James Russell Lowell and His Friends

by Edward Everett Hale

A foreign minister of America once said to me that Diplomacy meant Society, and Society Diplomacy. He meant that the important things are done in personal conversation between man and man, as they sip their coffee after a dinner-party, perhaps. The conclusions thus arrived at get themselves put into form afterwards in dispatches. In this view of diplomacy it was fortunate for all parties that Mr. Lowell and Lord Granville were the correspondents who had American affairs in hand, from such “emblems” as the American flag on Lord Mayor’s Day round to the nationality of Mr. O’Connor. Fortunate, because the two liked each other.

Lord Granville’s term of office as foreign secretary was almost the same as Lowell’s as American minister. Granville came in with the Gladstone ministry in April, 1882, and he went out of office with them in 1885. Lowell’s personal relations with him were those of great intimacy. He not only regarded Lord Granville with cordial respect, but knew him as an intimate friend. In 1886 he visited Lord Granville at Holmbury, at a time when Mr. Gladstone was also visiting there. “I saw Gladstone the other day, and he was as buoyant (boyant) as when I stayed with him at Holmbury, just before he started for Scotland. I think the Fates are with him, and that the Tories will have to take up Home Rule where he left it.”

Lord Granville was very young when he entered Parliament, as Mr. Levison Gower, member for Morpeth. He is said to have regretted the change of work in the House of Lords when he became Lord Granville. In 1859, when he was not forty-five years old, the queen asked him to form a cabinet, and in 1880 she consulted him with the same view again; but he did not become chief of the ministry at either time. He served under Lord Palmerston and under Mr. Gladstone, as he had done under Lord John Russell. He was, while he lived, the leader of the Liberals in the House of Lords, always in the minority, whatever the policy of the hour, but always cordial, amiable, and conciliatory. On Gladstone’s retirement in 1878 he was spoken of as the real leader of the Liberal party. It is said of him that he always kept a friend who was once a friend,—that he was willing to yield small points in controversy rather than to keep a quarrel in existence, and always “sacrificed his personal interests to those of his party.”

Such a man is a friend whom one likes to have; and such a character gives point to Lowell’s joke, which I have cited, which calls him the most engaging man in London. I remember with pleasure the first time I saw him. He was acting as chancellor of the University of London—as long ago as 1873. He was presenting the diplomas to those who had passed the examinations for degrees of that university. This means that two or three hundred young men, from all parts of Great Britain, were presented to him, by the heads of perhaps twenty different colleges, to receive this distinction. Now, such a formality may be merely a function, as stupid to see as stupid to go through. In this case there was genuine personal contact between the chancellor and the neophyte. As each one of those youths, proud or timid, came up, and as Lord Granville gave the diploma to each, he detained him, for the moment, by some personal word or inquiry,—such as you could guess the man who was entering life would always remember. With such a man Lowell would be sure to be on sympathetic terms. And I suppose they met each other, or were in close correspondence, almost every day in the “season.”

But Lowell was not only the minister from the people; he was a messenger to the people. And he had sense enough and historical knowledge enough to know that since there has been an America on the western side of the Atlantic, the people of England—the rank and file—have been in sympathy with the thought and feeling and purposes of that American people. When my brother Charles was in London in 1863, and the English government was acting, on the whole, as badly as it dared toward the United States, a member of the cabinet said to him one day, “The clubs are against you, Mr. Hale, but the people of England are with you.” This was true then; it was true in the American Revolution; it was true in Cromwell’s time,—he has no title which is more sure than that of the “Friend of New England.” The same thing is true to-day.

Now, Lowell never said to himself, “Go to, I will address myself to the people of Great Britain,” or, “The people of Great Britain is one thing, and the clubs of London another.” But because he was the man he was, he was always glad to meet the people and the men of the people, and let them really know what America is. It is not the America of interviewers, of excursionists, of nouveaux riches millionaires, or of namby-pamby philanthropists attendant on international conventions. These are the individuals whom the people of England are most apt to see. But the people of America, at home, have wider interests than theirs, and affairs more important than they have. Lowell felt this in every fibre of his life, and if the Workingmen’s College in London, or some public meeting at Birmingham, or a Coleridge monument, gave him a chance to give to the people of England his notion of what the people of America are, and have in hand, why, he was most glad to do so.

This is no place in which to describe or discuss his successes as a public speaker in England. It was a matter of course that, as soon as he spoke once, whoever heard him would be glad to hear him again; and he must have had proposals without number for his assistance in public dinners, at the unveiling of monuments, and in addresses of wider range and of more permanent importance.

In the two volumes of admirable memoirs of English life which Mr. Smalley has published, one chapter is given quite in detail to the description of Lowell’s remarkable welcome among Englishmen of every degree. In that chapter, which I suppose is made from one or two letters published at the time, Mr. Smalley quotes “The Spectator,” as saying that Englishmen, whether they knew Mr. Lowell or not, looked on him as a personal friend.

Of all the various addresses which contributed, each in its place, to his reputation as a public speaker, that which I have alluded to, which was delivered at Birmingham, on “Democracy,” is the most remarkable. It has, indeed, become a classic. It deserves its reputation; and it undoubtedly states with careful accuracy Lowell’s foundation feeling as to the institutions of this country, and what may be expected if democracy is fairly understood and fairly applied. No one who was familiar with him or with his letters, or had really studied his more serious poems, will regard any of the utterances in this great address as being new. They were the words of a careful scholar who was born under favorable circumstances in the midst of democracy admirably well applied. His training was all the better because the original people of Massachusetts are, so to speak, democratic in their origin and in the habit of their thought, without having formed many abstract theories on the subject, and being always, indeed, quite indifferent as to what the speculative theory might be.

An American minister abroad must not be often or long absent from his post. But there are methods by which four fortnights of permitted absence may be added together, and your outing taken at once. In some way Lowell was thus free for a tour through the Continent to Italy in the autumn of 1881. In Italy he and Story and Mr. Richard Dana met. Dana was at the Wells School with him when they were little boys, and in Italy they had that most agreeable of companions, Mr. John W. Field. Dana died the next winter, and Lowell writes to Field, “The lesson for us is to close up”—“if a year or two older than I, he belonged more immediately to my own set, and I had known him life long.”