CHAPTER XVI

RETURN TO PRIVATE LIFE

1885-1888

Elmwood was let, and if it had been vacant Lowell could hardly have gone back there at once to live. There were too many ghosts in the house, he said. He made no attempt to take up again his college work, though he held his title of Smith Professor with _emeritus_ added, and as his daughter had abandoned her plan of taking her children abroad, he made his home with her at Deerfoot Farm, Southborough, Massachusetts, about two hours by rail from Boston, in a pretty country where there was little intrusion of manufactures. He always had also a home in Boston at the house of his sister, Mrs. Putnam. He was at once besieged with invitations from many friends; as he wrote to Mr. Gilder: “I have been all these days in the condition of a bird of Paradise, unable to perch, no matter I might wish it, and perhaps embarrassed by the number of friendly roosts offered to my choice--yours not the least seductive among them.” He made up his mind to attend the Commencement at Harvard, though he dreaded both the heat and the emotion,--as he wrote: “O for a good freezing English July day!” He found himself deluged with letters--it was almost as bad as in London. Many he was unable to answer, many answered themselves after Napoleon’s easy-going philosophy, but with the return to private life and in the absence of any routine duties, Lowell took up again with a careless prodigality the occupation of letter-writing. He had left friends in England who had endeared themselves to him, and whose letters to him readily drew a response, and to his old friends he was always faithful, so that, taking Mr. Norton’s two volumes as a gauge, we find that he wrote twice as many friendly letters in the five years after his return to America as in the five years just preceding.

“I am already,” he writes to Mr. Norton, 22 July, 1885, “in love with Southborough, which is a charmingly unadulterated New England village, and with as lovely landscapes as I ever saw.... ’Tis an odd shift in the peep-hole of my panorama from London to this Chartreuse. For the present I like it and find it wholesome. I fancy myself happy sometimes--I am not sure--but then I never was for long;” and to Mrs. Clifford he wrote, 2 August: “I am planting my cabbages diligently and growing as much like them as I can. One must have confidants of one kind or another, and where one is cut off from women, one must follow Wordsworth’s advice and seek an intimacy with nature in whose impartial eyes cabbages are as interesting as--I was going to say strawberry-leaves, but remembered that you were an Englishwoman. I _wasn’t_ going to say women, though logically I ought. Perhaps they are as safe. I am trying to make myself tolerable to five grandchildren, though I am not so sure that I have enough of the Grandfather in me to go round among so many.”

There is a playful allusion in this letter to a side of Lowell’s nature which is hinted at also in his choice of correspondents. He was peculiarly dependent upon the companionship of women, and he attracted to himself the wittiest and most responsive. For it was not so much the cushioned comfort that he looked for, as the cosiness of good fellowship and the intellectual equality which he sometimes found and always prized. He loved the generous natures with whom he had good converse, and his talk and letters went freely to these habitual dwellers in a world of honest sentiment. As in so many other cases, this side of Lowell’s life found its expression in poetry, and there is no exaggeration in the sonnet “Nightwatches,” written after the death of one who had stood to him in this free, intimate relation for many years.

In August he went to Washington to close his business with the State Department, and made with great pleasure the acquaintance of Mr. Bayard, then Secretary of State, and later like him to represent the country in London. He met President Cleveland also, and saw in him “a legitimate birth of Democracy and not a byblow like Butler and his kind.”

Lowell was solicited both by the editor of the _Atlantic_ and other friends to take up again his contributions to literature, but he put them off. He had no inclination to write--he was glad of the solace of books and letters, but the spur to literary activity had been dulled. Yet he kept his Muse at least as a sort of friendly companion, as when on the seventy-fifth birthday of his neighbor and associate Dr. Asa Gray he wrote:--

“Just Fate, prolong his life well spent, Whose indefatigable hours Have been as gaily innocent And fragrant as his flowers!”

For a time he was content to drift, and to let the indolence which he had overmastered all his life get the upper hand of him now, even though the pressure of circumstance still lay heavy on him. “I am delighted,” he wrote 13 December, 1885, to Mr. John W. Field, “to hear that you are getting on so well--better than I feared--and cannot enough admire your pluck. ’Tis all the more admirable in a man like you who have the art of finding (or making) life worth living so much more than most of us. As for me I am a little tired now and then, and consent to grow old only because I can’t decently help it.... As for my coming on to Washington--I don’t know what to say. I should like to see you and Eliza, but don’t see how I can find the time at present. I have a great deal to do if I could only do it. But I am beginning to feel ‘old and slow,’ as Ulysses said to Dante. Especially do I feel slow as compared with what I once was.... I am just now bothered with an address to be given next week at the opening of a public library in Chelsea. When I have done that I mean to hold my tongue for evermore. Why should I make myself wretched when there is so much that will do it without my help?”

The address at Chelsea was the one on “Books and Libraries,” included in his “Literary and Political Addresses,” an address, almost conversational in its manner, marked not so much by felicity of expression as by a sanity of tone and the easy deliverance of a full mind.

A public function quite in accord with his academic and literary tastes was the presidency, which he accepted, of the American Archæological Institute. He took also the post of chairman of a committee to raise funds for the society’s school at Athens. “I find myself a little out of place,” he writes to Mr. Reverdy Johnson, 28 December, 1885, “but I consented to serve because I was so thoroughly persuaded both of the excellence of the object proposed and of the honor it has already done and is likely to do us in convincing Europe that we are not wholly given over as a nation to the pursuit of material good. The English school received its final impulse from the existence and success of ours.”

At the end of January, 1886, Lowell went to Washington, at the urgent request of the Copyright League, to advocate the cause of international copyright. Two separate bills designed to bring this about had been offered in the Senate by Senators Hawley and Chace, and there was to be a hearing on them before the Committee on Patents. Several publishers, authors, and members of the League had argued in favor of some action, and one gentleman, the late Mr. Gardiner G. Hubbard, had appeared in opposition. Mr. Hubbard, who was well known as the most active promoter of the then rather new Bell telephone, argued that an author’s right in his literary property differed from that in any other kind of property; “that while he has the manuscript of his thoughts in his own possession, it is his own, and that when he gives it out to the world it ceases to be his own and becomes the property of the world.”[92] He laid great stress, further, on the grounds of the granting of copyright by Congress, as for the benefit of the public, and not for the benefit of authors, and finally claimed that an international copyright would be injurious to the public by tending to raise the price of books.

Lowell came in while Mr. Hubbard was speaking, and was called upon by the chairman, Senator Platt of Connecticut, as soon as Mr. Hubbard had sat down. He had not intended to address the committee other than by answering such questions as might be put to him, but the last speaker’s positions nettled him, and he began at once by attacking them.

“There are one or two things in the very extraordinary speech which Mr. Hubbard has just addressed to you which, I think, call for some comment on my part. He began by stating what is a very common fallacy, that there could be no such thing as property in books. It is generally put in another way, that there can be no such thing as property in an idea. There is a feeling, I know, among a great many people that books, even when they are printed, are like umbrellas, _feræ naturæ_; but by Mr. Hubbard we are carried farther back than that, to the very conception of the book.

“Now, nobody supposes that there can be property in an idea. The thing is a fallacy on the face of it. What we do suppose is that there is a property in the fashioning that is given to the idea, the work that a man has put into it, and I think the Constitution has already recognized that in granting patents. Patents are nothing but ideas fashioned in a certain way. For instance, the Bell telephone is precisely a parallel case to that of books, and I think there are a great many people in this country who are interested in the Bell telephone and believe it to be property.

“It appears to me that a great deal of what is said in opposition to the view of those who favor an international copyright is, like the statement of Mr. Hubbard, purely hypothetical. He tells you that it would make books dearer. I do not think he has the slightest evidence on which to show you that it would make books dearer. My own decided opinion is that it would make books cheaper. When he says, also, that it is an attempt of publishers to make large profits on small editions, instead of small profits on large editions, I think he should have a more general knowledge of the book trade--nay, of the modern tendencies of trade in general--before he makes an assertion of that sort. It is based on the practice in England of publishing one expensive edition, and even in England the price of the book very soon falls. But the custom there has been pretty much dictated to the publishers by the owners of circulating libraries; and already there is a revolt against it, which is becoming intensified on the whole, and I believe a reform in that respect will take place there.

