The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I

by William James Stillman

CHAPTER XIV

LOWELL

The third magnate of our Club was Lowell, with whose personality the world at large is already well acquainted. In his own day and presence it was impossible to form a satisfactory personal judgment of him, and even now, through the perspective of the years since he died, it is out of the question for me to pronounce a dispassionate judgment. Of all that New England world, so hospitable, so brotherly to me that if I had been born in Cambridge it could hardly have been more kind, Lowell and Norton were those who most made my welcome free from any embarrassment to myself. Norton, almost exactly my contemporary, is still living, and which of us two shall say the last word for the other is in the lap of the gods, but in the Adirondack Club life he does not appear. No kinder or wiser friend have I ever had. Himself the son of one of the most distinguished of the great Unitarian leaders of liberal New England, his broad, common-sense views of sectarian questions first widened my religious horizon, emancipated me from the tithes of mint and cummin, and helped me to see the value of observances, and his hand was always held out to me in those straitened moments in which my impulsive and ill-regulated manner of life continually landed me. I shall not disturb the serenity of his old age by the indiscreet garrulity of mine. But the brotherhood between him and Lowell brought our lives together, and Lowell was the pole to which both our needles swung. Norton's delicate health made it impossible for him to take part in the excursions made by the Club, though he was enrolled as a member.

Of Lowell much has been said by many people, some of whom were less, and others, perhaps, better acquainted with him than I was, but of him I can speak at least without restraint, other than that which love and gratitude impose. And to-day, more than forty years since I found his friendship what it ever remained, the judgment I formed of him at first acquaintance comes up again in one point dominant. He seemed to me a man whom good fortune, and especially the favor of society, had prevented from filling the rôle that fate had intended for him. There was in not a few of his poems the promise of reaching a height which was attainable only to a man who climbs light. There was in him the possible making of a great reformer, an evangelist, which possibility never became actuality, owing to the weight which social success laid on him.

All through his early poems runs the thread of a fine morality, the perception of the highest obligations of religion and philanthropy, the subtle distinction of the purest Christianity, the defense of the weak and oppressed, the succor of the poor; in fine, the creed of a practical religion which required its adherent to go into the slums and out on the highways to carry out his convictions in acts. In the warfare he waged on slavery when the anti-slavery cause was very unpopular, and, in the case of Garrison and others, brought on its advocates continual danger and occasional violence, Lowell was unsparing in the denunciation of the national sin; but whether because the anti-abolition public which ruled Boston thought denunciation in form of verse had no practical value, or because the personal fascination the man always exercised on all around him was such as to disarm hostility, it happened that he was never made the object of aggression.

"Men called him but a shiftless youth,
In whom no good they saw;
And yet, unwittingly, in truth,
They made his careless word their law.

"Men granted that his speech was wise,
But, when a glance they caught
Of his slim grace and woman's eyes,
They laughed and called him good-for-naught."

There was a gracious indolence in him, an imperturbable serenity, which made proclamation in advance of a truce to all forms of brute collision. No doubt if they had hunted him out for a victim of the political animosity which led to so many tragedies in the early days of our anti-slavery agitation, he would have stood up to the stake as gayly as one of the martyrs of old; but the man's nature was repugnant to discords, and shrank from combats ruder than those of the printing-press.

All through his career, the religion of humanity is put forward with point and persistence, and the finest of distinctions in morality are maintained,—the so constantly ignored vital difference between the deed and its motive, as in "Sir Launfal:"—

"The Holy Supper is kept, indeed,
In whatso we share with another's need;
Not what we give, but what we share,—
For the gift without the giver is bare;
Who gives himself with his alms feeds three,—
Himself, his hungering neighbor, and Me;"

so that one might have expected from him the life of a social reformer, so keenly did he feel the outrages of civilization. But, possibly from the fact that in those days human slavery in our country summed up all villainies and crimes, and in the war against that he threw all his surplus energy, he never took part in the crusade then beginning against the more familiar iniquities nearer home. But in his constitution there was, I think, another reason why the author of "Sir Launfal," "Hunger and Cold," "The Landlord," and "The Search" should not have emulated Howard or Miss Fry, and have gone into the realms of destitution to relieve its wrongs. He was extremely fastidious, and anything that offended his taste by vulgarity or crudeness repelled him with such force that the work of practical philanthropy would have been impossible to his temperament. The indolence I have above spoken of—which must not be confounded with slothfulness, but is, as the true meaning of the word indicates, the following of the dictates of the temperament, whether in activity or rest—led him to contemplation rather than action.

