James Russell Lowell and His Friends

by Edward Everett Hale

for he really lost his eyes in the cause of freedom.

Longfellow was kind to him, Lowell was kind to him, and, indeed, he was a man who deserved to have friends everywhere. When I was in Europe in 1873, I was glad to hear that the good Von Hutten was living again in the castle of his ancestors upon the Danube River. It was one of the minor misfortunes of my life that I was not able to accept his invitation to visit him there.

ELMWOOD

As I have said, it has been intimated that Lowell chafed under the regular requisitions of the duties of a professor. And, as I have said, most men do chafe a little when they find that on a given day they are expected to do a given thing where they want to do something else. It must be discouraging to have a class of boys around you to whom a lesson is simply a bore, and to know that you will hear, at twenty-seven minutes after eleven, the same stupid mistake which you heard made at twenty-six minutes after eleven, three hundred and sixty-five days ago. In his private letters there is occasionally an expression, sometimes serious and sometimes gay, of the dislike of the necessary slavery which follows on such work. But he had accepted it, for better for worse, and went through with it loyally. He liked the intercourse which his work gave him with young men of promise, and availed himself gladly of every opportunity to make the intercourse of advantage to them. In a charming and suggestive paper by Professor Barrett Wendell, which was published in “Scribner’s” immediately after Lowell’s death, there is such detail as only a college professor could write of some of the methods and habits in which Lowell grew into a friendly intimacy with his pupils. He assigned one evening in a week when they might call to see him, and he was so cordial then that they took the impression that he liked to see them, and would go up on any evening when they chose. I am favored with the private journal of one of these pupils, in which are many anecdotes, some even pathetic, of the cordial intercourse he had with them. Professor Wendell gives a valuable account of his own experience with Lowell. He had never studied any Italian, and yet he boldly resolved that he would ask Lowell’s permission to attend his lectures on Dante, though he had no knowledge of the Italian language. Lowell was pleased, perhaps was interested in seeing what so bright a boy would do under such circumstances; and the result of this was, as Mr. Wendell says, “at the end of a month I could read Dante better than I ever learned to read Greek or Latin or German.” Remember this, gentlemen who are taking nine years to teach a boy to read Latin; and reflect that Mr. Wendell reads his Latin as well as the best of you.

I think the reader may indulge me in a little excursus when I say a few words seriously to the undergraduates of to-day with regard to this form of cordial intercourse between them and their professors. We used to say, when I was in college, that we wished the professors would treat us as gentlemen. The wish is a very natural one. I have had many classes myself in the fifty or sixty years which have followed, and I have always tried to live up to that undergraduate theory. I have treated my pupils as if they wanted to learn and were gentlemen, and their honor could be relied upon. Looking back on it, I think I should say that about half of them have met me more than halfway. But—and here lies the warning which I wish to give to undergraduates—the other half have taken an ell where I gave an inch. Because I did not crowd them they did nothing; they considered me a “soft” person, and my course a “soft” course. In other words, they shirked, simply because I did not treat them with the methods of a low-grade grammar-school.

Young gentlemen, then, ought to consider how far they are themselves responsible for any supposed harshness or mechanical habit on the part of the gentlemen who really know more than they do, and who are willing to trust them in their work. I had the honor last spring of being appointed as one of the judges of some prose exercises in one of our older colleges. I was proud and glad to give the time which the examination of these exercises required. What did I find? I found, of three different papers submitted to me in competition on the same subject, that all the writers had stolen, from reviews which they supposed would not be known, long passages, and copied them as their own. In this particular case, it happened that the three writers were so ignorant of the literature of the last half-century that they copied the same passage, hoping that the judges of their exercises would be ignorant enough to be deceived. Is it not rather hard to be told that you are to “treat as gentlemen” blackguards like these, who are willing to tell lies for so petty a purpose as was involved in this endeavor? I should say that the Greek-letter societies have it in their power to do a good deal to tone up the undergraduate conscience in such affairs.

To return to Lowell: He was quite beyond and above confining himself to the requisitions of his profession. As an instance of his generosity in this way, in the winter of 1865 he offered to the divinity students to come round to them and lecture familiarly to them on the mediæval idea of hell as it may be gathered from Dante. This was no part of the business of his chair. He volunteered for it as the reader of these lines might offer to take a class in a Sunday-school. I remember that some of the students took a notion that he pinched himself by his generous help to those whom he thought in need. One of his pupils told me that Lowell offered him a Christmas present of valuable books, under the pretext that he was thinning out his book-shelves. “I declined them,” said my friend, “simply from the feeling that he could not afford to give them. I need not say,” he says, “that I am sorry for this now.”

I am favored by Mr. Robert Lincoln, who was fortunate enough to be one of his pupils, with the following memoranda of the impression which he made upon them:—

Dear Doctor Hale,—My only association with Mr. Lowell in college was as a member of a small class who “went through” Dante under his supervision. Our duty was to prepare ourselves to translate the text, and Mr. Lowell heard our blunderings with a wonderful patience, and rewarded us with delightful talks on matters suggested in the poem; but we had no set lecture. My experience (that is, at Harvard), therefore, only permits me to speak of him as a professor in the recitation-room. In that relation his erudition, humor, and kindness made me, and I am sure all my associates, enjoy the hour with him as we did no other college exercise. I can sincerely say that it is one of my most highly cherished experiences. With us he was always conversational, and flattered us and gained us by an assumption that what interested him interested us. When now I take up my Dante, Mr. Lowell seems to be with me....