“I have one practical example to offer on the other side. For instance, Mr. Douglas, of Edinburgh, reprints a great many American books and pays a copyright for them. He prints them beautifully in little volumes of most convenient size, and sells them for a shilling. That is not very dear. He pays his copyright, remember. I myself am perfectly satisfied that the reading public in America, being much larger than in England, and demanding cheap books, the result of a copyright law, if we ever get one, will be to transfer the great bulk of the book trade from England to this country, and with it the publishing of books. That is my firm belief. But that is purely hypothetical, like Mr. Hubbard’s argument. Yet it seems to me there would be certain reasons for thinking so in what we know of the instincts and tendencies of trade. If the larger market be here, and if books have to be printed in a cheaper form in order to suit that market, I think they will be so printed and so far as the American public is concerned, it appears to me that if they get their books cheaply it does not so much matter where they are printed.

“I, myself, take the moral view of the question. I believe that this is a simple question of morality and justice; that many of the arguments which Mr. Hubbard used are arguments which might be used for picking a man’s pocket. One could live a great deal cheaper, undoubtedly, if he could supply himself from other people without any labor or cost. But at the same time,--well, it was not called honest when I was young, and that is all I can say. I cannot help thinking that a book which was, I believe, more read when I was young than it is now, is quite right when it says that ‘righteousness exalteth a nation.’ I believe this is a question of righteousness. I do not wish to urge that too far, because that is considered a little too ideal, I believe. But that is my view of it, and if I were asked what book is better than a cheap book, I should answer that there is one book better than a cheap book, and that is a book honestly come by. That would be my feeling.”

A series of questions and answers followed which travelled over a good deal of space, from the habit of book-buying in the two countries to the rights and wrongs involved in copyright, and Lowell drew upon personal experience and observation in a way to confirm emphatically the title which he once gave himself, “I am a bookman.” “My own impression is,” he said in the course of this conversation, “that the gathering of private libraries is diminishing; at least I think it is on the whole, according to my own observation. I mean to say that fewer persons, in proportion to the number of educated people in a community, collect libraries now than formerly, because large libraries are now more readily within the reach of so many people.... There [in England] the collection of libraries has also diminished very much, but is still large in country houses and so on. People who are rich wish to have a handsome copy of a book in their library, and for that purpose this handsome edition is published. But if you will pardon me for digressing for a moment from this subject, it seems to me there are a great many ways in which our laws about books are very disadvantageous to the country. I think, myself, that the tax on books is a barbarism.” Senator Teller here asked him if he meant the revenue tax. “Yes; it has prevented me from buying a great many books in the course of my life which would have been very valuable to me, and the imprints [reprints?][93] were comparatively valueless when I got them. I cannot at this moment as I could if I lived in any other country of the world, even Turkey, subscribe to a foreign society and receive its publications without the trouble of going to the post-office and paying the duty; and, as I happen to live up in the country now, that is very inconvenient. To be sure, as they know me, I am able to get the books sent up to the post-office of the town where I am living and pay my tax there, but it seems to me a very bad system.”

The chairman asked Lowell if people who read the cheap reprints of English books preserved them to any extent; to which he replied: “No, I think they are not preserved at all. It is a marvel where they go to. Those books get out of print quickly. I remember that I religiously preserved all the books that were sent me early in my life in order to give them to the college library, because I said, whether worthless or not they will disappear; and many of those books have disappeared, and cannot be bought at all, or procured, except the copies preserved there. They go back to the paper maker as waste paper. I wish to say before I sit down, in reference to the gentleman who is to follow me,[94] that I doubt if there is a class in the community who have a more profound sympathy with the typographical unions than we have. It is not that we wish to deprive them of their bread. I personally have a very strong sympathy with all labor organizations, and I think, as I have said, the result of a copyright law will be to give them more work rather than less.”

Both authors and those publishers who sympathized with the movement were concentrating their efforts at this time to secure the passage of an act which should effect international copyright. There was considerable diversity of opinion, especially regarding the clause which required all foreign books to be set up and printed in this country, if they were to be protected by copyright, but the largest support was given to the bill introduced by Senator Chace and stands now as law, practically as then drawn. The editors of the _Century_ collected vigorous expressions of opinion from the most representative writers and published the testimony in the number for February, 1886. In response to the request for an opinion, Lowell came into the editor’s office one day, said he had something in his head, and wanted a pen with which to write it out. Then he sat down and wrote the famous scorcher:--

“In vain we call old notions fudge, And bend our conscience to our dealing; The Ten Commandments will not budge, And stealing will continue stealing.”

This was printed in facsimile at the head of the testimony. But though Lowell was an uncompromising advocate of justice in this matter, perhaps because he was so uncompromising, the most active advocates of the bill had to use a good deal of _finesse_ in making his support available. The act for securing international copyright was not a partisan measure, but it was in the hands of the Republicans in Congress, mainly, and Lowell with his emphatic independence in politics was not at this time a _persona grata_ with Republican politicians, who were incensed by the falling out of the ranks of men of character and influence. The act was passed finally 3 March, 1891.

There was one form of public appearance which Lowell reluctantly allowed himself to take up in this winter of 1886. The rage for Authors’ Readings had set in, and under the guise of charity of one sort or another, society compelled its favorites to stand and deliver their old poems. “I am having proof sheets,” he wrote to Mr. Field, 30 March, 1886, “and I have been reading in public with O. W. H. and oh, don’t I wish I had never written a verse! Take warning by me, old boy, and if you make a rhyme by accident, duck yourself in holy water to wash the Devil clean out of you,--or they’ll have you on a platform before you can say Jack Robinson, or even d--n.” A keener thrust came to him now and then when he was urged to read poems which others could read, it might be, with equanimity, but which were for him like raising the lid of a coffin.

The proof sheets to which he refers in this letter were of the small volume “Democracy and other Addresses,” a volume which appeared in the spring of 1886, just before Lowell went back to England for the summer. Here he gave himself up to those pleasures which he could enjoy but sparingly when he was in the official harness. His friends welcomed him most cordially, and he made a round of visits. He looked on upon the game of English politics with the eye of a trained observer, but resisted all enticements to write or speak for the English public, though he did preside at one dinner. “I made an epigram (extempore) one day on the G. O. M.,” he writes to his daughter, “and repeated it to Lord Acton.

His greatness not so much in genius lies As in adroitness, when occasions rise, Lifelong convictions to extemporize.

This morning I find the last lines quoted by Auberon Herbert in a letter to the _Times_, but luckily without my name. It is a warning.”

“I am living a futile life here,” he writes to Mr. Norton, “but am as fond of London as Charles Lamb. The rattle of a hansom shakes new life into my old bones, and I ruin myself in them. I love such evanescent and unimportunate glimpses of the world as I catch from my flying perch. I envy the birds no longer, and learn better to converse with them. Our views of life are the same.” It was the summer also when Dr. Holmes made his royal progress through England, and Lowell had the pleasure of seeing the hearty welcome his old friend received. To Mr. Field he wrote, 27 July, 1886:--

“I met Mrs. Archibald Forbes the other day and had much talk with her about you. She did not give me much comfort,--except in telling me that you had gone away from Washington for the summer. This means, I suppose, that you are well enough to go to Ashfield, which I take as a good sign. I constantly meet old friends of yours here who ask after you affectionately. I give them what comfort I can by telling them how bravely both of you bear up under your common sorrow....

“Old Mrs. Proctor told me a good story lately which may amuse you. She was breakfasting with Rogers. Thackeray and Kinglake were there among others. So was Abraham Hayward, who began abusing Houghton (then Monkton Milnes), a great favorite of hers. Kinglake tried in vain to divert or stop him. At last Mrs. P. in a pause broke out with, ‘Mr. Hayward, for the first time in my life I wish I were a man that I might call you out and make you, for the first time in your life, a gentleman!’ She is as young as ever and as jealous of her lovers, tolerating no rivals.

