Studies of Lowell

W >> William Dean Howells >> Studies of Lowell


He was so eager to have me like England in every way, and seemed so fond
of the English, that I thought it best to ask him whether he minded my
quoting, in a paper about Lexington, which I was just then going to print
in a London magazine, some humorous lines of his expressing the mounting
satisfaction of an imaginary Yankee story-teller who has the old fight
terminate in Lord Percy's coming

"To hammer stone for life in Concord jail."

It had occurred to me that it might possibly embarrass him to have this
patriotic picture presented to a public which could not take our Fourth
of July pleasure in it, and I offered to suppress it, as I did afterwards
quite for literary reasons. He said, No, let it stand, and let them make
the worst of it; and I fancy that much of his success with a people who
are not gingerly with other people's sensibilities came from the
frankness with which he trampled on their prejudice when he chose. He
said he always told them, when there was question of such things, that
the best society he had ever known was in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He
contended that the best English was spoken there; and so it was, when he
spoke it.

We were in London out of the season, and he was sorry that he could not
have me meet some titles who he declared had found pleasure in my books;
when we returned from Italy in the following June, he was prompt to do me
this honor. I dare say he wished me to feel it to its last implication,
and I did my best, but there was nothing in the evening I enjoyed so much
as his coming up to Mrs. Lowell, at the close, when there was only a
title or two left, and saying to her as he would have said to her at
Elmwood, where she would have personally planned it, "Fanny, that was a
fine dinner you gave us." Of course, this was in a tender burlesque; but
it remains the supreme impression of what seemed to me a cloudlessly
happy period for Lowell. His wife was quite recovered of her long
suffering, and was again at the head of his house, sharing in his
pleasures, and enjoying his successes for his sake; successes so great
that people spoke of him seriously, as "an addition to society" in
London, where one man more or less seemed like a drop in the sea. She was
a woman perfectly of the New England type and tradition: almost
repellantly shy at first, and almost glacially cold with new
acquaintance, but afterwards very sweet and cordial. She was of a dark
beauty with a regular face of the Spanish outline; Lowell was of an ideal
manner towards her, and of an admiration which delicately travestied
itself and which she knew how to receive with smiling irony. After her
death, which occurred while he was still in England, he never spoke of
her to me, though before that he used to be always bringing her name in,
with a young lover-like fondness.




XI.

In the hurry of the London season I did not see so much of Lowell on our
second sojourn as on our first, but once when we were alone in his study
there was a return to the terms of the old meetings in Cambridge. He
smoked his pipe, and sat by his fire and philosophized; and but for the
great London sea swirling outside and bursting through our shelter, and
dashing him with notes that must be instantly answered, it was a very
fair image of the past. He wanted to tell me about his coachman whom he
had got at on his human side with great liking and amusement, and there
was a patient gentleness in his manner with the footman who had to keep
coming in upon him with those notes which was like the echo of his young
faith in the equality of men. But he always distinguished between the
simple unconscious equality of the ordinary American and its assumption
by a foreigner. He said he did not mind such an American's coming into
his house with his hat on; but if a German or Englishman did it, he
wanted to knock it off. He was apt to be rather punctilious in his shows
of deference towards others, and at one time he practised removing his
own hat when he went into shops in Cambridge. It must have mystified the
Cambridge salesmen, and I doubt if he kept it up.

With reference to the doctrine of his young poetry, the fierce and the
tender humanity of his storm and stress period, I fancy a kind of baffle
in Lowell, which I should not perhaps find it easy to prove. I never
knew him by word or hint to renounce this doctrine, but he could not come
to seventy years without having seen many high hopes fade, and known many
inspired prophecies fail. When we have done our best to make the world
over, we are apt to be dismayed by finding it in much the old shape. As
he said of the moral government of the universe, the scale is so vast,
and a little difference, a little change for the better, is scarcely
perceptible to the eager consciousness of the wholesale reformer. But
with whatever sense of disappointment, of doubt as to his own deeds for
truer freedom and for better conditions I believe his sympathy was still
with those who had some heart for hoping and striving. I am sure that
though he did not agree with me in some of my own later notions for the
redemption of the race, he did not like me the less but rather the more
because (to my own great surprise I confess) I had now and then the
courage of my convictions, both literary and social.

