James Russell Lowell and His Friends

by Edward Everett Hale

In the twenty years between 1834 and 1855, the change had begun at Cambridge which has made of the college of to-day an entirely different place, with entirely different customs and traditions. It was in a great address delivered by Dr. Hedge at the Phi Beta Kappa in 1840 that the first visible token of this change appeared before the somewhat startled gaze of corporation, overseers, and graduates. Dr. Hedge said squarely then that this sort of schoolboy work could not long continue in a civilized country like ours, and that everybody must go to work to lift the college to a higher grade.

I think he thought that the age of undergraduates was to be greater than it was before. I think we all thought so. I am told, however, now, that the experience of the years since that time has not justified this supposition. I believe that the average of the age of the boys in the college classes is but a few months older than it proved to be then. But I am disposed to think that in the prehistoric days there came in more grown men—rather sporadic instances, indeed, but still a good many of them—and that the presence of these grown men in the classes raised the statistics of average of those periods. If two or three queer antediluvian fellows of thirty-five came into the midst of a class of fifty boys of sixteen, why, they screwed up the average age by several months. I do not understand that such sporadic cases occur very often now. Anyway, the doctrine of Dr. Hedge’s address is that the college shall open its doors to teach what it can teach; that there shall be a chance for the teachers themselves to be learning something in the lines of original research, and that every encouragement shall be given to the learner to follow the “bent of his genius,” as Mr. Emerson says somewhere, and that he shall not be made to do certain things because somebody else has done them.

The line of Presidents of short periods, which followed, was a line of men not disinclined to these larger views. Neither Dr. Sparks, nor Dr. Felton, nor Dr. Hill had a long enough term of office to do much in the direction in which President Eliot has so boldly stepped forward. But they were not averse to enlarging the life of the University. Certainly Lowell was in sympathy with any such endeavor.

The Smith professorship, as I have intimated, gave opportunity for a pretty wide range of duty on the part of the professor. He had, indeed, a wider range than any other professor had in any other department. He was virtually responsible, as a superintendent, for the verbal instruction about nominative cases and verbs and der and die and das, which had to be given, if young men were to know anything about the literature of the languages taught. These languages were French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. But the real detail of the instruction in these languages was given by people who were called assistant professors or instructors; and the professor himself, so far as he had a function of his own, was a lecturer on important themes bearing on the literary life of the last two or three centuries. As early as Longfellow’s day, he delivered in college a series of lectures on Dante, which embodied much of what one finds in the notes to his translation of the poet. Lowell began his course by reading to the students the lectures which he had delivered in Boston. In the twenty years of his active professorship he delivered to them several courses of similar lectures.

If you talk with any of the men now on the stage who were with him in college, you find that they associate him especially with these brilliant lectures which students liked to attend. But you find much more than this. Those who knew him at all, and who took any interest in the line of study to which he was committed, remember him from their personal intimacies with him. I was myself much interested, in the years between 1866 and 1870, in the college fortunes of Frederick Wadsworth Loring, a young fellow who died, too soon as it seemed, only a year after he graduated. He has left behind quite enough to justify those of us who remember him in what we say of his remarkable promise. I saw that boy when he was seven years old, sitting on a footstool at his mother’s feet, reading Shakespeare eagerly. I said to her, “Take care! Pray take care!” And she said to me, with an expression which I have never forgotten, “Oh, we know the danger, and I think we are careful!” And they were. She died, alas! in the year 1859. He was, so to speak, pitchforked into college, and found himself there, with his passionate enthusiasm for literature and poetry, after very hard and uncomfortable discipline at a poor country academy. And at Cambridge, as in Lowell’s time, there was chapel which must be attended, there was this and that which must be learned, and so-and-so which must be done. And here was Loring, wild about the majestic achievements of the great poets. He was utterly indifferent as to the systems of Ptolemy or of Newton; and the world might have rolled backward for five years without his caring. Yet must is must, and he had to pretend to study mathematics. What would have happened to the dear boy but for the existence of two men, I do not know; but, fortunately for him and for those who loved him, here was Lowell at the head of the department of modern languages, and Elbridge Jefferson Cutler at the head of the English subdivision. And, after four years of Loring’s college life, which was of value to him that no man can pretend to describe, he graduated. I think, indeed, that they gave him a poem at Commencement. I have never forgotten that when I was at the “spread” in Holworthy, where Loring modestly entertained his friends on Class Day, I met Cutler, and I said to him, “Well, Cutler, you have got Fred through.” “Yes,” he said, “we have dragged him through by the hair of his head.”

“We” meant Lowell and himself. They were perfectly determined that this brilliant young poet should get what could be got out of the university. They were perfectly determined that no waywardness of his own should break up the regular course of life which offered such promise. And if I told some of the stories of the affectionate way in which those two distinguished men cared for the life of this distinguished boy, it would be a story out of which some one who knew how to hold a pen could make a fascinating romance or drama. It would, perhaps, do something to remove the preposterous and ridiculous impression of the more foolish undergraduate that “the faculty” hates him.

On the catalogue Mr. Lowell’s position as Smith Professor covers thirty years. In 1886 he resigned to be appointed “Professor Emeritus,” and so his name remains on the college catalogue until his death. In 1865 he had the welcome relief of the appointment of Mr. Cutler as an assistant. The department was gradually enlarged with the enlargement of the college, but for thirty years it was under Mr. Lowell’s general administration, excepting during his journeys in Europe and his diplomatic residence in Madrid and in London.

This boy of 1838 left college to try the experiments of life, not really knowing what life had for him. In the seventeen years between 1838 and 1855 he had been in Europe two or three times, and, as the reader knows, he had spent a part of one winter in Philadelphia. But Cambridge had been his home most of the time, and he had seen step by step the changes which made this “academy” or “seminary” into a university. Some of the officers still remained to whom he had recited when in college.

Josiah Quincy had been succeeded as President by Edward Everett, and Jared Sparks, and James Walker, the last of whom was now the President.

Dr. Walker’s name may not be universally known among students in all parts of this country, especially by men of those religious schools who made it a duty to brand him and the men of his communion as infidels. But it is safe to say that no man was in college during the twenty-two years in which he was professor and president who does not remember him with gratitude and speak of him with enthusiasm. From 1838 to 1853 he was the Professor of Natural Religion and Moral Philosophy. He lectured on these subjects in the Lowell Institute. He often preached in the college pulpit, and to this day, when you meet any of his old hearers, you will find that they hark back to him and what he said to them with distinct memory of the lessons, practical and profound, which he enforced.