“I am to meet Doña Emilia next Friday at dinner, and shall take upon myself to give her your kindest regards. I fear she is not very well, but she is so fond of London that it will be better for her than a course of the waters at Wiesbaden. I shall be very glad to see her again. I last met her in London four years ago.... By the way, I saw Don Palo (Francisco) Giher at Oxford whither I went to help Holmes on with his gown. It was a pleasant surprise to me when he rushed forward with both hands outstretched in the Master’s drawing-room at Balliol and began at me in Spanish. As the window was behind him I could not see his face and did not at once recognize him. My Spanish naturally creaked a little on its hinges after such long disuse, but, with that _hidalquia_ which is common to all his race, he told somebody afterwards that I spoke the most exquisite Castilian! Even at twenty I shouldn’t have believed--and at sixty-seven!

“I have been whirling round like a marble on the van of a windmill and am worn as smooth. I roll off on the slightest incline. But I can lie still on the lap of an old friendship such as ours. Good-by and God bless you.”

When Lowell went abroad in the spring of 1886 he had been asked to give the address in November at the 250th anniversary of the founding of Harvard University. The thought of it harassed him during the summer. “I am distressed with the thought of that abominable address,” he wrote near the end of July. “I have not yet accepted and would decline could I give any better reason than that I have nothing to say. Nobody ever thinks _that_ of any importance! What have I done to have this fly thrust into my pot of ointment which grows more precious every day by diminution like the Sibyl’s leaves?” And after his return to Deerfoot Farm late in September, when he could not avoid his destiny, he wrote: “I am in direful dumps about my address,--the muse obstinately dumb.” Once more, 6 October, he wrote: “I have been mulling over my address and to-day mean to break into it in earnest by blocking out an exordium. It doesn’t take hold of me, and I always feared it wouldn’t. It isn’t exactly in my line. To fill so large a bowl as an hour I shall have to draw on the cow with the iron tail,--and pumping is an exercise that always wearies me beyond most.”

His equanimity was further shaken by a disagreeable experience when the son of an old friend, making a show of a friendly visit, led him on into discourse about England and English affairs, and then, relying on his memory, decanted the conversation into an article for a New York paper with which he was connected. “If he had reported what I really said, instead of his version of it, I should not feel so bitterly,” was Lowell’s comment, and to a friend he wrote: “As for ---- he _knew_ that I didn’t know he was interviewing me. To any sane man the shimble-shamble stuff he has made me utter is proof of it. I say ‘made me utter’ deliberately, because, though he has remembered some of the subjects (none of my choosing) which we talked about, he has wholly misrepresented the tone and sometimes falsified the substance of what I said.... The worst of ----’s infidelity (I mean to keep my temper) is that it is like a dead rat in the wall,--an awful stink and no cure.”

It is not easy to say just what gave rise to the peculiarly American academic custom of making a celebration to consist of an oration and a poem, but Harvard was fortunate in being able to summon from her graduates Holmes to deliver a poem and Lowell an oration. To Lowell himself the occasion was stimulating, not only because of the pride and loyalty with which he regarded the college, but because he had given it twenty years of service, and came back to it now after nearly a decade in which he had abundant opportunity for comparison of its fruit with that which hung on the boughs of older institutions. As one reads again an address which was listened to with eagerness, one follows the course which Lowell’s thought took with a deepening sense that he was speaking out of a full mind, not so much upon the specific questions of university education as upon the large aspects of education and life which rose to view as an historical survey laid them bare. The address was the outcome of Lowell’s life as a scholar broadening into the experience of a man who had had to do with the affairs of a great world. The affectionate pride which he had in New England as exemplified in his historic study, “New England Two Centuries Ago,” had grown into a feeling of reverence which leads him in the opening passages of his address to set forth the founders of the college in a manner to leave on the minds of his hearers the impression of an august body chosen out of the greatest of their time to lay the foundation of a noble institution; and toward the close of his address he returns to this theme and presents it anew with an eloquence and beauty of phrase that make the passage one which may be read without fear beside the sonorous Latin which faced the audience in Sanders Theatre.

“They who, on a tiny clearing pared from the edge of the woods, built here, most probably with the timber hewed from the trees they felled, our earliest hall, with the solitude of ocean behind them, the mystery of forest before them, and all about them a desolation, most surely (_si quis animis celestibus locus_) share our gladness and our gratitude at the splendid fulfilment of their vision. If we could have but preserved the humble roof which housed so great a future, Mr. Ruskin himself would almost have admitted that no castle or cathedral was ever richer in sacred associations, in pathos of the past, and in moral significance. They who reared it had the sublime prescience of that courage which fears only God, and could say confidently in the face of all discouragement and doubt, ‘He hath led me forth into a large place; because He delighted in me, He hath delivered me.’ We cannot honor them too much; we can repay them only by showing, as occasions rise, that we do not undervalue the worth of their example.”

It was out of this natural consideration of the origin of the University that Lowell passed by an historical process to an analysis of the objects had in founding it and the spirit in which these objects had been pursued. He troubled himself not at all with the external affairs of the college and used no time in tracing its material development. He had found its chief office to be that of maintaining and handing down the traditions “of how excellent a thing Learning was,” and his main contention was that the chief office of the University still is to train in learning rather than in knowledge. It was in urging this that he made a plea for the broad and not the special interpretation of the term Learning. As the result of his own study and observation he contended earnestly for the Humanities as the paramount interest.

Lowell admitted in a letter he wrote to G. H. Palmer, one of the most intelligent advocates of those new methods in education which found their fullest expression in what is known as the “elective system,” that he based some parts of his address rather on his experience as a teacher there than on the later conditions of teaching in the college; but after all his dispute was with the elective system, for he distrusted what looked to him like a departure from the “unbroken experience and practice of mankind.” One does not need to doubt or believe in this particular collegiate method to give full assent to Lowell’s dictum that “the most precious property of culture and of a college as its trustee is to maintain higher ideals of life and its purpose, to keep trimmed and burning the lamps of that pharos, built by wiser than we, that warns from the reef and shallows of popular doctrine.” For as he moves forward in his address, he is drawn inevitably into a consideration of what was, first and last, the fundamental social question with him, the democratic idea. He had refrained, as we have seen, from touching in his English address on Democracy upon the perils which beset it in its American stronghold, but here, at home, in the very heart of its stoutest defence, he must needs use these perils to emphasize his doctrine that the prime business of the college is to “set free, to supple, and to train the faculties in such wise as shall make them most effective for whatever task life may afterwards set them, for the duties of life rather than for its business, and to open windows on every side of the mind where thickness of wall does not prevent it.”

The whole address is an exemplification of how surely Lowell’s mind had come to base all speculations on the broad bottom of a political organism. And as he was still unequivocally an idealist, the very melancholy of his foreboding, cropping out in this and other addresses, bore testimony not to his faintheartedness but to his apprehension of the distance which prevailed between his ideal and the fact. He saw in the whole the sum of the particulars, and, as individual character working in freedom was the ultimate end in persons, he would listen to nothing else when he applied his ear to the movement of the people; and thus it was that he distrusted any departure of the University in its methods from that line which had resulted in the historic democracy that he believed to have found its true exemplar in New England.

When Lowell was in England in the summer of 1886 he had written to Mr. Gilder that his friend Miss Mary Boyle had some letters of Landor which she had intrusted to him for publication, and he proposed to preface them with an introduction of his own if Mr. Gilder would publish the paper in the _Century_. His letters show that he was moved not by any desire to write on Landor, but to help an old friend, and now that his Harvard address was off his hands, he applied himself to the task. He had the curiosity to look up his early paper on Landor in the _Massachusetts Quarterly_,[95] in which he remarks he found one good sentence and one other that he could not understand.[96] He sent the paper to Mr. Gilder, 23 December, 1886: “I send you a Christmas gift. I have made more of it than I expected, but you may eat only the plums if you like and give to the poor the pudding in which I have hidden them. The letters, thank Heaven, are better than I thought. The last (on Powers’s death) is charming. I have arranged them as well as I could without books. There is one on the Chinese War which I could date could I remember the year of that outrage--1841 or 2? You might find out.

“Have I added too much of my own? And is it dull? _I_ am, but that’s nothing to the purpose. I could easily have held my peace, but I promised to play the Master of Ceremonies and must proclaim the rank of my guests.

“I am sorry that some of the letters are copied on both sides. Most of them are in proper form. Send me proof here unless I say otherwise.

