His student friends could do nothing but accept the situation. Later, they begged him, when they knew he was to be at St. Andrews, to address them unofficially. It was not long before the expiration of his term as American minister, and he wrote, 27 January, 1885:--

“Circumstances over which I have no control will prevent my being with you at St. Andrews next Friday. I feel deeply touched by the continued kindness of the students of your ancient University, and greatly honored by their wish to see me and hear me. I am somewhat consoled in my disappointment by the reflection that neither your eyes nor your ears will lose so much as is kindly implied by the invitation with which you have honored me. It is I who miss a pleasure whose loss I shall always regret; for young friends have a charm and value of their own, as he feels most sensibly who has reached a period in life when old ones are only too frequently saying good-by forever.”

When the commotion over the rectorship was going on, Lowell was having a holiday in Paris, where he was able to take Mrs. Lowell for a couple of months. An anonymous writer in the _Atlantic Monthly_,[88] who saw the Lowells at this time, has recorded some impressions created by Lowell’s conversation, and among them one respecting his interest in the Jewish race. When he was writing his paper on Rousseau, his interest was awakened, and the interest took a personal turn as he associated his own family name of Russell with that of the French philosopher. He was led to enquire into the representation of the race in America, and no doubt his interest was heightened by his sojourn in Spain. But it was after he went to England, where be had manifold opportunities for making observations, that the whole subject of the Jewish element in society came to be a very frequent topic of conversation with him. It was just such a subject as would appeal to his love of paradox, his subtle curiosity, and his liking for brilliant forays into new territory. It does not appear that Lowell ever set down in writing his deliberate convictions. Rather he kept this theme for the pastime of conversation, driving the ball indeed at times with an energy which would suggest the professional athlete.

“One evening,” says the writer in the _Atlantic_, “I was dining with Mr. and Mrs. Lowell and three other friends, and he began to lament the renaming of old streets which was going on, and the obliteration of the last traces of the Paris of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,--the Paris of the schoolmen and their open-air debates. He spoke of the local history that lay in the mere names of streets and squares,--Rue du Fouarre, Rue des Gauvais Garçons, and several more of which he gave the origin and legend. In the midst of this picturesque and learned disquisition he stumbled upon the class of a celebrated philosopher of those times, seated on their bundles of straw,--a well-known teacher whose name I cannot now recall,--and stated that he was a Jew.

“He instantly began to talk of the Jews, a subject which turned out to be almost a monomania with him. He detected a Jew in every hiding-place and under every disguise, even when the fugitive had no suspicion of himself. To begin with nomenclature: all persons named for countries or towns are Jews; all with fantastic, compound names, such as Lilienthal, Morgenroth; all with names derived from colors, trades, animals, vegetables, minerals; all with Biblical names, except Puritan first names; all patronymics ending in _son_,--_sohn_, _sen_, or any other version; all Russels, originally so called from red-haired Israelites; all Walters, by long descended derivation from wolves and foxes in some ancient tongue; the therefore Cecilia Metella, no doubt St. Cecilia too, consequently the Cecils, including Lord Burleigh and Lord Salisbury; he cited some old chronicle in which he had cornered one Robert de Cæcilia and exposed him as an English Jew. He gave examples and instances of these various classes with amazing readiness and precision, but I will not pretend that I have set down even these few correctly. Of course there was Jewish blood in many royal houses and in most noble ones, notably in Spain. In short, it appeared that this insidious race had and permeated the human family more universally than any other influence except original sin. He spoke of their talent and versatility, and of the numbers who had been illustrious in literature, the learned professions, art, science, and even war, until by degrees, from being shut out of society and every honorable and desirable pursuit, they had gained the prominent positions everywhere.

“Then he began his classifications again: all bankers were Jews, likewise brokers, most of the great financiers,--and that was to be expected; the majority of barons, also baronets; they had got possession of the press, they were getting into politics; they had forced their entrance into the army and navy; they had made their way into the cabinets of Europe and become prime ministers; they had slipped into diplomacy and become ambassadors. But a short time ago they were packed into the Ghetto: now they inhabited palaces, the most aristocratic quarters, and were members of the most exclusive clubs. A few years ago they could not own land; they were acquiring it by purchase and mortgage in every part of Europe, and buying so many old estates in England that they owned the larger part of several counties.

