James Russell Lowell and His Friends

by Edward Everett Hale

Señor Canovas was the minister who was murdered last year.

With such cares, and in such difficult surroundings, Lowell spent the close of 1877 and the years 1879 and 1880. He was then summoned, very unexpectedly, to transfer his residence to London as United States minister to England.

In the mean time, with his astonishing power of work, he not only attended curiously well to the work of the legation, but had devoted himself sedulously to the study of the Spanish language and literature. His private letters have the most amusing and interesting references to such studies. When he was presented to the king, he made his speech in English, the king answered him in Spanish, then came forward and exchanged a few compliments in French. But very soon it appears that he was determined not to be dependent on any interpreter, or on the accomplishment of any of the foreign officers with whom he had to do. “I am turned schoolboy again, and have a master over me once more,—a most agreeable man, Don Herminegildo Giner de los Bios, who comes to me every morning at nine o’clock for an hour. We talk Spanish together (he doesn’t understand a word of English), and I work hard at translation and the like.” And again: “This morning I wrote a note to one of the papers here, in which my teacher found only a single word to change. Wasn’t that pretty well for a boy of my standing?”

This he writes to his daughter and to Miss Norton: “I like the Spaniards, and find much that is only too congenial in their genius for to-morrow. I am working now at Spanish as I used to work at Old French,—that is, all the time, and with all my might. I mean to know it better than they do themselves, which is not saying much.... This is the course of my day: get up at eight; from nine, sometimes till eleven, my Spanish professor; at eleven breakfast, at twelve to the legation, at three home again and a cup of chocolate, then read the paper and write Spanish till a quarter to seven, at seven dinner, and at eight drive in an open carriage in the Prado till ten, to bed twelve to one.”

He writes to a friend in 1878 that he found that the minister of state for foreign affairs sometimes smoked a pipe in the secrecy of home. “I was sure he must be blistering his tongue with Spanish mundungus, and sent him a package of mine. He writes to say, ‘It is the best I ever smoked in my life; I had no idea there was anything so good.’ So I sent him yesterday ten more packages, and have promised to keep his pipe full for so long as I am here.”

Of his own work in his vocation as diplomatist he says: “I am beginning to feel handier in my new trade, but I had a hard row to hoe at first. All alone, without a human being I had ever seen before in my life, and with unaccustomed duties, feeling as if I were beset with snares on every hand, obliged to carry on the greater part of my business in a strange tongue, it was rather trying for a man with so sympathetic and sensitive a temperament as mine, and I don’t much wonder the gout came upon me like an armed man. Three attacks in five months! But now I begin to take things more easily. Still, I don’t like the business much, and feel that I am wasting my time. Nearly all I have to do neither enlists my sympathies much nor makes any call on my better faculties. I feel, however, as if I were learning something, and I dare say I shall find I have when I get back to my own chimney-corner again. I like the Spaniards, with whom I find many natural sympathies in my own nature, and who have had a vast deal of injustice done them by this commercial generation. They are still Orientals to a degree one has to live among them to believe. But I think they are getting on. The difficulty is that they don’t care about many things that we are fools enough to care about, and the balance in the ledger is not so entirely satisfactory to them as a standard of morality as to some more advanced nations. They employ inferior races (as the Romans did) to do their intellectual drudgery for them, their political economy, scholarship, history, and the like. But they are advancing even on these lines, and one of these days—But I won’t prophesy. Suffice it that they have plenty of brains, if ever they should condescend so far from their hidalguia as to turn them to advantage. They get a good deal out of life at a cheap rate, and are not far from wisdom, if the old Greek philosophers who used to be held up to us as an example knew anything about the matter.”

It must have been a joy to Mr. Evarts, in the Department of State at home, to read Lowell’s dispatches when they came. It is reserved for those who have the inner keys to the inner bureau of the department to read them all; but here are some passages which have been printed in the government reports,—because harmless,—which make one understand why he was sent to England when there was a vacancy there:—

(February 6, 1878.) “In these days of newspaper enterprise, when everything that happens ought to happen, or might have happened is reported by telegraph to all quarters of the world, the slow-going dispatch-bag can hardly be expected to bring anything very fresh or interesting in regard to a public ceremonial which, though intended for political effect, had little political significance. The next morning frames of fireworks are not inspiring, unless to the moralist; and Madrid is already quarreling over the cost and mismanagement of a show for the tickets to which it was quarreling a week ago.”

...“Whoever has seen the breasts of the peasantry fringed with charms older than Carthage and relics as old as Rome, and those of the upper classes plastered with decorations, will not expect Spain to become conscious of the nineteenth century and ready to welcome it in a day.”

...“A nation which has had too much glory and too little good housekeeping.”...