If the hunting up of Christmas gifts hasn’t killed her, Give my love to Mrs. Gilder.”[97]

The paper, which is included in “Latest Literary Essays and Addresses,” was a most agreeable compound of criticism and personal reminiscence, and contains what Lowell rarely ventured on in his printed work, but now and then in his letters with real success--the portraiture of a man.

The article did not appear for a year; meanwhile he was in correspondence with Mr. Aldrich respecting some poems, and he had engaged to write the introduction to a subscription book, “The World’s Progress.” He had the assurance that the work thus introduced was a serious one, but his introduction had no special relation to it; it was an independent paper. “It rather attracts me,” he wrote, “through my sense of humor. It will be pure creation made out of nothing, not even nebula or star-dust,” and he added, what was indeed the secret of his undertaking the work, “the money it will fetch me will be a great medicine. Grandfathers get miserly. I never saved a penny till I had two [grandchildren].” As the new year opened, and he found himself in the midst of this set task: “I don’t get on with the world at all since I half promised to write an introduction to ‘The World’s Progress,’ a megatherium of a book in two volumes, quarto. I hear their heavy footfall behind me wherever I go, and am sure they will trample me into the mud at last.”

The Introduction, though undertaken apparently with a reluctant rather than an eager mind, and bearing indeed some marks of a perfunctory performance, is yet not only interesting in itself but valuable as a mirror in which to catch a passing reflection of its author’s mind. Aware that the book to follow would deal largely with those advances in civilization which publishers and writers in their bookkeeping like to record to the credit of the world, he cannot forbear at the outset gently reminding his readers that with all our statistics we cannot “make ourselves independent of the inextinguishable lamps of heaven,” and with a sort of under-the-breath doubt if he may not be letting his own temperament get in the way of more exact standards of measurement, he allows himself for a moment to pause over the changes in civilization, which accepted as progress do yet obliterate some very wonderful prints which the foot of man has made. It is the old song of _laudator temporis acti_, sung to the air of his own brooding age.

But having thus, as it were, satisfied his conscience by discharging the debt he owed to his own personal taste in the matter of what constitutes progress, he takes up the real business of the Introcduction and quickly becomes forgetful of himself the philosopher in the pleasure which the poet and artist in him may take with a very large and plastic substance. Near the close of the paper he writes: “Should the doctrines of Natural Selection, Survival of the Fittest, and Heredity, be accepted as Laws of Nature, they must profoundly modify the thought of men and, consequently, their action.” He himself, with his aversion to the speculations of science, had but a bowing acquaintance with those investigations of Darwin and Huxley and their fellows which brought about so great a revolution of thought in his lifetime, and clearly was impatient of what he regarded as the encroachment of science upon the humanities in the formation of intellectual beliefs; but he was, after all, a child of his time, and his thought had been, whether he would or no, modified by the results of scientific investigation. At any rate, he had the poet’s faculty for appropriating results, and the picture which he draws in this Introduction of the evolution of the earth and of man’s early mastery of it is a striking piece of imaginative writing, touched here and there with a dash of wit which one almost fancies was Lowell’s intellectual aside to the Balaam-like prophecy he was compelled to deliver.

It is, however, when he emerges in his thought upon those great plains of society where his mind was most wont to dwell, that Lowell falls into an earnestness of tone which quite as surely indicates that he had been warmed by the fire he had kindled into a healthy and natural vigor, and when, from a rapid survey of the world’s past growing more and more present under his touch, he comes to forecast the world’s future, it is with a voice familiar through his recent addresses and poems and letters that we hear him speak. Again he recurs to that significant element in modern life about which his mind was constantly revolving, the political organization of men in its relation to their individual character, and his definitions of Democracy are here more precise, more carefully formulated than in any of his writings. The main passage is so notable that it deserves to be read again, apart from its context, as the last statement made by one whose whole life was, in a measure, occupied with an exposition of the truths here laid down.

“In casting the figure of the World’s future, many new elements, many disturbing forces, must be taken into account. First of all is Democracy, which, within the memory of men yet living, has assumed almost the privilege of a Law of Nature, and seems to be making constant advances towards universal dominion. Its ideal is to substitute the interest of the many for that of the few as the test of what is wise in polity and administration, and the opinion of the many for that of the few as the rule of conduct in public affairs. That the interest of the many is the object of whatever social organization man has hitherto been able to effect seems unquestionable; whether their opinions are so safe a guide as the opinions of the few, and whether it will ever be possible, or wise if possible, to substitute the one for the other in the hegemony of the World, is a question still open for debate. Whether there was ever such a thing as a Social Contract or not, as has been somewhat otiosely discussed, this, at least, is certain,--that the basis of all Society is the putting of the force of all at the disposal of all, by means of some arrangement assented to by all, for the protection of all, and this under certain prescribed forms. This has always been, consciously or unconsciously, the object for which men have striven, and which they have more or less clumsily accomplished. The State--some established Order of Things, under whatever name--has always been, and must always be, the supremely important thing; because in it the interests of all are invested, by it the duties of all imposed and exacted. In point of fact, though it be often strangely overlooked, the claim to any selfish hereditary privilege because you are born a man is as absurd as the same claim because you are born a noble. In a last analysis, there is but one natural right; and that is the right of superior force. This primary right having been found unworkable in practice, has been deposited, for the convenience of all, with the State, from which, as the maker, guardian, and executor of Law, and as a common fund for the use of all, the rights of each are derived, and man thus made as free as he can be without harm to his neighbor. It was this surrender of private jurisdiction which made civilization possible, and keeps it so. The abrogation of the right of private war has done more to secure the rights of man, properly understood,--and, consequently, for his well-being,--than all the theories spun from the brain of the most subtle speculator, who, finding himself cramped by the actual conditions of life, fancies it as easy to make a better world than God intended, as it has been proved difficult to keep in running order the world that man has made out of his fragmentary conception of the divine thought. The great peril of democracy is that the assertion of private right should be pushed to the obscuring of the superior obligation of public duty.”

Having thus discoursed upon what is most fundamental in political thinking, he passes, after a brief reflection upon the growing function of the press, to enquire into that new factor in the problem of the future which takes the name of Socialism. He distinguishes here, as elsewhere, between socialism as a new reading of the law of rights and duties, and State Socialism. He repeats his warning against this form which he holds destructive of a genuine democracy, for he distrusts the robbery of man’s freedom of development in character for the sake of paying him back in the paper promises of security from misfortune. The whole latter part of this Introduction, in spite of its hurried manner, is a footnote to the history of Lowell’s thought on some of the greatest of themes.

The intimation given above, that Lowell could not quite afford the luxury of being a bystander in his old age, reminds us how close he sailed to the wind throughout his life, yet how faithfully he kept off the reefs of debt. At times he had enough to live on comfortably; when he could not live what is called comfortably, he simply drew in, and at least knew not the discomfort of living beyond his means. He had not now the resources of his professorship, and he was fain to increase the income which his small estate and his copyrights brought him by such tasks as the Introduction we have considered, and other more congenial literary labors. His reputation, fortunately, had now turned capital so far as the quick assets of his writing went. He could command good prices from editors, but by a not uncommon fortune periodical work yielded him much better return than his accumulating books. In a letter written to Thomas Hughes, 10 January, 1887, he makes this frank statement of his affairs: “Rejoice with me that I am getting popular in my old age, and hope to pay my this year’s trip to the dear old Home without defrauding my grandchildren.[98] I get twenty-five cents, I think it is, on copies [of “Democracy”] sold during the first eight months after publication, and then it goes into my general copyright, for which I am paid £400 a year. Not much after nearly fifty years of authorship, but enough to keep me from the almshouse.”

His friends sometimes chided him for not reckoning in his price the worth of his name, but he had it not in him to drive sharp bargains. Still, now and then he braced himself, as when he wrote to a friendly editor respecting a poem he had sent him: “Another magazine would have given me----. I am not speaking of intrinsic but of commercial values, of course. I think one ought to make hay while the sun shines, and mine, after a good deal of cloudy weather, seems to be shining now. As I don’t know how long this meteoric phenomenon is to last, I must be diligent with my windrows and cocks that my crop may be in the mow before a change of weather. As an author, you will sympathize with me, while as editor, you will ask me blandly how flint-skins are quoted in the last prices current. I fancy you with that dual expression of countenance typified by Hamlet as ‘one dropping and one auspicious eye’--only I see that I have got the epithets in the wrong order for the metre.”

