James Russell Lowell and His Friends

by Edward Everett Hale

For this celebration the most admirable arrangements were made in New York by the committee which had taken the matter in hand. In the evening a banquet was served at the Metropolitan Opera-House, and many of the most distinguished speakers in the country had gladly accepted the invitation to be present. Among them Lowell naturally was one. But to those who listened, it seemed as if all these great men were in a sort awed by the greatness of the occasion. His address, perhaps because so carefully prepared, was for the purpose no better than any of the others. They could not help it. Every man who spoke was asking himself how his speech would read in the year 1989. There was no spontaneity; instead of it there was decorum and consideration, the determination to think wisely, and none of the eloquence which “belongs to the man and the occasion.” For hour after hour the patient stream of considerate commonplace flowed on, till at two in the morning the new President of the United States made the closing speech. The expectation of this address, and that alone, had held the great audience together. He was probably the only man who had not had a chance “to make any preparation.” He had gone through the day alive with the feeling of the day, drinking in its inspirations; and with such preparation as six hours at the dinner-table would give him, he rose to say what the day had taught him. He made one of the most magnificent addresses to which I have ever listened. He led with him from height to height an audience jaded and tired by the dignity of lawyers, the dexterity of politicians, and the commonplace of scholars. In fifteen minutes he had established his own reputation as a great public orator among the thousand men who were fortunate enough to hear him.

And yet, such is the satire of what we call history that, because the other speeches had been written out and could be sent to the journals,—because even a New York morning newspaper has to go to press at some time,—this absolutely extemporaneous speech of the one man who proved himself equal to the occasion did not get itself reported in any adequate form, and will never go down into history. There is, however, no danger that any of the other addresses of that great ceremonial will be read at the end of the hundred years.

His cousin says that Mr. Lowell was chiefly occupied by his addresses and other prose essays in the first years after his return, but that he wrote a few poems. Most of these will be found in the “Atlantic.” For the Lowell Institute he prepared a course of lectures on the old English dramatists, which have been published since his death. Of his addresses he printed but few, but the address on “The Independent in Politics,” which he delivered in 1888 before the New York Reform Club, was printed by that club.

ROOM ADJOINING THE LIBRARY, ELMWOOD

Of his Cambridge life after his return to Elmwood his cousin writes: “The house was haunted by sad memories, but at least he was once more among his books. The library, which filled the two rooms on the ground floor to the left of the front door, had been constantly growing, and during his stay in Europe he had bought rare works with the intention of leaving them to Harvard College. Here he would sit when sad or unwell and read Calderon, the ’Nightingale in the Study,’ in whom he always found a solace. Except for occasional attacks of the gout, his life had been singularly free from sickness, but he had been at home only a few months when he was taken ill, and, after the struggle of a strong man to keep up as long as possible, he was forced to go to bed. In a few days his condition became so serious that the physicians feared he would not live; but he rallied, and, although too weak to go to England, as he had planned, he appeared to be comparatively well. When taken sick, he had been preparing a new edition of his works, the only full collection that had ever been made, and he had the satisfaction of publishing it soon after his recovery. This was the last literary work he was destined to do, and it rounded off fitly his career as a man of letters.”

Of these six years perhaps his friends remember his conversation most. Like other great men and good men, he did not insist on choosing the subject for conversation himself, but adapted himself to the wishes and notions of the people around him. His memory was so absolute, his fancy was so free, and his experience so wide that he seemed as much at home in one subject as in another. But when he had quite his own way among a circle of people more or less interested in books or literature, the talk was quite sure to drift round into some discussion of etymologies, of dialect, or of the change of habit which comes in as one or two centuries go by. And when his curiosity was once excited about a word—as I said when I was speaking of his talk with Mr. Murray—he would hold on to that word as a genealogist holds on to the biography of a great-grandmother of whom he only knows half the name. Here are one or two passages from notes which illustrate what I mean: “I used to know some about Pennsylvania Dutch, but forget their names.” “I wish I could have studied the Western lingo more, for it has colored our national speech most.” “I think perhaps W.P. Garrison might put you on the track of something about the Southern patois.”

“Pitch into the abuse of ‘will’ and ‘shall,’ ‘would’ and ‘should;’ when we were boys, no New Englander was capable of confounding them. I am expecting a statute saying that a murderer ‘will be hanged by the neck till he is dead.’ Alas the day!” And again, “Daddock I knew, but never met it alive; dodder, for a tree whose wood is beginning to grow pulpy with decay, I have heard, and the two words may be cousins. The latter, however, I believe to be a modern importation.” Murray and the dictionaries confirm his quick guess between the relation of one of these words to the other.

We have a fine American proverb, “Get the best.” In later years I have tried to make some Western State adopt it for its state seal. I have never seen it in any earlier use than in one of Lowell’s pleasant letters describing a canoe voyage in Maine; and I wrote to him rather late in his life to ask him if he were the inventor of the phrase. It has been adopted, as the reader may be apt to remember, by the authors of Webster’s Dictionary, and is a sort of trade-mark to their useful volumes. I am sorry to say that Lowell himself did not remember whether he had picked it up in conversation, or whether he coined it in its present form. For myself, I like to associate it with him.

I find, as I said, I am always reading with pleasure his estimate of his own work in the close of his life. It seems to me to be free from mock modesty on the one hand, as it is from vanity on the other. He seems to me to be as indifferent about style as I think a man ought to be. If a man knows he is well dressed, he had better not recall his last conversation with his tailor; he had better go and come and do his duty. Other people may say about the dress what they choose. In Lowell’s self-criticism, if one may call it so, you see the same frankness and unconsciousness, the same freedom from conceit of any kind, which you see in those early expressions which have been cited as illustrations of his boyhood and his youth. If he had said what he wanted to, he knew he had. If he had failed, he knew that. But it seemed to him almost of course that if a man knew what he wanted to say he should be able to say it.