“Mr. Lowell said more, much more, to illustrate the ubiquity, the universal ability of the Hebrew, and gave examples and statistics for every statement, however astonishing, drawn from his inexhaustible information. He was conscious of the sort of infatuation which possessed him, and his dissertation alternated between earnestness and drollery; but whenever a burst of laughter greeted some new development of his theme, although he joined in it, he immediately returned to the charge with abundant proof of his paradoxes. Finally he came to a stop, but not to a conclusion, and as no one else spoke, I said, ‘And when the Jews have got absolute control of finance, the army and navy, the press, diplomacy, society, titles, the government, and the earth’s surface, what do you suppose they will do with them and with us?’ ‘That,’ he answered, turning towards me, and in a whisper audible to the whole table, ‘that is the question which will eventually drive me mad.’”

On the return of the Lowells from Paris to London they moved into a larger and more commodious house still in Lowndes Square, but No. 31. “We have been having a mild winter,” Lowell writes to Mr. Field, 19 January, 1884, “with only a couple of days or so of frost thus far. Everything is looking as green as summer (by everything I mean the grass in the Parks) and the thrushes are using up all their best songs before the curtain of spring rises. The Season hasn’t begun yet, but I am dining out more or less as usual. Fanny goes too sometimes, but can’t stand much of it. You will have seen that I have resigned my rectorship, but I was at once chosen president of the Birmingham and Midland Institute so that I might have another chair to sit down in.”

It was in the double office of American minister and poet that he took part in the ceremonies attending the unveiling of the bust of Longfellow in Westminster Abbey, 2 March, 1884. But the personal relation which he bore the poet was uppermost in his mind, especially as he was renewing his intercourse with the family in the person of two of Longfellow’s daughters who were living in England at this time and were present at the unveiling. The occasion was not one for critical judgment, but in the course of his brief speech he made a felicitous point on sonnet writing. “I have been struck particularly,” he said, “with this quality of style in some of my late friend’s sonnets, which seem to me in unity and evenness of flow among the most beautiful and perfect we have in the language. They remind one of those cabinets in which all the drawers are opened at once by the turn of the key in a single lock, whereas we all have seen sonnets with a lock in every line with a different key to each, and the added conundrums of secret drawers.”

In April came the tercentenary commemoration of the University of Edinburgh, when Lowell was present and received the degree of Doctor of Laws. The same degree was conferred on him at his own University a few weeks later.

In May he was called on for two addresses. On the seventh of the month he attended the annual dinner of the Provincial Newspaper Society at the Inns of Court Hotel, London, and a few words which he then said, because spoken apparently without premeditation, are worth recording as expressing a judgment held by him with great sincerity. “I have my own theory,” he said, “as to what after-dinner speaking should be. I think it should be in the first place short; I think it should be light; and I think it should be both extemporaneous and contemporaneous. I think it should have the meaning of the moment in it, and nothing more. But I confess that when I get up here and face you, representing what you call the Provincial Press--and if you will allow me by way of an interjection, I may state that it has been my fortune to live in a number of countries, where it has sometimes been my duty to study the National Press, and I have always and everywhere found it provincial: I have never yet encountered a truly cosmopolitan newspaper--when I feel myself standing for the first time in the presence of a collection of editors, I experience a very serious emotion. I feel as if I were talking to the ear of Dionysius, at the other end of which the world was listening. I do not see any reporters here--I am glad I do not. I cannot help taking this opportunity, with so many persons who have the formation of public opinion before me, of saying one or two words on the growing change which has taken place in the methods of forming public opinion. I am not sure that you are always aware to how great an extent you have supplanted the pulpit, to how great an extent you have supplanted even the deliberative assembly. You have assumed responsibilities, I should say, heavier than man ever assumed before. You wield an influence entirely without precedent hitherto in human history. I do not wish the dinner to be too solemn, but, as I tell you, I have been solemnized standing in this presence. I came here intending only to say a few words of kindly thanks for the friendliness which you have shown toward the country I have the honor to represent, and to me as representing it. But, I cannot forbear to say that, if I were an editor, I should have written up in the room in which I write, ‘Woe to me if I preach not the gospel:’ I mean so much of the Word of God as is manifest to me, and I should strive to preach that word, and to convey it to my fellow-men. I have always thought the case of clergymen a hard one, because they are expected to be inspired once a week. But what is this to yours who must be inspired every day, and who have undertaken to edit the whole world every morning? There has been nothing, as I was just saying, that has, in the history of man, occupied such a position as the Press. You have the formation of public opinion. There is not a man here who values any more than I do, or ever have done, the opinion of Tom, or the opinion of Dick, or the opinion of Harry. But when Tom, Dick, and Harry agree, then we begin to call it public opinion. I am not sure that it always deserves that name; but I am sure of this, that public opinion is of value in precise proportion to the material it is made of. I am sure of this, that two factors go towards the making of that material. One is the editor, and the other is the reader.”