The refined idealism of his nature, made more subtle by the indulgence of an idolizing circle of relatives and friends, who saw in him the promise of more even than he ever attained, or than was possible to the smooth prosperity of his life, made it impossible for him to thrust himself into the social conflicts, whether of poverty or of politics, though the finest and most exalted passages of his work were not so fine and exalted as his personality; he was better than anything he ever wrote, and this is understood by all who knew him, and that what he wrote was only the overflow of a mind which never needed a stimulus to divine cogitation. The fascination, the subtle personal glamour he unconsciously threw over those who came in true contact with him, made them always expect more than he accomplished, for in that there was not even the stimulus of ambition. What he did was done with the spontaneousness of the wind or the sunshine. If he had a vanity, it was to be in all points accoutred for his place in society; but even this was so lightly held that few knew him well enough to see it, and it was never a motive power in him.

Knowing all his earlier work before I knew him, I thought I detected a want of that profounder sympathy with humanity and the pathos of life which comes from actual suffering, and I remember saying to one of his admirers, before I saw him, that what he wanted to make him a great poet was suffering. This he had gained somewhat of when I made his acquaintance. His wife had died not long before I went to Cambridge to see him and to enlist his assistance in "The Crayon," and he was in the earliest phase of the reaction from a sorrow which had made him insist on solitude. All his surroundings had kept up the impressions of his bereavement, and all his associates sympathized with and respected it, and I came in with a new life just as he came to need relief from the depression which had become morbid. He has told it in one of his first letters to me:—

"I am glad you had a pleasant time here. I had, and you made me fifteen years younger while you stayed. When a man gets to my age, enthusiasms don't often knock at the door of his garret. I am all the more charmed with them when they come. A youth full of such pure intensity of hope and faith and purpose, what is he but the breath of a resurrection trumpet to us stiffened old fellows, bidding us up out of our clay and earth if we would not be too late?

"Your inspiration is still to you a living mistress; make her immortal in her promptings and her consolations by imaging her truly in art. Mine looks at me with eyes of paler flame, and beckons across a gulf. You came into my loneliness like an incarnate inspiration. And it is dreary enough sometimes; for a mountain peak on whose snow your foot makes the first mortal print is not so lonely as a room full of happy faces from which one is missing forever."

The tone of his life at that period is given in the few poems of the time, published later: the "Ode to Happiness," which he read to me unfinished during that first visit; "The Wind-Harp," in which

"There murmured, as if one strove to speak,
And tears came instead; then the sad tones wandered
And faltered among the uncertain chords
In a troubled doubt between sorrow and words;
At last with themselves they questioned and pondered,
'Hereafter?—who knoweth?' and so they sighed
Down the long steps that lead to silence and died;"

"The Dead House," "Auf Wiedersehen (Summer)" and the "Palinode (Autumn)," in which the first grief had deepened while losing its acuteness, and the feeling of loneliness had taken largely the place of the first desolation, the wrenching apart of soul and body:—

"It is pagan; but wait till you feel it,—
That jar of our earth, that dull shock
When the ploughshare of deeper passion
Tears down to our primitive rock;"

and some of his friends had tried the folly of condolence, to whom he replies, in the same poem ("After the Burial"):—

"Console if you will, I can bear it;
'Tis a well-meant alms of breath;
But not all the preaching since Adam
Has made Death other than Death."

But the man was too robust in body and mind to linger long in the shadows of melancholy, and though the effects of bereavement—which, in the few years before I knew him, had taken his only boy, who died in Rome, his elder daughter, of whose death "The First Snow-Fall" keeps a touching record, and finally his wife—deepened his character as expressed in his subsequent writing, the buoyancy and elasticity which he found in his enjoyment of nature, and his severe application to the studies of the new position to which the retirement of Longfellow from the professorship of modern languages at Harvard promoted him, restored his old tone of life, while his very happy marriage with his second wife made him, as may now be said without indiscretion, happier than he had ever been.

