James Russell Lowell, A Biography; vol 2/2

by Horace Elisha Scudder

The preparation which Lowell had received for efficient service as Minister of the United States to Spain certainly did not lie in the discharge of so-called political duties. To be delegate to a district convention and presidential elector would scarcely qualify one for a diplomatic post, and to many of his countrymen no doubt he seemed but a dilettante statesman. Yet he was better trained than many a man who has been more energetic in party organization. He was a fair Spanish scholar so far as familiarity with the literature goes. When he first entered on his duties he was, it is true, depressed by his inability to use the language freely; his pride was mortified with the ease with which others could use it, and both his French, of such use in diplomacy, and his Italian got in his way. But a couple of months after he had reached his post he could say: “I can talk now with comparative ease and write notes without fear of scandal. What I wanted was the familiar and every-day forms. I am getting them. But all along I have insisted on conducting my official business in Spanish, and have already astonished ’em at the Foreign Office here. They say in their Oriental way that I speak Castilian like a native and pronounce it perfectly. Of course I haven’t turned goose since I came, to believe all this, but I really am getting on.”

But if colloquial Spanish was not at first at his command, he had a very valuable instrument in his familiarity with Spanish literature. The man who knows and loves the best literature of the country to which he is accredited has the key wherewith to unlock the nature of the men with whom he has to deal. Lowell, to whom Calderon was as a nightingale in his study, was not taken unawares when asked to go to Spain. He did not need to cram for an examination. When qualifying himself for his post at Harvard, twenty years before, he had made himself acquainted with Spanish, and both his studies and his teaching since that day had led him into such an acquaintance with its language, literature, and history, that he could say playfully that he knew more Spanish than most Spaniards.

At first sight it might seem that the somewhat isolated and secluded life he had led would have disqualified Lowell for the life of a diplomat; that greater commerce with men was essential to the training of one whose business it was to deal directly with men in matters possibly of high consequences. But if Lowell was a scholar and somewhat of a recluse, it must be remembered that his most frequent converse was with picked men, and that, moreover, in his studies and reading his attention had been concentrated on literature which was expressive of great thoughts, great emotions, and great dramatic situations, so that both in life and in literature he was at home and moved with ease in high society.

In diplomatic life, the minister can scarcely escape the consciousness of his representative character. The men with whom he has most to do remind him of it; they are themselves in the same category. The reader of Shakespeare’s Histories is struck with the fine impersonation of their countries which the leading characters convey as it were in the tones of their voice. France, England, Scotland become in their impassioned language not geographical entities, nor even nations merely, but incarnate in them. So at courts, aided by the very trappings and ceremonies of their office, private gentlemen become for the nonce figures in a pageant and feel themselves such. They speak, it may be, in their natural voice, and talk for the most part with ministers of state as man to man, with friendly accent and in négligé forms even; but the consciousness of their representative function is never remote, it is always alert and ready against surprise. I suspect it becomes even more easy for a scholar than for a man of affairs to play the part well on such a stage. And it is this same sense which lies behind much of the sensitiveness as to rank and punctilio. The ambassador takes precedence of the minister; thus the minister of a great country is irritated at finding himself in the procession behind the ambassador of a country of a second order, not because his personal pride is wounded, but because his country has felt a slight. These things touch a man of the great world more than a mere man of the world. The scholar who is absolutely content with high thinking and plain living in his own home may be abnormally sensitive to appearances in the embassy over which he presides. It is an illustration of this that when at his presentation to the King there was some blunder, and Lowell was kept waiting twenty minutes beyond the hour appointed for his audience, and the introducer apologized, Lowell replied it was nothing to him personally, but it should be remembered it was not he, but the United States that was kept waiting.

Another illustration appears in the despatch which Lowell sent Mr. Evarts, 3 February, 1878, detailing the course he pursued when he received a telegram from the President congratulating the King upon his approaching marriage. “I communicated the substance of it,” he writes, “to the Minister of State and asked for an audience that I might present it in person to His Majesty. On Monday (the 21st ultimo), accordingly, I was received by King Alfonso in private audience and delivered my message, at the same time adding that it gave me particular pleasure to be the bearer of it. The King in reply desired me to convey to the President his great pleasure in receiving this expression of sympathy from the chief magistrate of a people with which he wished always to maintain and draw closer the most friendly relations. A very gracefully timed compliment to the messenger followed....

“I think that this act of courtesy on the part of the President has really given pleasure here, and has not been entirely lost in the throng of special ambassadors who have been despatched hither with numerous suites to pay the royal compliments of the occasion.

“As these special ambassadors had been received in public audience, I had some doubt whether I ought to consent, as being in this case the immediate representative of the President, to be received privately. But the time was too short for much consideration. The audience was to be at half-past one o’clock, and I received notice of it only the night before. Had it been a letter of the President, I should have insisted on its being received publicly. As it was, I thought it most prudent and graceful to admit the distinction between extraordinary ambassadors sent with great pomp to bring gifts and decorations, and a mere minister plenipotentiary, especially as it would have otherwise been impossible to deliver the message at all before the wedding. The difficulty was heightened by my having only just risen from a very severe attack of illness, which made it necessary for me to economize my strength in order to take any part at all in the ceremonies.”

To all this must surely be added, that his very abstinence from political party associations at home deepened Lowell’s sense of his position. His conception of the nation which he represented was not embarrassed by the vapors too often engendered by “practical politics.” He knew his country, as we have already seen by an examination of his political writings, and even when most full of concern for her integrity, he always kept before him the ideal of a land devoted to freedom and progress. That he was an idealist made him more readily an actor on the diplomatic stage where America met Spain when Lowell conversed with Silvela. But his idealism did not get in the way of his plain business sense. Rather it helped him and supplied that consciousness of dignity which might have forsaken him had he regarded himself merely as a business agent.

The drawback to his satisfaction with the office was his consciousness that he disliked business and was not apt at it; and business after all was what lay constantly beneath all the courtly exchange of civility. “You would have laughed,” he wrote to an intimate friend, “if you could have seen my anxiety when I had to give a receipt for an indemnity of five hundred thousand dollars. I was so afraid of making a blunder. It kept me awake night after night, even when I had signed it, and gave me such palpitations of the heart that I have had pains there ever since. It was not myself I was thinking of—but the guild—I didn’t wish another of those ‘d—d littery fellers’ to come to grief.” And to Mr. Putnam he wrote: “I like the Spaniards very well so far as I know them, and have an instinctive sympathy with their want of aptitude for business.” Of course he relied much on the subordinate officers of the legation, but he knew well that he could not leave the business to them, and he had, besides, for a while the interest in the details of a life which was novel to him, as well as the pride which would not suffer him to be a mere figure-head.

The Lowells were about a month on their way from Boston to Madrid. They spent a few days in London, and Lowell was in a holiday mood both there and in Paris, where they also made a brief halt in the same pleasant inn in the Latin Quarter in which they had been so much at home three years before. The tranquil enjoyment of little scenes which his letters from the two capitals disclose betokens a mind unvexed by many cares. He was entering upon a new and untried experience, but he was too old to feel an undue excitement, and too well poised to borrow trouble from ignorance of superficial duties. He was rid of the rather irksome and too familiar occupations of the academic life, he was yet in his freedom to assume novel responsibilities, and he set his face toward Madrid with an equanimity which was no doubt heightened by the feeling that he was not Professor Lowell on a vacation, but Minister Lowell about to realize his new function.