Three days later, 10 May, 1884, he delivered, as president of the Wordsworth Society, the address on that poet which is included in his “Literary and Political Addresses.” He deprecated the notion that he could add materially to what he had written of Wordsworth in his more deliberate earlier paper,[89] for as he says: “Without unbroken time there can be no consecutive thought, and it is my misfortune that in the midst of a reflection or of a sentence I am liable to be called away by the bell of private or public duty.” The speech contains one or two critical passages which may be added to the sum of Lowell’s comment on Wordsworth; but to the student of Lowell’s mind as affected by new conditions and registering itself in new terms, the speech is more interesting because of the main thought in it, that which occupies him upon passing in review the work of Dr. Knight who had by his new edition of the poet enabled the student to perceive more clearly the development of Wordsworth’s thought. Precisely that examination which we are desirous of making of Lowell, Lowell set out to make of Wordsworth; but the eye of the student reveals something of the mind that prompts the eye’s excursion, and Lowell was in a way suggesting the movement of his own thought when, upon enquiring what was the solution by which Wordsworth attempted as he grew in years to justify his own early radicalism with his later conservatism, he found a very powerful influence in that religious conception which dominated Wordsworth’s later thought. “I see no reason to think,” he says, “that he ever swerved from his early faith in the beneficence of freedom, but rather that he learned the necessity of defining more exactly in what freedom consisted, and the conditions, whether of time or place, under which alone it can be beneficent, of insisting that it must be an evolution and not a manufacture, and that it should coördinate itself with the prior claims of society and civilization.” But the roots of freedom were planted in the individual nature, and there they were to be nourished. Development of character--yes, but by what means? “Observation convinced him that what are called the safeguards of society are the staff also of the individual members of it; that tradition, habitude, and heredity are great forces, whether for impulse or restraint. He had pondered a pregnant phrase of the poet Daniel, where he calls religion ‘mother of Form and Fear.’ A growing conviction of its profound truth turned his mind towards the church as the embodiment of the most potent of all traditions, and to her public offices as the expression of the most socially humanizing of all habitudes.”

Lowell was analyzing Wordsworth’s poetry with a view to reaching definite understanding of the principles which prompted it, and especially which led to the gradual yet none the less sure change in the philosophy of the poetry. I think in the whole interesting discussion which Lowell here entered upon one may read his own mind, more or less conscious of change in its attitude and finding in the mirror of another poet some image of itself. In becoming wonted to English life, Lowell was lessening a certain protest against institutional religion which was characteristic of the community into which he was born, and had been a part of his own intellectual and moral expression. In a letter to Mrs. Herrick written in 1875, he had answered a question of hers regarding his religious faith:--

“You ask me if I am an Episcopalian. No, though I prefer the service of the Church of England, and attend it from time to time. But I am not much of a church-goer, because I so seldom find any preaching that does not make me impatient and do me more harm than good. I confess to a strong lurch towards Calvinism (in some of its doctrines) that strengthens as I grow older. Perhaps it may be some consolation to you that my mother was born and bred an Episcopalian.”