In the letter to Mr. Hughes last quoted, Lowell says: “I am going to talk on politics to the people of Chicago on my next birthday,” and he went to Chicago to fulfil this engagement. The Union League Club of that city had proposed to celebrate Washington’s birthday by public exercises in Music Hall, consisting mainly of Lowell’s address, which was announced to be on “American Politics.” The house was completely filled and Lowell was given a hearty welcome. The audience, however, was greatly taken aback at the first words of the speaker, for he said when he came forward that he had changed his subject and would speak not on “American Politics,” but upon the principles of literary criticism as illustrated by Shakespeare’s Richard III., a paper which he had read in 1883 before the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution, and which was included, after his death, in “Latest Literary Essays and Addresses.” He went on to say that in announcing politics as the subject of his address he had not fully realized the conditions under which it was to be delivered; that he was accustomed to speak frankly, but that he found himself the guest and, in a manner, the representative of the Club. What he had to say would plainly give offence to his hosts, and he was thus compelled on the score of courtesy to change his subject.

The situation was one which might have led those present to detect some irony in Lowell’s politeness. The Union League Club was a Republican organization under the control of the Blaine wing of the party. It had succeeded in getting rid of those Republicans who had been hostile to Blaine, amongst whom was the gentleman who was Lowell’s host. But Lowell had made no concealment of the position he occupied. He made it clear enough at this time, a couple of days later when he was a guest of the Harvard Club of Chicago: “I stood outside of party,” he then said, “for nearly twenty-five years, and I was perfectly happy, I assure you.... Party organization, no doubt, is a very convenient thing, but a great many people, and I feel very strongly with them, feel that when loyalty to party means worse disloyalty to conscience, it is then asking more than any good man or any good citizen ought to concede.”

Upon his return from Chicago Lowell gave six lectures on the Old Dramatists before the Lowell Institute. Though in accepting the invitation he was returning to an early love he had never forsaken, the preparation was a burden. “I haven’t time for a word more,” he wrote to Mr. Gilder, 3 March, 1887, “for I begin a course of lectures next Tuesday and haven’t yet begun to write them, though I have done a deil o’ thinking,” and to Mr. Higginson on 8 March: “I am fagged to death. I never ought to have consented to the Lowell Lectures. If I get over them without breaking down, I shall be happy. After they are (if _I_ am not) over, I will try to do what you ask. But my brains are husks just now.” Perhaps there was no better barometer of Lowell’s spirits than his temper regarding out of door life. Time was when the frosty winter air was elixir to him, but now he writes: “It is growing colder as my legs inform me--for I have had no fire to-day. I look out of window and see that the sun is gone behind a cloud, and the white lines of snow along the walls marking out the landscape as if for a tennis-court of Anakim. I don’t like winter so well as I used. It tempts the rheumatism out of all its ambushes, as the sun thaws out snakes. And the walking is like bad verses.” The confession gains force when one considers that all his life Lowell had been indifferent to the need of a top coat, and preferred to work in his study at a temperature of 60°.

In his first lecture Lowell said that he should have preferred to entitle his course “Readings from the Old English Dramatists with illustrative comments,” and that is practically what he made of his work. The slim volume in which, after his death, the six lectures were contained, does not at all stand for six hours’ entertainment of his audience; long passages which he read from printed books do not appear at all, as there were no passages in his written lectures which introduced or followed them. Lowell was recurring to a familiar theme, and his intention plainly was to speak freely out of a full mind. He does not appear to have re-read his early “Conversations;” he had not seen it, he said, for many years, and he was not quite sure just what its subjects were. A comparison of the two treatments separated by forty-four years shows curious likenesses and differences. As will be remembered, the young critic was so zealous over his ideas of reform that Chapman and Ford, the only dramatists he treated, and Chaucer, were often no more than mere prompters in the discussion of some current phase of morals or society. A little of this disposition to vagrancy reappears in these later talks, for they are quite as informal in their way as were the earlier Conversations. But in place of the topics connected with reform, there are more cognate themes. Since he is to speak of Marlowe, he finds it easy to make, by way of preface, an enquiry into the refinement which had been going on in the language, and so, by natural association, to one of his old themes, the sanctity of the English tongue. In introducing Webster also, he has some quiet criticism on the function of Form; and when he passes to Chapman, an enquiry into the personal element in literature leads him into some remarks on biographies, autobiographies, and the modern zest for intimacies in the lives of men, remarks which gain some earnestness, no doubt, from experiences which he had undergone.

But for the most part, he keeps closely to his business of inviting his hearers to share with him the enjoyment of the dramatists whom he reads and comments on, and when we compare the actual appreciation and criticism in the two books, the difference is mainly in the mellowness and quiet assurance which pervade the later treatment, and in the fact that in the earlier book he was more concerned with what in old-fashioned terms were the “beauties” of the poets, in the later, with the art and the constructive faculty.

In his half-homeless condition, Lowell looked with eagerness to his summers in England. There he had in its leisurely form the social life which had come to be a real solace to him, and there too he found the world arranged for the ease and comfort of a solitary. He sailed for England this year on the 21st of April, and found himself shortly in his familiar lodgings in London. He liked the sense of world activity which he felt in the heart of that great city. “Nothing can be more bewildering,” he wrote to his daughter, “than the sudden change in my habits and surroundings. Were it merely from the dumbness of Southborough to the clatter and chatter of London, it would be queer enough; from the rising and falling murmur of the mill to this roar of the human torrent. But I can hardly help laughing sometimes when I think how a single step from my hermitage takes me into Babylon. Meanwhile it amuses and interests me. My own vitality seems to reënforce itself as if by some unconscious transfusion of the blood from these ever-throbbing arteries of life into my own.”[99]

There were two places in England, outside of London, in which he especially delighted: one was St. Ives in Cornwall, the resort of his friends Mr. and Mrs. Leslie Stephen, the other was Whitby in Yorkshire. For six years, with the exception of 1885, he had made a summer stay in Whitby. It was then a quiet, primitive place; now it knows the flood of summer excursionists. Lowell liked the folk he met there, who reminded him of New England country folk. He liked the walks in the neighborhood and the sounding sea, and he was wont to invite to his lodgings friends whose companionship he cared for. An appreciative follower in Lowell’s footsteps has made an agreeable record of the memories he left behind in Whitby, especially with the two Misses Gallillee, with whom he lodged.[100] The paper deals with the picturesque properties of the little village, and has also a faint fragrance from the very human reminiscences of Lowell that remained in the minds of those who came near to him. “In the eyes of the positive little person--an innate Yankee of Yorkshire blood--whose duty it was to change the courses on these occasions, literary men as such have no glamour at all. Her acquaintance includes a number, and her North Country vocabulary has terms wherewith to dispose of them briefly. But there is neither reservation nor qualification in the tone in which she says of the conclusion of a certain discussion, listened to between times in the serving, ‘I never forgot it.’ It had wound up in a round-robin agreement, according to which each person present was to say by what he should best like to be remembered. The host spoke last, and the sentence in which his admiring hearer puts him on record is, ‘By kindly acts and helpful deeds.’”

Yet much at home as he was in Whitby, Lowell could not well resist the contagion which attacks all summer wanderers. As he wrote to Lady Lyttleton from Whitby, 7 September: “I am a bird of passage now, and that makes me feel unsettled wherever I am, but I have enjoyed my stay here, and the hogsheads of fresh air I have drunk have done me good.... I go down to Somersetshire on Saturday to Mr. Hobhouse, who has promised to show me Wells Cathedral, the only one in England I have not seen. Thence I go to the Stephens.” During this summer he was fitfully engaged in bringing together such poems as he had written since the volume “Under the Willows,” or had written before but had not included in that volume, and he continued his work upon it after his return to Deerfoot Farm in the fall. He pondered over what he should include, what leave out, and the medley which resulted caused him, in the volume “Heartsease and Rue,” to distribute the contents without regard to chronology under a variety of headings,--Friendship, Sentiment, Fancy, Humor and Satire, Epigrams. “My book will be a raft manned by the press-gang, I fear,” he wrote. “There will be some hitherto unprinted things in it--many of them trifles--some of which, however, please my fancy and may another’s here and there.” As he went on with the work of collection, he grew more and more distrustful. “I feel,” he wrote 22 December, 1887, “like a young author at his first venture. I think there will be some nice things in the book, but fear that _my_ kind of thing is a little old-fashioned. People want sensation rather than sense nowadays.” Again, 4 January, 1888, he writes: “I am wondering more and more if my poems are good for anything after all. They are old-fashioned in their simplicity and straightforwardness of style,--and everybody writes so plaguily well nowadays. I fear that I left off my diet of bee bread too long and have written too much prose. A poet shouldn’t be, nay, he can’t be anything else without loss to him as poet, however much he may gain as man.”