The second Mrs. Lowell was a woman of the rarest mental, moral, and personal qualities, and her influence on Lowell was of the happiest and sunniest. She was one of three daughters of a merchant of Maine, who had left them without other resources than what their own excellent education gave them, and with the charge of a younger brother, for whose education they provided after the New England way. The other sisters I never knew; but Fannie, Mrs. Lowell, was one of the most remarkable women I ever knew for the combination of resolute and persistent courage and serene religious temperament. She was a Swedenborgian, and probably owed to that form of faith her serenity and imperturbable faith in a Divine Providence; but her unflinching courage in adversity and her extreme sweetness of character were of her New England birth and education. After her father's death she became a governess, and came to Lowell's house in that capacity after the death of his wife; but she had, before that, gone through many vicissitudes of fortune. She told me one day an incident of travel which is worth recording as indicating her character. She had been in a situation in Charleston, S.C., and had accepted another in the valley of the Ohio, to reach which, there being then no railway that traversed the distance, she had to make a long journey by stagecoach, traveling day and night across the Alleghanies. One night she found herself in the coach with a single fellow-passenger, apparently a gentleman, who took his place with her on the back seat, and who, after a time, pretending to be asleep, fell over towards her, so that his head lay on her shoulder, but, correcting himself, sat upright again, to repeat the feint again and again, each time with more abandon, until his arm dropped behind Fannie's waist, with an unmistakable attempt to embrace her. She quietly drew out her shawl-pin and drove it into his arm, without any remark or other attention to him. He sat up instantly, at the next stopping-place took an outside seat, and discontinued his journey at the first town they came to.

Mrs. Lowell fitted her husband as sunshine fits calm, and the gravest sorrow he ever felt with her was her having no children. When, two or three years after the time I am now writing of, I had decided to go to Europe again, and he tried to dissuade me from going, and I, for reasons I could not tell him, persisted, he brought me one day, just before I sailed, six hundred dollars, insisting on my accepting it as a gift, saying: "I shall never want it. I know now that I shall never have another child, and I can well spare it." Lowell had never been wealthy, but he had an income sufficient for all needs in the state of life which he preferred, and his generosity towards his friends who were poorer than he took all the surplus. He rejoiced in the addition to his income in the salary of his professorship, but it added nothing to his own expenditure. And yet I have always felt that if he had been a poor man, compelled to work for his daily bread, he would have occupied a larger place in the world of letters. He was not one of the "intellectual giants buried under mountains of gold," but he was a greater man than he ever showed him self, always cushioned by a sufficiency of fortune for all his needs, and by his tastes inclined to a simple and tranquil life; for, though he became later a political personage, he cared little, au fond, for the political world. Perhaps the little was too much for his attainment as a poet, and some of his best friends have always held that his diplomatic life was a disaster for his intellectual completion.

I have elsewhere alluded to his going to Europe to complete the preparations to enter into his professorship, and when he came back from this voyage he said to me, "I must study yet a good deal before I attempt to produce anything more." He finally felt the carelessness of form in his work, and in the succeeding years he worked very hard in his professorial work, which was, perhaps, not the best for his advancement as an author, but it certainly gave more solidity to the production of those years which intervened between his simpler life and his diplomatic career. His lectures before the students and the public (the popularity of Lowell as a lecturer was immense) solidified an education which, as he himself humorously avowed, was often broken by freaks of irrepressible youthful spirit; and the saddening and indelible effects of the war, which came between and sharply divided those phases of his career, had so modified his character for the graver and more profound that I agree with those of his friends who consider his entry into the diplomatic career as a misfortune for American letters, and that his mind flowed to waste in those later years. Nor was he at home in diplomacy. It was a reversal of all the conditions of his habitual existence; but it flattered his amour propre that the country should recognize the part he had taken in the cultivation of the anti-slavery sentiment of the nation, and the trace of worldly feeling which I have noted grew under the stimulus to a motive in life. His social gifts were very great, and his patriotic pride intensified the pleasure of his successes in a line of life which was really secondary in his nature.

In those years of his diplomatic life we saw little of each other. Our intimate intercourse was suspended by my going to Europe in 1859. We were nearest each other in our Adirondack life, in which he had all the zest of a boy. He was the soul of the merriment of the company, fullest of witticisms, keenest in appreciation of the liberty of the occasion, and the genius loci. One sees through all his nature-poetry the traces of the heredity of the early settler, the keen enjoyment of the fresh and unhackneyed in nature, even of the angularity of the New England farmhouse and the brightness and newness of the villages, so crude to the tastes founded in the picturesqueness of the Old World. Not even Emerson, with all his indifference to the mere form of things, took to unimproved and uncivilized nature as Lowell did, and his free delight in the Wilderness was a thing to remember, and perhaps by none so keenly appreciated as by me, to whom the joy of forest life was a satisfactory motive for living.