In this passage Lowell betrays very naturally his New England mind. He inherited the prevailing notion that the Episcopal Church was an exotic,--he speaks of attending the service of the Church of England, when he probably is thinking of his occasional visits with his daughter to Christ Church in his own Cambridge; and he could not help looking upon the sermon as the central point in religious worship. But the preference which he had for the service was easily strengthened by association with it where it was the rule and not the exception; not only so, but that observation which he used so keenly showed him in England the existence of a highly organized society, very congenial to him, in which not only was church-going a matter of course, but religion as a spirit was not dissociated from the forms of worship, rather it was thought of largely in those terms. Hence it was that Lowell in adjusting himself as he did to the life about him was undergoing more or less conscious a change in the attitude of his mind toward the whole field of religion.

To some this would seem an indication that Lowell was becoming Anglicized. But how confidently could this be asserted of his political faith? That was a very integral part of his nature. From youth to age he had declared and reiterated his faith in freedom, in the largest liberty, and especially in that political equality which was the basis of all that was holiest and most enduring in the America of which he was so passionate a lover,--the America which he saw in a vision, and was able to see even through the vapors which might rise from mephitic ground. When the autumn of 1884 came, the political signs pointed to a change of party in the administration of government at home, and in the event of an accession to power of the Democratic party, it was plain that Lowell would be recalled from his post as minister near the Court of St. James. Four years of friendly intercourse with Englishmen and Englishwomen, of a somewhat more intimate acquaintance with the springs of government than falls to the lot of the mere looker-on; not only that, but the advantage which an alienated American has of viewing his country from a new vantage ground, for distance in space has some of the properties of distance in time, and an American in Europe has almost the point of view of an American of the next century,--all this may well have led Lowell to reflect on the fundamentals of politics, and have served to give point to his reflections when he came to give the address expected of the incoming president of the Birmingham and Midland Institute. Moreover, the place where he was to speak reminded him of that great industrial factor which enters so powerfully into modern conceptions of the state.

It is fair, therefore, to take his address on Democracy, given 6 October, 1884, as a careful and deliberate expression of his political faith. Yet it must be borne in mind that he was somewhat hampered by his official position as well as inspired by it. He stood for the great democratic country, was its spokesman, but he was not speaking to his own countrymen, and might easily be misconstrued by foreigners if he attempted to weigh Democracy in balances designed for apothecaries’ stuff, and not for hay wagons. As he himself said four years later: “I was called upon to deliver an address in Birmingham, and chose for my theme ‘Democracy.’ In that place I felt it incumbent on me to dwell on the good points and favorable aspects of democracy as I had seen them practically illustrated in my native land. I chose rather that my discourse should suffer through inadequacy than run the risk of seeming to forget what Burke calls ‘that salutary prejudice called our country,’ and that obligation which forbids one to discuss family affairs before strangers. But here among ourselves it is clearly the duty of whoever loves his country to be watchful of whatever weaknesses and perils there may be in the practical working of a system never before set in motion under such favorable auspices, or on so large a scale.”[90]

One need not be nicer than his author, and it is clear from what Lowell wrote afterward that he was somewhat surprised at the importance attached to this utterance at Birmingham. In truth, it was the natural and in a measure the unstudied expression of a man whose convictions were not lightly held, had been tested by long experience, and were the warp and woof of his political loom. Studied the address was, so far as it became him not to disregard his official self, and above all not to suffer his creed to be modified by his surroundings; but, bating all this, the speech was the mellow judgment of a man who was about to retire from a post where he had been an intermediary between the two freest nations on earth, and it represented his deliberate thought upon the foundations of that freedom.