Yet he liked the little task of collecting the volume, and there was a pleasurable content in his uneventful country life with his books and pipe. “My mind is busy,” he wrote, “and I like it. I am sitting in the sun without fire and I like that. My pipe tastes good and I like that too, for it enables me to treat with indifference some alarums and incursions of the gout which I was sharply aware of yesterday and this morning. No weather-sign is so truthful as this: If your pipe is savory, nothing is the matter with you. Put that in _your_ pipe and smoke it!”

Lowell’s friendliness showed itself in the informal visits he liked to make to his friends when he was in town, and the familiar letters he wrote from the country. He was rather more ready to entertain a correspondent with a bit of criticism than to heed the calls made on him by editors for the same kind of writing done with formal purpose. Thus he writes to Mrs. Bell from Deerfoot Farm, Thanksgiving Day, 1887: “A second-rate author two hundred years old has a great advantage over his juniors of our own day. If he himself have not the merit of originality, his language has that of quaintness which sometimes gives him a charm similar in its effect though very inferior in quality. I think this is true of Feltham, though it be now more than twenty years since I have looked into him. I had read him in the day of my superstition when one takes all established reputations for granted, and read him over again after Experience had let fall her fatal clarifying drops into my eyes. Woe’s me, how he has dwarfed! I wrote my opinion of him on the flyleaf of my little quarto edition, and all I can recollect of him is that I called his style ‘lousy with Latinisms.’ Pardon me. Swift was still read when I was young, and how resist the alliteration? I can pardon Browne’s Latinisms, nay, his Græcisms too, and even like them. They are resolved in the powerful menstruum of his thought. They are farsought and yet seem not farfetched. Feltham’s are stuck-in like plums in his poor pudding and make the dough more dismal by contrast. He hasn’t _stoned_ them and we crush between our teeth something hard and out of place that leaves an acrid taste behind it. I remember one phrase of his that tickled me--the ‘spacious ears’ of the elephant. It fits another animal, and sometimes when I have been assfixiated by an audience I have been tempted to beg of them to ‘lend me their spacious ears.’

“I think it possible that I gave Longfellow the references to him, for I was reading him about the time the Dante translation was going on. I could tell if I had my copy here and could take a look at the flyleaves.

“I may do Feltham wrong. The _navicella di nostro ingenio_ draws more water as we grow older, and grounds in the shallows where we found good water-fowling in our youth.

“No doubt the book is in the Athenæum,--but wait, please, till I can lend you my copy. It is at Elmwood, and I can get it after I come back from New York, whither I go to be baited for the benefit of the International Copyright League. I wish there were a concise and elegant Latinism for D--n! I would bring it in gracefully here.

“I didn’t mean to write all this and shouldn’t if I hadn’t had something else I ought to be doing. How tempting the duty that lies farthest from us always is, to be sure!”

It may have struck the reader how little comment, comparatively, Lowell made during his life upon his fellows in American literature. We must except of course his poetic criticism in “A Fable for Critics” and “Agassiz;” but in his prose criticism he occupied himself most constantly with the dead, not the living. When, later, he spoke on “Our Literature” at the Washington Centennial in New York he confined himself to generalities. It is worth noting, therefore, that on an occasion when he was called on to preside at an Authors’ Reading for the benefit of the Copyright League[101] he prefaced his argument for an international copyright act with a résumé of the course of American literature, and some more specific characterization of the contemporaries with whom his own name always will be associated. As a somewhat unwonted personal sketch, even though scarcely more than an off-hand deliverance, it may well be given here as one of the last of Lowell’s public addresses.

“When I was beginning life, as it is called,--as if we were not always beginning it!--the question ‘Who reads an American book?’ still roused in the not too numerous cultivated class among us a feeling of resentful but helpless anger. The pens of our periodical writers fairly sputtered with rage, and many a hardly suppressed imprecation might be read between their lines. Their position was, in truth, somewhat difficult. We had had Jonathan Edwards, no doubt; and people were still living who thought Barlow’s ‘Hasty Pudding’ a lightsome _jeu d’esprit_, and who believed that Dwight’s ‘Conquest of Canaan’ was a long stride towards that of posterity and the conversion of the heathen there. We had had Freneau, who wrote a single line,--

‘The hunter and the deer a shade,’

which had charmed the ear and cheated the memory of Scott (I think it was) till he mistook it for his own. We had the ‘Star Spangled Banner,’ and two or three naval ballads which, to my ear, have the true rough and ready tone. Philip Cook, of Virginia, had written a few graceful and musical lyrics. We had ‘McFingal,’ as near its model as any imitation of the inimitable can be, but far indeed from that intricate subtlety of wit which makes ‘Hudibras’ a metaphysical study as well as an intellectual delight. We had in the ‘Federalist’ a mine of political wisdom by which even Burke might have profited, and whose golden veins are not yet exhausted, as foreign statists and jurists are beginning to discover. But of true literature we had next to nothing. Of what we had, Duyckinck’s scholarly ‘Cyclopædia of American Literature’ gives us an almost too satisfactory notion. Of what we had not, there was none to tell us, for there were no critics. We had no national unity, and therefore no national consciousness, and it is one of the first conditions of a virile and characteristic literature that it should feel solid and familiar earth under its feet. New England had indeed a kind of unity, but it was a provincial unity, and those hardy commonwealths that invented democracy were not and could not yet be quite in sympathy with the new America that was to adopt and expand it. Literature thrives in an air laden with tradition, in a soil ripe with immemorial culture, in the temperature, steady and stimulating, of historic associations. We had none of these. What semblance we had of them was English, and we long continued to bring earth from the mother-country to pot our imported plants with, as the crusaders brought home that of Palestine to be buried in. And all this time our native oak was dropping its unheeded acorns into the crannies of the rock where by and by their sturdy roots would make room for themselves and find fitting nourishment.

“Never was young nation on its way to seek its fortune so dumfounded as Brother Jonathan when John Bull, presenting what seemed to his startled eyes a blunderbuss, cried gruffly from the roadside, ‘Stand, and deliver a literature!’ He was in a ‘pretty fix,’ as he himself would have called it. After fumbling in all his pockets, he was obliged to confess that he hadn’t one about him at the moment, but vowed that he had left a beautiful one at home which he would have fetched along--only it was so everlasting heavy. If he had but known it, he carried with him the pledge of what he was seeking in that vernacular phrase ‘fix,’ which showed that he could invent a new word for a new need without asking leave of anybody.

