One is reminded of Lamb’s famous letter to Manning when he reads a letter which Lowell wrote to his brother-in-law, Captain Parker, then in China: “A man who is eccentric enough to prefer a part of the world where folks walk with their heads down certainly deserves the commiseration of his friends, but as for letters—how to write and what to write about? I can’t write upside down, and I suppose you can’t read rightside up. So it is clearly a waste of time, but you will be able to read this after you get home again, when old age will have given all the news in it a kind of second-childhood, and it will have become fresh by dint of having been forgotten.
“Of course there isn’t any news—when was there ever any? For my own part, I don’t regret it, looking on news as generally only a short way of saying nuisance, and believing Noah to have been the happiest man that ever lived, for all the gossips were five thousand fathoms under water, and he knew that he should not hear anything when he got into port. The daughters must have been put to it, though, with nobody left but Shem, Ham, and Japhet to work slippers and smoking caps for, and never a new engagement to discuss.
As for news here,—there was the College Exhibition day before yesterday, which was a good deal like other Exhibitions only that it rained. I suppose your wife has written you of the appointment of Caihee as professor of the Chinese language and literature with a salary of ten piculs a year, which she is allowed to raise in the college grounds, the Corporation finding cucumber seed and Theodore Parker the vinegar. A compromise has been effected in theological matters, and she is to worship Josh Bates the London banker instead of simple Josh, in consideration of which Mr. Bates will pay half the salary of a Bonze to be imported express. The students will be allowed to let off fire-crackers during her lectures. She begins with an exposition of the doctrine of the venerable confuse-us, which can hardly fail of being in harmony with all existing systems of philosophy and theology. As all the Professors are obliged to do something outside for a living, she will continue to be on duty with Maggie. This is a great triumph for the Woman’s-Rights party, who have nominated Mrs. —— for Governess, with a Council of old women, including, I am told, Mr. ——. You see the world moves up here. As to other political intelligence, there is not much—that quality is commonly wanting in such matters: but the Charleston Convention is expected to nominate the Captain of the yacht Wanderer[126] for President, as an exponent of the views of the more moderate wing of the party (I mean, of course, the Southern wing) on the subject of slavery. A Red River overseer is to adorn the ticket as candidate for the Vice-Presidency. We shall be likely at last to get a truly conservative administration. At home we have a rehearsal of ‘Bonnie Doon,’ Banks being the Republican man, while the brays are well performed by Mr. B. F. Butler.
“Cambridge meanwhile is all agog with a wedding to come off this afternoon, Darley the artist and Miss Jenny (I think) Colburn. There is to be a wonderful turn-out of handsome bridesmaids, the bride having the good luck to be beautifully cousined. A great crush of hoops is looked for at Christ Church, and the coopers, it is said, will take the occasion for a strike. All the girls are crazy to go, and many who go in with a diameter of ten feet will come out with only two. I have sent for a new pair of lemon-colored gloves for the wedding visit. There will be a jam, of course, but then I am one of the harder sex, and shan’t mind it. They have my best wishes for a crop of little Darleyings.
“So you are to have another war over there. I think it a shabby piece of business. Can you thrash a nation into friendly relations? And if a man don’t like your society, can you change his views by giving him a black eye? The Chinese are not a nation of savages, and with two hundred and forty millions of people they can hold out a great while in killed, wounded, and missing. I think John Bull and Johnny Crapaud will have their hands full before they are done with it. What has a Bull to do in a China-shop?”
There was an incompatibility of temper in Lowell which stood in the way of entire pleasure in editing the Atlantic. He was not averse to work—instances enough have been shown of this—but he chafed under methodical work. He could work hours and even days with scarcely a respite, but he could also help himself to large measures of loafing. A magazine, with its incessant inflow of letters and manuscripts, and the demand which it makes for periodic punctuality, ill befits such a temper, and Lowell found a good deal of irksomeness in his daily task. “I used to be able to answer letters in the month during which I received them,” he wrote ruefully to Mr. White, 6 April, 1859, “but now they pile up and make a jam behind the boom of my occupations, till they carry everything before them, and after a little confused whirling float placidly down to the ocean of Oblivion. I do not know if it be so with everybody, but with me the perpetual chance of interruption to which I am liable induces a kind of stolid despair. I am afraid that at this moment there are at least a hundred and fifty unanswered letters in and on and round my desk, whose blank [looks] seem to say ‘how long?’ Your letter came just in the midst of a bother in the Atlantic, which it took all my diplomacy to settle so that both sides should not bite their own noses off, to which mad meal they had violent appetites. It is all ‘fixed’ now, and things go smoothly again—but meanwhile the hiatus in my correspondence grew daily wider.”
“I am at last even with my manuscripts,” he wrote to another friend. “It is splendid. Such a heap as had gathered. It had snowed poems and tales and essays, and an eddy had drifted them into my study knee-deep. But I have shovelled myself out, and hope ’tis the last great storm of the season. I even found time to go to Dresel’s concert last evening, where I saw one of your cousins. The concert was nearly all Mendelssohn and seemed to me a little vague and cloudy—beautiful clouds, rose tinted and—indefinite. I longed for a good riving flash of Italian lightning. Fanny liked it, however, but I was rather bored. It seemed to me like reading manuscripts titillated with promise continually and finding no egregious and satisfying fulfilment.”
“Don’t come this way again,” he writes to Mr. White, “without letting me know you are coming. I want a talk with you, and I can’t talk by letter, for I can’t write them when I am tired, and I am tired all the time. If there be any truth in the doctrine of compensations, the bobolinks in some other stage of existence will all be caged in Grub Street and made editors. They are altogether too happy here. Well, maybe we shall be bobolinks. If ever we should be, I can show you a fine meadow for building in, a kind of grassy Venice with good tussock foundations jutting everywhere from the water.”
After something more than a year’s experience, he wrote to Mr. Norton: “I am resolved that no motive of my own comfort or advantage shall influence me, but I hate the turmoil of such affairs, despise the notoriety they give one, and long for the day when I can be vacant to the Muses and to my books for their own sakes. I cannot stand the worry of it much longer without a lieutenant. To have questions of style, grammar, and punctuation in other people’s articles to decide, while I want all my concentration for what I am writing myself—to have added to this personal appeals, from ill-mannered correspondents whose articles have been declined, to attend to—to sit at work sometimes fifteen hours a day, as I have done lately—makes me nervous, takes away my pluck, compels my neglecting my friends, and induces the old fits of the blues.”[127]
“If my letters seem dry,” he wrote again to Mr. White, “it is no fault of mine. I am overworked and overworried and overinterrupted. I can’t write a genial letter, but I want you and like you all the same. If ever I get back to my old nest among the trees at Elmwood, and I am no longer professor or editor, with time enough to follow up a doubtful passage in Shakespeare or a bit of dilettante philology,—then what pleasure I should have in corresponding with you and exchanging thoughts and suggestions. But now, if anything occurs to me, I feel too tired to communicate it to anybody, for my days are so broken that I am forced sometimes to sit up till the birds sing to get any time for my own studies.”