He strikes the keynote of his discourse in his opening sentence: “He must be a born leader or misleader of men, or must have been sent into the world unfurnished with that modulating and restraining balance-wheel which we call a sense of humor, who, in old age, has as strong a confidence in his opinions and in the necessity of bringing the universe into conformity with them as he had in youth.” Here was Lowell, not unmindful of the zeal of his youth, standing up in the serenity of age and about to repeat his credo in accents which could not be the self-same as those with which he had early sung. Wherein, then, does “Democracy” disclose essential agreement with its author’s ardent faith in youth, or departure from the ideals then enjoyed? The one note always struck by Lowell when he was singing of freedom and democracy was that of the impregnable defence of these great truths in free and conscience-governed character, and it is this note with which his address concludes: “Our healing is not in the storm or in the whirlwind, it is not in monarchies, or aristocracies, or democracies, but will be revealed by the still small voice that speaks to the conscience and the heart, prompting us to a wider and wiser humanity.” And in testing current views by his unalterable faith in humanity, he cleaves with no uncertain stroke. At the time of his address Henry George’s doctrine was preached by its most eloquent expounder, Henry George himself, and Lowell says frankly: “I do not believe that land should be divided because the quantity of it is limited by nature,” but a moment after, “Mr. George is right in his impelling motive; right, also, I am convinced, in insisting that humanity makes a part, by far the most important part, of political economy.” So, too, he distinguishes at once between a socialism which means “the practical application of Christianity to life, and has in it the secret of an orderly and benign reconstruction,” and State Socialism, whose disposition is to “cut off the very roots in personal character--self-help, forethought, and frugality--which nourish and sustain the trunk and branches of every vigorous commonwealth.”

What strikes one as most final in this discourse as an exponent of Lowell’s attitude is his thinking through to the substance of things and his indifference to names or to terms except as they define realities. “Democracy in its best sense,” he declares, “is merely the letting in of light and air.” He never did believe in violent changes; in his most ardent crusade against the gigantic evil of slavery, he refused to go with his associates who were ready to sever a union which seemed to protect slavery. But with growing age it may be said that he was more averse to any change except that which was scarcely perceptible at any one moment of its progress. “Things in possession,” he says, “have a very firm grip,” and I think the whole address is tinged with a sense of inertia, almost of weariness, even though it rises to moments of fine courage and the expression of an unshaken faith. Was this anything more than the brooding tone of a man who after all his experience was unquestionably a man of thought rather than a man of affairs?

The election of Cleveland to the presidency made it clear that Lowell was to bring to a close his diplomatic life in England, though some of his friends both there and in America clung to the illusion that the light way in which he wore the party dress might make it possible for a Democratic president to retain in office a man who had made himself so acceptable. Some even went so far as to see in such a policy the initiation of a new course in administration, by which ambassadors and ministers representing the United States should hold their appointments irrespective of change of party in administration, since the foreign policy of the government was practically continued on the same line, whichever party was in power. Shortly before the election Lowell wrote to Mr. Norton: “I follow your home politics with a certain personal interest. The latest news seems favorable to Blaine. I suppose in either event I am likely to be recalled, and I should not regret it but for two reasons,--certain friendships I have formed here, and the climate, which is more kindly to me than any I ever lived in. It is a singularly manly climate, full of composure and without womanish passion and extravagance.” After the election he wrote to the same friend: “As for myself, my successor was already named, and the place promised him in case of Blaine’s election. This I knew long ago, and I cannot quite make up my mind whether it is my weakness of good-nature and _laizzez-faire_ that makes me willing to stay, or a persuasion of what is best for me. Everybody here is so continually lamenting my departure that I dare say my judgment isn’t worth much in the matter. My position is complicated in two ways,--the necessity of engaging a house, and now by Mabel’s intention of coming abroad for some time with her children. This would change the aspect of things entirely, for they are naturally the strongest magnets that draw me homewards. If she come, I may stay, whatever Cleveland thinks best.” To Mr. Field he wrote, 11 December, 1884: “We are well and waiting to hear our fate. I should be indifferent but for a few friendships here. All England is writing to express regret. But I am old enough to think that they will survive the loss of me.... Fanny is better than at any time since she left Spain, and quite willing to stay here now that the chances are against it. But she _will_ not believe that anybody would recall me! She doesn’t know the depths of human depravity.”

