Cordially yours,
J. R. Lowell.
The article on Spenser, as I have said, was the last of the series of considerable studies of great authors which Lowell had been writing for the past ten years, and he now gathered the final sheaf into a second series of “Among My Books,” which he had hoped to bring out in the fall of 1875, but which did not appear until the spring of 1876. His activity in literature, and the accumulation of his published writings, were making him more steadily a conspicuous figure and calling out appreciation and criticisms. To Mrs. Herrick, who had been collecting material for an article on him, and had applied to him for facts and dates, he wrote, 6 October, 1875, after the appearance of her article: “If I were not pleased with what you have written about me, I must indeed be difficult, as the French say. It is not for me to comment on your discrimination, but I cannot be insensible to the truly feminine grace and delicate fervor of sympathy which run through the whole article.... You have given me a real pleasure and a real encouragement. I have never seen any of Mr. Wilkinson’s criticisms upon me,[61] but I know no reason to suspect any personal spite. He is ludicrously wide of the mark in what he says of the early reception of my writings at home and the later in England. I never belonged to any clique here, and the highest appreciation I ever received in England (degrees from Oxford and Cambridge) were when the Geneva delegation had left a very bitter feeling against everything American. I say this only for your friendly ears. I dare say I may seem to contradict myself sometimes, for my temper of mind is such that I never have the patience to read over again what I have once printed. As for my grammar, you may be quite easy. I know quite as much about English as Mr. W. is likely to do, and inherited my grammar, which is the best way of getting it. I think (from what others have told me) that you hit the nail on the head in saying that I have a kind of ‘vitality.’ But it is not wise to discuss one’s own qualities. I will only say that if nature had made me as strong in the driving as in the conceptive faculties I should have done more and better.
“I am glad your article is fairly over and out of the way, for now I can enjoy the pleasure of your friendship without any feeling of awkwardness. That I have been a help to you is a help to myself, and I thank you for telling me of it so frankly.
“When I wrote you last I was still very far from well. I am now (though not recovered) very much better, and my wits are beginning to clear again.”
His birthday in 1876 found him reflecting on the degree to which he was absconding from active life. “I get so absorbed,” he writes, “in the pretty shadows on the surface of Time, that I never notice the flowing of the current, and while I am musing, behold it has brought Next Year abreast of me.... I am going to dine with Gray, C. J., this afternoon to meet the Friday Club. I am invited to join it, and have been pondering over my answer these six weeks. I feel as if it might shake me up a little, for solitude is gradually making me numb. But I don’t know. I have the best possible Swift in my head, if I could only get him out. I have half written it twice, and am now going to begin again. You don’t believe me when I tell you that my mind is sluggish, but it is.” Apparently he had planned a paper on Swift of the proportions of one of his North American articles; what actually appeared was a brief review of Forster’s “Life of Swift” in the Nation. He wrote but little verse, though he was not neglectful of the work of others. “By the way,” he wrote to Mr. Howells, 21 March, 1875, “who is Edgar Fawcett? Those ‘Immortelles’ of his in the last Atlantic are in my judgment easily the best poetry in the number. I have been taken with things of his before, I remember. Why did you let the other man (whose name I have forgotten) spoil a charming little poem by writing Ac’tæon? I doubt if Artemis would have wasted an arrow in him—but Pallas Athene would have given him the ferule. It was so light and pretty, all the rest of it.”
In a nature like Lowell’s there is more the appearance of sluggishness than the reality. His industry is evident enough when one adds his published and uncollected writings to his regular academic duties. What may easily have provoked the popular notion of his indolence was the privacy of his life, the fact that he himself was little en evidence, and the casual on-looker seeing him sitting for hours over his books and pipe, taking his social recreation only in the seclusion of his own cherished home, and the libraries and dining-rooms of a very small circle of friends, hardly ever going even to Boston, and drawn when on his feet rather to Beaver Brook than to the pavements,—such an one might fancy him almost a scholarly recluse, living anywhere but in the American present.
But a great deal of the bustle of other men’s lives had its sphere of activity in Lowell’s mind. He was wont to retreat within himself, but it was to reflect on what he saw in the world about him. As has been seen already, he had commented on public affairs in verse which was not to be credited to his poetic sense so much as to his moral and political insight, and the tide of feeling was rising in his soul. It needed occasion only to bring him more actively into the current of affairs.
The changing of the time of which he had written so caustically had brought about what many to-day are disposed to regard as the lowest ebb of politics within the memory of man. As Grant’s second administration drew near its close, there began to be a stirring in the minds of men, and a resolution to reform the administration of government. The spectacle especially of the Southern States held in control by a combination of Northern carpet-baggers and negro politicians, backed by the Federal army, was one which filled with dismay those who had seen in the abolition of slavery the beginning of a new life for the nation; and the sordid view of public life which had resulted from this and from the unchecked abuse of political power in the distribution of public offices as rewards for party service, was leading to a determined effort at a reform of the whole civil service.
Lowell’s letters at this time indicate how deeply he felt the needs of the hour. In the spring of 1876 a number of young Cambridge men were inspired with a zeal to better the morale of the Republican party, which was the party in power and the one whose traditions made its better element ardent to purify it from the corruption which seemed to be fastening upon it. The effect of this rally was to call a large public meeting, and Lowell was invited to preside.
“Though I don’t think the function you wish me to perform,” he wrote in reply, “quite in my line, I am willing to do anything which may be thought helpful in a movement of which I heartily approve. I am not so hopeful, I confess, as I was thirty years ago; yet, if there be any hope, it is in getting independent thinkers to be independent voters.”