“Meanwhile the answer to Sydney Smith’s scornful question was shaping itself. Already we had Irving, who after humorously satirizing the poverty of our annals in his ‘Knickerbocker,’ forced to feel the pensive beauty of what is ancient by the painful absence of it, first tried to create an artificial antiquity as a substitute, and then sought in the old world a kindlier atmosphere and themes more sympathetic with the dainty and carefully shaded phrase he loved. He first taught us the everliving charm of style, most invaluable and most difficult of lessons. Almost wholly English, he is yet our earliest classic, still loved in the Old Home and the New. Then came Cooper, our first radically American author, with the defects of style that come of half-culture, but a man of robust genius who, after a false start, looked about him to recognize in the New Man of the New World an unhackneyed and unconventional subject for Art. Brockden Brown had shown vivid glimpses of genius, but of a genius haunted by the phantasms of imagination and conscious of those substantial realities they mocked only as an opium eater might be. His models were lay figures shabby from their long service in the studios of Godwin and the Germans. Cooper first studied from the life, and it was the _homo Americanus_ with our own limestone in his bones, our own iron in his blood, that sat to him. There had been pioneers before him, like Belknap and Breckenridge, who had, in woodman’s phrase, blazed the way for him, but he found new figures in the forest, autochthonous figures, and on the ocean, whose romance he was the first to divine, he touched a nerve of patriotic pride that still vibrates. I open upon my boyhood when I chance on a page of his best. In prose we had also Channing, who uttered the perceptions, at once delicate and penetrating like root fibres, of a singularly intuitive mind in a diction of sober fervor where the artist sometimes elbows aside the preacher; and Webster, the massive simplicity of whose language and the unwavering force of whose argument, flashing into eloquent flame as it heated, recalled to those who listened and saw before them one of the most august shapes manhood ever put on, no inadequate image of Pericles. We had little more. Emerson was still letting grow or trying in short flights those wings that were to lift him and us to Heaven’s sweetest air. Hawthorne, scarce out of his teens, had given in ‘Fanshawe’ some inkling of his instinct for style and of the direction his maturer genius was to choose, but no glimpse of that creative imagination, the most original and profound of these latter days. Our masters of historical narration were yet to come.

“In poetry we were still to seek. Byrant’s ‘Waterfowl’ had begun that immortal flight that will be followed by many a delighted eye long after ours shall have been darkened; Dana had written some verses which showed a velleity for better and sincerer things; Willis was frittering away a natural and genuine gift; Longfellow was preluding that sweet, pure, and sympathetic song which persuaded so many Englishmen that he must be a countrymen of theirs. In his case the question certainly became not ‘Who reads an American book?’ but ‘Who does _not_ read one?’ Holmes had written one imperishable poem.

“This was the state of things when I was a boy. That old question, once so cruelly irritating, because it was so cruelly to the point, has long ago lost its sting. When I look round me on this platform, I see a company of authors whose books are read wherever English is read, and some whose books are read in languages that are other than their own. The American who lounges over an English railway-book-stall while his train is making-up sees almost as many volumes with names of his countrymen on their backs as he sees of native authors. American Literature has asserted and made good its claim to a definite place in the world. Sixty years ago there were only two American authors, Irving and Cooper, who could have lived by their literary incomes, and they fortunately had other sources of revenue. There are now scores who find in letters a handsome estate. Our literature has developed itself out of English literature, as our political forms have developed themselves out of English political forms, but with a difference. Not as parasitic plants fed from the parent stock, but only as new growths from seeds the mother tree has dropped, could they have prospered as they have done. And so our literature is a part of English literature and must always continue to be so, but, as I have said, with a difference. What that difference is, it would be very hard to define, though it be something of which we are very sensible when we read an American book. We are, I think, especially sensible of it in the biography of any of our countrymen, as I could not help feeling as I read that admirable one of Emerson by Mr. Cabot. There was nothing English in the conditions which shaped the earlier part of Emerson’s life. Something Scottish there was, it may be said, but the later life at Concord which was so beautiful in its noble simplicity, in its frugality never parsimonious, and practised to secure not wealth but independence, that is--or must we say was?--thoroughly American. Without pretension, without swagger, with the need of proclaiming itself, and with no affectation of that commonness which our late politicians seem to think especially dear to a democracy, it represented whatever was peculiar and whatever was best in the novel inspirations of our soil. These inspirations began to make themselves felt early in our history and I think I find traces of their influence even so long ago as the ‘Simple Cobbler of Agawam,’ published in 1647. Its author, Ward, had taken his second degree at Cambridge and was a man past middle life when be came over to Massachusetts, but I think his book would have been a different book had he written it in England. This Americanism which is there because we cannot help it, not put there because it is expected of us, gives, I think, a new note to our better literature and is what makes it fresh and welcome to foreign ears. We have developed, if we did not invent, a form of racy, popular humor, as original as it is possible for anything to be, which has found ideal utterance through the genius of ‘Mark Twain.’ I confess that I look upon this general sense of the comic among our people and the ready wit which condenses it into epigram, as one of the safeguards of our polity. If it be irreverent it is not superstitious; it has little respect for phrases; and no nonsense can long look it in the eye without flinching.”

* * * * *

“Heartsease and Rue” was published in the early spring of 1888 and immediately afterward Lowell printed in the _Atlantic_ his poem “Turner’s Old Téméraire, under a Figure symbolizing the Church.” This poem and “How I consulted the Oracle of the Goldfishes,” which appeared in the _Atlantic_ for August, 1889, were printed in the thin posthumous volume of “Last Poems,” and belong thus in the group which most effectively represents Lowell’s mood on the profoundest themes at the end of his life. The first poem in “Heartsease and Rue,” that on Agassiz, which heads the section entitled Friendship, has already been noted in connection with the time when it was written. A little of the same pathos of parting with old friends is in the postscript of the letter to Curtis, and in this as in the former, the poet’s mind runs on naturally in its speculation to the new To Be. A single hint of a thought which filled many of Lowell’s hours occurs in the poem when he says:--

“With bits of wreck I patch the boat shall bear Me to that unexhausted Otherwhere;”

but it is in the group of poems referred to above that one sees most clearly a recurrence to the great underlying questions of faith. With a half-mocking smile Lowell asks in “Credidimus Jovem regnare” if science has found the key which religion has lost, and falls back on the somewhat lame conclusion that he had best keep his key, which may be but a rusty inheritance, on the chance that the door and lock may some day be made to fit the key. Again, in the poem “How I consulted the Oracle of the Goldfishes,” where he muses over the realities and illusions of the spiritual world, he does not deny the doubts that have arisen in his own mind, but after all refuses to permit even his doubts to dismay him.

“Here shall my resolution be: The shadow of the mystery Is haply wholesomer for eyes That cheat us to be over-wise, And I am happy in my sight To love God’s darkness as His light.”

Nor will he allow himself, even when contemplating what he regards as the obscuration of the Church’s light, to look upon this as the last state of organic faith. He takes that noble painting by Turner, “The Fighting Téméraire tugged to her last berth, to be broken up,” and sees science, “a black demon, belching fire and steam,” drag it away “to gather weeds in the regardless stream.” Ruskin makes the picture an unconscious expression by the painter of his own return to die by the shore of the Thames, “the cold mists gathering over his strength, and all men crying out against him, and dragging the old ‘Fighting Téméraire’ out of their way, with dim, fuliginous contumely;” but surely this is rather the passionate comment of a disciple making his master’s work prophetic. Lowell’s poem strikes a deeper than a personal note. It is a fine imaginative conception, a rare interpretation of a great work of art by another work of art, and what is noticeable in the cry of the poem is the protest which Lowell, in his instinctive faith, makes against the finality of his own interpretation. He sees in imagination the splendid history of the church, and no fighter under Nelson could have witnessed this desolate funeral of the great ship with more anguish than Lowell has thrown into his pathetic words; but as the English sailor could have righted himself with a vision of the glories of the future English navy, so Lowell closes his dirge with a triumphant prophecy:--

“Shall nevermore, engendered of thy fame, A new sea-eagle heir thy conqueror name, And with commissioned talons wrench From thy supplanter’s grimy clench His sheath of steel, his wings of smoke and flame?

“This shall the pleased eyes of our children see; For this the stars of God long even as we; Earth listens for his wings; the Fates Expectant lean; Faith cross-propt waits, And the tired waves of Thought’s insurgent sea.”[102]

In taking another great painting as the prompter of his verse, Titian’s so-called “Sacred and Profane Love,” Lowell again is not so much interpreting the painter’s thought as he is using the canvas for a mirror in which to read his own soul, and though in printing “Endymion” he adds the gloss “a mystical comment,” one may guess that Lowell in this twilight of his life, musing upon the ideals which had beckoned him from earliest days, still saw in the heavens that vision of beauty, of truth, and of freedom which had never been dethroned in his soul. Faithfulness to high emprise,--that at least he could declare of himself amidst all the doubt that beclouded his intellectual vision, and it was fitting that the poet should, in this veiled figure of Endymion, see the reflection of his own face and form.