So wonted had Lowell become to his English surroundings that some of his friends in England laid plans to keep him with them, and sounded him as to his willingness to be nominated for the professorship of English language and literature which had lately been established in Oxford. “Had he consented to stand,” says an editorial article in the _London Times_,[91] “not even a Board determined to sink Literature in Philology could have passed over his claims. But he declined for two reasons. There were claims of family over in Massachusetts; and, greatly as he loved the mental atmosphere of England, he thought it his duty not to accept a definitely English post. And the sense of duty is strong in that old Puritan stock from which he sprang.”

But there came an event which made all speculation regarding his plans vain and illusory. On

the 19th of February, 1885, Mrs. Lowell died after a short, sharp illness. The loss struck a chill in his heart which made him dumb for the most part, but he wrote to his friends, Mr. and Mrs. John W. Field, who had been sharers in his profound anxiety during those painful days in Madrid:--

LONDON, 6 March, 1885.

DEAR OLD FRIENDS,--What shall I say to you, even though I have the sad comfort of feeling that whatever I say will be said to those who loved her and knew the entire beauty of her character. But I must at least say how deeply grateful I am to you whose friendly devotion in Madrid did so much to prolong a life so precious. She was given back to us for five years, and for the last two of them was hopeful enough about her health to enjoy her life. She had grown easy in her ceremonial duties, and (since the death of her mother and sisters) had no desire to return home. It is all bitterly sad.

It seems there was no hope from the first,--though I naturally thought it an attack like that of three years ago which she would pull through. The doctors all believed as I did. But they think now that there was some organic and incurable lesion of the brain,--perhaps a tumor,--and that this disturbance was the cause of her fever in Spain instead of being its consequence.

Everybody here has done for me everything that kindness could do,--especially Lady Lyttelton, Mrs. Smalley, and Mrs. Stephen. Lady L. has been all that the tenderest sister could be.

God bless you, dear old friends!

Good-by, affectionately yours, J. R. LOWELL.

To an old and attached friend of his wife he wrote: “You will have a sad pleasure in knowing that she suffered no pain. In her last consciousness when I asked her if she suffered, she shook her head. But I cannot write about these things coolly, and hate to put sentiment on paper where it lacks the witness of sincerity which the voice carries with it. And yet I am glad to write to you who knew how noble she was. You knew also her goodness and perfect faith, and are as sure as I am that she sees God.”

In fulfilling a wish of his wife, Lowell wrote to his old friend, Mrs. W. W. Story, 31 March: “I send you General Wallace’s book by to-day’s post. It was touchingly characteristic that I should find it on her writing-desk done up and addressed to you. She never forgot or neglected a duty. But, not knowing the requirements of the Post Office, she had closed it at both ends, and sealed it. So I was obliged, much to my regret, to have it done up in the right way. But I ordered her original address to be left inside that it might show she had not forgotten.

“I am on the whole glad to be rid of my official trammels and trappings. I do not know yet when my successor will arrive, but hardly look for him before July. I shall then go home, but whether to stay or not will be decided after I have looked about me there. If I decide to stay I shall certainly visit the Old World pretty regularly, and shall be sure to turn up in Rome.”

Lowell added one more to his public addresses before leaving England, that delivered on unveiling the bust of Coleridge, in Westminster Abbey, 7 May, 1885. It is a slight, graceful performance, but in it I think we may hear now and then that echo of his own thought about himself which we have more than once caught in his addresses, as when he says: “His critical sense rose like a forbidding apparition in the path of his poetic production;” and again: “We are here to-day not to consider what Coleridge owed to himself, to the family, or to the world, but what we owe to him. Let us at least not volunteer to draw his frailties from their dread abode. Our own are a far more profitable subject of contemplation. Let the man of imaginative temperament, who has never procrastinated, who has made all that was possible of his powers, cast the first stone.”

Early in June, 1885, Lowell left England, that held his wife’s grave, and returned lonely to his old home.