He was probably most at odds with me in regard to my theories of fiction,
though he persisted in declaring his pleasure in my own fiction. He was
in fact, by nature and tradition, thoroughly romantic, and he could not
or would not suffer realism in any but a friend. He steadfastly refused
even to read the Russian masters, to his immense loss, as I tried to
persuade him, and even among the modern Spaniards, for whom he might have
had a sort of personal kindness from his love of Cervantes, he chose one
for his praise the least worthy, of it, and bore me down with his heavier
metal in argument when I opposed to Alarcon's factitiousness the
delightful genuineness of Valdes. Ibsen, with all the Norwegians, he put
far from him; he would no more know them than the Russians; the French
naturalists he abhorred. I thought him all wrong, but you do not try
improving your elders when they have come to three score and ten years,
and I would rather have had his affection unbroken by our difference of
opinion than a perfect agreement. Where he even imagined that this
difference could work me harm, he was anxious to have me know that he
meant me none; and he was at the trouble to write me a letter when a
Boston paper had perverted its report of what he said in a public lecture
to my disadvantage, and to assure me that he had not me in mind. When
once he had given his liking, he could not bear that any shadow of change
should seem to have come upon him. He had a most beautiful and endearing
ideal of friendship; he desired to affirm it and to reaffirm it as often
as occasion offered, and if occasion did not offer, he made occasion. It
did not matter what you said or did that contraried him; if he thought he
had essentially divined you, you were still the same: and on his part he
was by no means exacting of equal demonstration, but seemed not even to
wish it.




XII.

After he was replaced at London by a minister more immediately
representative of the Democratic administration, he came home. He made a
brave show of not caring to have remained away, but in truth he had
become very fond of England, where he had made so many friends, and where
the distinction he had, in that comfortably padded environment, was so
agreeable to him.

It would have been like him to have secretly hoped that the new President
might keep him in London, but he never betrayed any ignoble
disappointment, and he would not join in any blame of him. At our first
meeting after he came home he spoke of the movement which had made Mr.
Cleveland president, and said he supposed that if he had been here, he
should have been in it. All his friends were, he added, a little
helplessly; but he seemed not to dislike my saying I knew one of his
friends who was not: in fact, as I have told, he never disliked a plump
difference--unless he disliked the differer.

For several years he went back to England every summer, and it was not
until he took up his abode at Elmwood again that he spent a whole year at
home. One winter he passed at his sister's home in Boston, but mostly he
lived with his daughter at Southborough. I have heard a story of his
going to Elmwood soon after his return in 1885, and sitting down in his
old study, where he declared with tears that the place was full of
ghosts. But four or five years later it was well for family reasons that
he should live there; and about the same time it happened that I had
taken a house for the summer in his neighborhood. He came to see me, and
to assure me, in all tacit forms of his sympathy in a sorrow for which
there could be no help; but it was not possible that the old intimate
relations should be resumed. The affection was there, as much on his
side as on mine, I believe; but he was now an old man and I was an
elderly man, and we could not, without insincerity, approach each other
in the things that had drawn us together in earlier and happier years.
His course was run; my own, in which he had taken such a generous
pleasure, could scarcely move his jaded interest. His life, so far as it
remained to him, had renewed itself in other air; the later friendships
beyond seas sufficed him, and were without the pang, without the effort
that must attend the knitting up of frayed ties here.

He could never have been anything but American, if he had tried, and he
certainly never tried; but he certainly did not return to the outward
simplicities of his life as I first knew it. There was no more
round-hat-and-sack-coat business for him; he wore a frock and a high hat,
and whatever else was rather like London than Cambridge; I do not know
but drab gaiters sometimes added to the effect of a gentleman of the old
school which he now produced upon the witness. Some fastidiousnesses
showed themselves in him, which were not so surprising. He complained of
the American lower class manner; the conductor and cabman would be kind
to you but they would not be respectful, and he could not see the fun of
this in the old way. Early in our acquaintance he rather stupified me by
saying, "I like you because you don't put your hands on me," and I heard
of his consenting to some sort of reception in those last years, "Yes, if
they won't shake hands."