In sending “Endymion” to his publishers for insertion in the volume “Heartsease and Rue,” Lowell had written from Deerfoot Farm, 20 December, 1887: “I hoped to have sent this [‘Endymion’] by Monday morning’s post, but for two days after my return my head continued to be cloggy and my vein wouldn’t flow. I have at last managed to give what seems to me as much consecutiveness as they need to what have been a heap of fragments in my note-books for years. Longer revolution in my head might round it better, but take it as a meteorolite, splintery still, but with some metallic iridescence here and there brought from some volcanic star. Let it come among poems of sentiment, and as the longest, first if possible.”

He was still looking forward at this time to full labors. He had been urged by his publishers to undertake the volume on Hawthorne in the _American Men of Letters_ series. He had signified his assent in general, some time before, and seemed now to be deliberately contemplating the task, for he wrote four days after the last:--

“I think there have been one or two volumes published within a few years about _old_ Salem. I should be glad to have them sent to me at Southborough. I have one little job of writing to finish, after which I shall revise my poems and prose for a new edition. I don’t know whether it be second childhood, but I am beginning to take an interest in them. Then I mean to take up Hawthorne in earnest....”

Before “Heartsease and Rue” was published Lowell had begun the task of setting in order all his writings. With some hesitation he published in the spring of 1888 a volume of “Political Essays,” in which he gathered the articles printed in the _Atlantic_ and _North American Review_ during the stormy war period, but he added as the final number his address on “The Independent in Politics,” given in New York, 13 April, 1888. It may be noted that, with no apparent definiteness of purpose, Lowell did in the closing years of his life sum up, in forms which occasions for the most part suggested, his leading principles and doctrines, as if in a series of valedictories. Thus “Democracy” was a confession of his fundamental belief in the region of world-politics; his address at Harvard was the one word on scholarship which at the end of a scholar’s life he most wished to say; his address before the Copyright League had touched on points in the great theme of literature which had been of lifelong interest; in his serious poetry, as we have seen, he touched upon those great themes of both worlds which, as a seer of visions all his life, he could not fail to find deepening in his thought; and now he took the opportunity furnished by a friendly audience to set forth some of those principles which had formed his rule of conduct throughout a life that had found active employment in citizenship. There is no lack of definiteness in this address, and yet the period just before its delivery, when he may be supposed to have prepared it, was one of even unwonted depression.

“It isn’t pleasant to think one’s self a failure at seventy,” he wrote 27 March, 1888, “and yet that’s the way it looks to me most of the time. I _can’t_ do my best. That’s the very torment of it. Why not reconcile one’s self with being second-rate? Isn’t it better than nothing? No, ’tis being nowhere.” And on being expostulated with, he wrote again: “It isn’t the praise I care for (though of course I should like it as well as Milton did, I suppose),--I mean the praise of others,--but what I miss is a comfortable feeling of merit in myself. I have never even opened my new book since it was published--I haven’t dared.”

It would be idle to seek too narrowly for the causes of this despondency. As we have had frequent occasion to note, Lowell all his life was subject to fluctuation of moods. The most comprehensive cause was no doubt in the very constitution of his temperament, and as he was overclouded at times, so for him the sun when it shone was more brilliant than to many. But one asks most anxiously, are such moods superficial or do they trench upon the very citadel of being, sapping and mining the walls, so that if entrance is made, the very heart stops beating. In all the shifting of Lowell’s mind there were great fundamental beliefs from which he would not be separated. It may be that in those deepest laid foundations of being, where the bed-rock of faith in spiritual realities is discovered to be a ledge of the rock of ages, Lowell finally, as we have seen, confessed to an ultimate expression of faith, which was that of a child in the dark; but how was it as regards that firm belief in his country which had been a passion with him all his days, and was in truth an elemental faith with him? It is hard to read his last political discourse, “The Place of the Independent in Politics,” without a little sense of pain mingled with one’s admiration for the serenity of the temper with which Lowell made what was in effect a confession of his political faith; for when one comes to rest his hopes for his country in the remnant, he confesses almost to as much doubt as confidence. It must of course be remembered that Lowell had given expression to his large faith in democracy in his Birmingham address, and he calls the attention of his audience to this as an explanation of the terms in which he is to address his own countrymen. He might properly use a note of warning among a people whose cardinal doctrine was the democratic principle, and he was justified unquestionably in giving frankly his impressions of the low point to which political organizations had fallen. Still, in undertaking to account for the evolution of the democratic idea in American life, he was questioning whether after all opportunity had not much to do with it, and whether now that the walls were closing about this new country, the force of evolution had not been largely spent. The dangers imminent in the constant inflow of an ignorant body of foreigners, in the easy good-nature with which the American tolerated abuses, and in the aristocratic character of a civil service as diseased as the rotten borough of English politics,--these dangers rose before him, threatening, alarming. He had lost faith largely in the organic action of parties, chiefly because he saw in them the passive instruments of unscrupulous politicians; and he found the correction of this great evil in the increasing power of a neutral body. He even went so far as to find the only hope of salvation in the action of the Independents. “If the attempt should fail,” the attempt that is to reform the parties from without, “the failure of the experiment of democracy would inevitably follow.”

This is not the place to discuss the merits of such a question. What I wish is to show the working of Lowell’s mind on those political subjects which had occupied him from boyhood. He was consistent throughout in holding lightly to any allegiance to party, and in valuing highly the integrity of the individual conscience, and his plea, gathering force as it proceeds, is for such a spirit of devotion to the great ideals of the country as shall compel the union of like-minded patriots in accomplishing the great active reforms that press upon the minds of thoughtful men.

“What we want,” he says in conclusion, “is an active class who will insist in season and out of season that we shall have a country ... whose very name shall not only, as now it does, stir us as with the sound of a trumpet, but shall call out all that is best within us by offering us the radiant image of something better and nobler and more enduring than we, of something that shall fulfil our own thwarted aspiration, when we are but a handful of forgotten dust in the soil trodden by a race whom we shall have helped to make more worthy of their inheritance than we ourselves had the power, I might almost say the means, to be.”

No, Lowell’s last word to his countrymen in domestic politics was not one of despair, however it may have been tinged with a sense of temporary defeat. It was because of his strong love that he was jealous of the honor of his country. The sadness is that of one weary in the fight, but the last note, as in the other instances of his valedictories, was a call to action and the reassertion of his undying faith in his country. Yet, as in the other instances, there is the pathetic note of faith in spite of the evidence of sight.

Once again, a little later than this, he was called on to preside at a dinner of the Civil Service Reform Association, and something of what he then said may be quoted as showing how hope and courage came to the front with him when great national issues were in question. “If I am sometimes inclined to fancy,” he then said, “as old men will, that the world I see about me is not so pleasant as that on which my eyes first opened, yet I am bound to admit on cross-examining myself, that it is on the whole a better world, better especially in the wider distribution of the civilized and civilizing elements which compose it, better for the increased demands made upon it by those who were once dumb and helpless and for their increasing power to enforce those demands. But every advance in the right direction which I have witnessed has seemed painfully slow. And painfully slow it was, if measured, as we are apt to measure, by the standard of our own little lives, and not, as we should, by that larger life of the community which can afford to wait.

“Every reform like that in which we are interested has to contend with vested interests, and of all vested interests abuses are those which are most adroit in putting a specious gloss on their monopolies and most unscrupulous as to the weapons to be used in their defence. The evil system which we would fain replace with a better has gone on so long that it almost seems part of the order of nature. It is a barbarous and dangerous system. When I was in Spain I saw reason to think that the decay of that noble nation, due, no doubt, to many causes, was due above all to a Civil Service like our own that had gone farther on the inevitable road which ours is going.

“It should seem that a reform like ours, so reasonable, so convenient, so economical, would at once commend itself to the good sense of the people. And I think there are manifest signs that it is more and more so commending itself. The humanity of our day is willing (as our ancestors were not) that the state should support its inefficient members. But did humorist ever conceive a more wasteful way of supporting them than by paying them salaries for performing ill the minor and more mechanical functions of government, thus making this inefficiency costly to every one of us in his daily affairs? Even supposing them capable of becoming efficient, the chances are that, just when they have learned their business, they will be dismissed to make room for other apprentices to pass through the same routine. My own experience has convinced me that not only our social credit, but our business interests have suffered greatly by the theory still more or less prevalent that a man good for nothing else was just the thing for one of the smaller foreign consulates.”