James Russell Lowell and His Friends

by Edward Everett Hale

He was himself a graduate of Harvard College in the year 1764, “went into business,” as our New England phrase has it, and became rich, as that word was used in those early days. He is spoken of by Mr. Quincy as a man “of strong sense and steady purpose, guiding his life by his own convictions of duty, with little esteem for popular opinion or posthumous fame; scrupulously just and honest; practicing habits of frugality less from regard to wealth than out of respect to the example.”

It is the fashion to laugh at the name of Smith; but it must be confessed that a good many people who have had to go through life under that banner have done the world good service.

“Jones teach him modesty and Greek,

Smith how to think, Burke how to speak.”

This is the Smith couplet in the fine account of the Beefsteak Club. If Abiel Smith never did as much thinking as Adam, he must, all the same, be remembered as a benefactor. He certainly never did so much harm as Adam Smith has done, if he has not done more good.

I am apt to think that this modest man was the first person in the English-speaking world to recognize the value of the systematic study of the modern languages in any university of England or America. A smattering of French was taught at our Cambridge as early as 1780, and Jefferson studied some French at William and Mary’s at about the same time. Charles Bellini was made Professor of the Modern Languages there in 1781. This recognition of the foreign languages of civilization was due probably to the Philistine fact that we were the allies of a Bourbon king.

The first professor under this Smith foundation was George Ticknor, a graduate of Dartmouth College of the year 1807, now known everywhere in the world of letters by his history of Spanish literature. I found this book the working book of reference in the Royal Library at Madrid—which, by the way, is the most elegant working public library I ever saw. Ticknor was professor from 1820 to 1835. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was his immediate successor, and, when Longfellow resigned in 1854, Lowell was appointed to succeed him. This is a brilliant series, the honors of which have been well sustained since Lowell died.

I have seen it somewhere said that Lowell disliked the work of a college professor. In a way, I suppose this statement may be literally true. That is to say, like other men who know how to work hard, it was not agreeable to him to be called off at a particular hour to do a particular thing for a particular length of time, and so far to interrupt the regular line of his study or thought for the day. But he was not a fool, and he accepted the universe frankly. So that, if it were his duty to walk down from Elmwood to the college and see how a particular class was getting on in Spanish, or how the particular teacher handled the beginners in French, he could do that as well as another. He would scold, in his funny way, about such interruption of his more interesting work,—so do the rest of us,—but if the thing were to be done, he did it. I say this at the beginning of what I want to say about his position at Cambridge as a teacher.

In describing the four years between 1834 and 1838, the years of his undergraduate life, I tried to give some idea of what an American college was in those prehistoric times. Simply, it was a somewhat enlarged country “academy.” The wonder was that the boys did not study in the rooms in which they recited, as they would have done in such an academy. That would have completed the resemblance to such a school. The distinction that you studied your lesson in your own room and recited it in another building was the principal distinction between your work at the Boston Latin School, or Leicester Academy, and the work which you did in college. Thus, you were told that your lesson was to be eighty lines of Euripides’s “Hecuba.” You sat down at your task in the evening, looked out the words and found out how to read it, you went down the next day and recited it, and went back again. That was all which Hecuba was to you, or you to Hecuba. I can conceive of nothing more dull.

Governor Everett once said very well that a school was a place where you recited a lesson which somebody outside had taught you. This was quite true in those days. For one, as I ought to have said in an earlier chapter, I had but four teachers in college,—Channing, Longfellow, Peirce, and Bachi. The rest heard me recite but taught me nothing.