Ever since his visit to Rome in 1875 he had let his heavy mustache grow
long till it dropped below the corners of his beard, which was now almost
white; his face had lost the ruddy hue so characteristic of him. I fancy
he was then ailing with premonitions of the disorder which a few years
later proved mortal, but he still bore himself with sufficient vigor, and
he walked the distance between his house and mine, though once when I
missed his visit the family reported that after he came in he sat a long
time with scarcely a word, as if too weary to talk. That winter, I went
into Boston to live, and I saw him only at infrequent intervals, when I
could go out to Elmwood. At such times I found him sitting in the room
which was formerly the drawing-room, but which had been joined with his
study by taking away the partitions beside the heavy mass of the old
colonial chimney. He told me that when he was a newborn babe, the nurse
had carried him round this chimney, for luck, and now in front of the
same hearth, the white old man stretched himself in an easy-chair, with
his writing-pad on his knees and his books on the table at his elbow, and
was willing to be entreated not to rise. I remember the sun used to come
in at the eastern windows full pour, and bathe the air in its warmth.

He always hailed me gayly, and if I found him with letters newly come
from England, as I sometimes did, he glowed and sparkled with fresh life.
He wanted to read passages from those letters, he wanted to talk about
their writers, and to make me feel their worth and charm as he did. He
still dreamed of going back to England the next summer, but that was not
to be. One day he received me not less gayly than usual, but with a
certain excitement, and began to tell me about an odd experience he had
had, not at all painful, but which had very much mystified him. He had
since seen the doctor, and the doctor had assured him that there was
nothing alarming in what had happened, and in recalling this assurance,
he began to look at the humorous aspects of the case, and to make some
jokes about it. He wished to talk of it, as men do of their maladies,
and very fully, and I gave him such proof of my interest as even inviting
him to talk of it would convey. In spite of the doctor's assurance, and
his joyful acceptance of it, I doubt if at the bottom of his heart there
was not the stir of an uneasy misgiving; but he had not for a long time
shown himself so cheerful.

It was the beginning of the end. He recovered and relapsed, and
recovered again; but never for long. Late in the spring I came out, and
he had me stay to dinner, which was somehow as it used to be at two
o'clock; and after dinner we went out on his lawn. He got a long-handled
spud, and tried to grub up some dandelions which he found in his turf,
but after a moment or two he threw it down, and put his hand upon his
back with a groan. I did not see him again till I came out to take leave
of him before going away for the summer, and then I found him sitting on
the little porch in a western corner of his house, with a volume of Scott
closed upon his finger. There were some other people, and our meeting
was with the constraint of their presence. It was natural in nothing so
much as his saying very significantly to me, as if he knew of my heresies
concerning Scott, and would have me know he did not approve of them, that
there was nothing he now found so much pleasure in as Scott's novels.
Another friend, equally heretical, was by, but neither of us attempted to
gainsay him. Lowell talked very little, but he told of having been a
walk to Beaver Brook, and of having wished to jump from one stone to
another in the stream, and of having had to give it up. He said, without
completing the sentence, If it had come to that with him! Then he fell
silent again; and with some vain talk of seeing him when I came back in
the fall, I went away sick at heart. I was not to see him again, and I
shall not look upon his like.

I am aware that I have here shown him from this point and from that in a
series of sketches which perhaps collectively impart, but do not assemble
his personality in one impression. He did not, indeed, make one
impression upon me, but a thousand impressions, which I should seek in
vain to embody in a single presentment. What I have cloudily before me
is the vision of a very lofty and simple soul, perplexed, and as it were
surprised and even dismayed at the complexity of the effects from motives
so single in it, but escaping always to a clear expression of what was
noblest and loveliest in itself at the supreme moments, in the divine
exigencies. I believe neither in heroes nor in saints; but I believe in
great and good men, for I have known them, and among such men Lowell was
of the richest nature I have known. His nature was not always serene or
pellucid; it was sometimes roiled by the currents that counter and cross
in all of us; but it was without the least alloy of insincerity, and it
was never darkened by the shadow of a selfish fear. His genius was an
instrument that responded in affluent harmony to the power that made him
a humorist and that made him a poet, and appointed him rarely to be quite
either alone.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

I believe neither in heroes nor in saints
It is well to hold one's country to her promises
Liked being with you, not for what he got, but for what he gave