“Here they lived, read, wrote, talked, enjoyed themselves. Mr. Lowell was probably writing something of importance, but he had at that time no public or official business, no pressing engagements. He was, in fact, doing just what he pleased all the time. Of course his acquaintance was large in the American colony and among the best French society of Paris, but I do not think he troubled himself about it much. He delighted in prowling about the book-stalls which abound in the Quai Voltaire, where old rubbish in print is displayed along the parapet of the river in tempting openness, and where a real book-worm may rummage and find something really valuable among apparently hopeless stuff. He loved a quiet little dinner (in their rooms) à quatre, or, still better, à trois, where the food was good enough, and the talk excellent; his cigar came afterwards. Mrs. Lowell, his sympathetic and congenial companion, sat smiling and interested at such times, like the proper wife of a good talker, not talking much herself, but showing in her pleasant, refined face that she appreciated and enjoyed the fun. Although her health, even then, was delicate, she was strong enough to share his life and interests. What they both liked the most was the quiet of their own fireside, and the unmolested pursuit of literary pleasures, stimulated by all the resources of the great city, without any parade, or the burden of a crowd of engagements. They might have been any humdrum couple of small means, passing the winter in the most delightful city in the world, with all the resources in themselves of wit, intelligence, and mutual affection.”
While Lowell was in Europe, King Amadeo, the Italian sovereign of Spain, abdicated, and the republic of Castelar was born. Lowell was in Venice in November, 1873, at the time of the Virginius massacre. But he does not seem to have known, better than any others of his countrymen in Europe, how near we were to war with the Spanish republic. Yet in that month Mr. Fish had instructed Mr. Sickles to break off relations with the Spanish government unless they could reform their Cuban administration. “If Spain cannot redress these outrages, the United States will.” Such were the words in his telegram to Madrid of November 15, 1873.
Lowell had once and again visited his old friend William Story in his residence in Italy. The Storys had visited America in 1865. With Mrs. Lowell he now had an opportunity to visit them in Rome.
Since Mr. Story went to Rome with his wife in 1847 he had been devoting himself to sculpture, but he had never forgotten his American friends; and his light pen kept him in the memory of many of those who did not see his statues. His Cleopatra had won general approval. When the Lowells visited Rome in 1873 Story’s Alkestis was new, and Lowell writes of it with genuine pleasure. “It was so pleasant to be able to say frankly, ‘You have done something really fine, and which everybody will like.’ I wonder whether I shall ever give that pleasure to anybody.” This, observe, dear reader, as late as 1874.
Lowell returned to America in the summer of that year, arriving in Elmwood on the Fourth of July.
I myself do not believe that a long residence in Europe is of great help to an American gentleman or lady so far as an estimate of one’s own country goes. They are apt to read the London “Times’s” view of America, or that contained in Galignani’s newspaper, or possibly the Paris edition of the New York “Herald.” These utterances from day to day are not encouraging; but if they were true and adequate, one need not complain of discouragement. The truth is, however, that they are not adequate, and therefore they are not true. For one month when I was in Europe in 1873 the daily American dispatch in the “Times” was confined to the fortunes of some wretched Modoc Indians in California, who were hiding among their rocks and were being killed one by one by sharpshooters. For the rest there was practically nothing,—nothing which showed me that brave boys were growing into brave men, that good girls were growing into pure women, that universities and libraries and Chautauquas and summer schools were giving a liberal education to half my country, that merchants were telling the truth and acting the truth, and inventors were renewing the world.
I go a little out of the way to say this, because I observe that Mr. A. Lawrence Lowell, in his admirable notice of his cousin’s life, suggests that his stay in Europe in 1872-73 to a certain extent modified his notion with regard to America and American politics. Mr. A. Lawrence Lowell uses the following words:—
“During his stay in Europe Lowell had been distressed at the condition of politics in this country, and annoyed at the expressions of contempt for America it had called forth on the other side of the Atlantic. On his return he was horrified by the lack of indignation at corruption in public life, for the intense party feeling engendered by the war was still too strong to permit independent judgment in politics. He expressed his disgust in a couple of poems in ‘The Nation,’ called ‘The World’s Fair’ and ‘Tempora Mutantur.’ The verses were not of a high order of poetry, and at first one regrets that Hosea Biglow did not come out once more to do battle with the spoils system, as he had with the slave power long ago; but the subject was not one that made it possible. Among the archaic sculptures buried on the Acropolis after the sack of Athens by Xerxes, and recently unearthed, is a fragment of a pediment representing Hercules and the Hydra. The hero is on all fours alongside the monster in a cave, a fitting type of the way political corruption must be fought at the present day. The war with slavery, like that of Perseus with the dragon, could be waged on wings with a flashing sword; but the modern reformer must go down on his hands and knees and struggle with reptiles in the dark.”
THE HALL, ELMWOOD