The furlough which Lowell had taken greatly refreshed him, and he took up his life again with vigor and gayety, applying himself not only to the duties of the legation, but to the better acquisition of the Spanish language, a fuller knowledge of the literature, and the study of those larger matters of Spanish polity and character with which it became a minister to acquaint himself. “I have come back,” he wrote to his daughter, “a new man, and have flung my blue spectacles into the paler Mediterranean. I really begin to find life at last tolerable here, nay, to enjoy it after a fashion.”
Here is an outline of his days, as he gives it in a letter to a friend: “Get up at 8, from 9 sometimes till 11 my Spanish professor, at 11 breakfast, at 12 to the legation, at 3 home again and a cup of chocolate, then read the papers and write Spanish till a quarter to 7, at 7 dinner, and at 8 drive in an open carriage in the Prado till 10, to bed at 12 to 1. In cooler weather we drive in the afternoon. I am very well,—cheerful and no gout.”
He set to work systematically on Spanish with a cultivated Spaniard who could speak no English, and with whom he read and talked every day, besides turning French and English literature into Spanish. “I am working now at Spanish,” he writes, 2 August, 1878, “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 isn’t saying much. Considering how hard it has always been for me to speak a language—even one I knew pretty well—I am making good progress, for I did not begin till my return six weeks ago. Before that I hadn’t the spirit for it.” Of his tutor, Don Herminigildo Gines de los Rios, he adds: “He is a fine young fellow who lost a professor’s chair for his liberal principles, and is now professor in the Free University they are trying to found here. I like him very much.”
Three months later he wrote: “I am beginning to talk Spanish pretty well, but my previous knowledge of the language is a great hindrance. This may seem a paradox, but it isn’t. What I mean is that I know too much to catch it by ear. I understand all that is said to me, and accordingly cannot (without a conscious effort) pay attention to the forms of speech. They go in at one ear and out at the other. But I can write it now with considerable ease and correctness. I am to be admitted to the Academy this month, I believe.”
Lowell had been a year now at his post, and could venture to write of the internal politics of Spain with greater assurance because he had a more exact knowledge. His despatch to the government, No. 108, dated 26 August, 1878,[72] is a studied analysis of the character of the parties and leaders that composed the political situation. He begins by explaining his own reticence heretofore. “I have always been chary,” he writes, “of despatches concerning the domestic politics of Spain, because my experience has taught me that political prophets who make even an occasional hit, and that in their own country, where they may be presumed to know the character of the people, and the motives likely to influence them, are as rare as great discoverers in science. Such a conjunction of habitual observation with the faculty of instantaneous logic that suddenly precipitates the long accumulation of experience in crystals whose angles may be measured and their classification settled, can hardly be expected of an observer in a foreign country. Its history is no longer an altogether safe guide, for with the modern facility of intercommunication, influences from without continually grow more and more directly operative, and yet wherever, as in Spain, the people is almost wholly dumb, there are few means of judging how great the infiltration of new ideas may have been. Where there is no well-defined national consciousness with recognised organs of expression, there can be no public opinion, and therefore no way of divining what its attitude is likely to be under any given circumstances.”
In forming his judgment Lowell seems to have used the broad means which great ambassadors have always had recourse to. That is, he did not merely sift the opinions he received from Spaniards, or put himself under the tutelage of any one man, but he attended the debates of the Cortes, he read the more intelligent journals, he talked with leaders of Spanish opinion, and be availed himself of converse with those foreigners travelling in Spain, whose impressions could be valued, and behind all lay an old acquaintance with Spanish history and literature, constantly added to, and an apprehension of Spanish character, reënforced by personal intercourse. In a word, he went about the business of an American minister to Spain with the same painstaking care and the same breadth of view which, as a scholar, he would employ on the interpretation of a great piece of literature. He did not neglect the commercial side of his business, but he properly made it subordinate, holding that he was not merely representing the country as an eminent consul, but was assisting at the high court of international comity. In the analysis which he attempts, he testifies to the kind of training which he brings to the task, by fixing his attention mainly on the leaders of parties, and studying their characters and aims. Especially is this true of his acute examination of the qualities of Señor Cánovas del Castillo, whom he regards as not only the ablest politician, but capable also of being Spain’s most far-seeing statesman, and he makes his observation more effective by the comparison which he draws between him and Señor Castelar.
Mr. Adee, who, when Lowell went to Spain, was chargé d’affaires, in his intelligent and appreciative Introduction to “Impressions of Spain,” remarks that “necessarily lacking the knowledge of the true springs of national impulse deep down in the heart of the masses, he dealt with the surface indications, and analyzed the character and motives of the men on top, whose peculiarities most caught his attention.” It is quite as much to the point that Lowell did not assume a profound knowledge of the Spanish people, and that he wrote of the phenomena most on the field of his own activity as a minister resident. He was, moreover, too sound a scholar and too shrewd a man to indulge in philosophizing on a nation from the data furnished even by long study and some personal experience. Nevertheless, whatever he lets fall about Spain, as well as his more studied expression, indicates that kind of insight which was one of Lowell’s gifts of nature, and stood him in good stead as a critic of books, of men, and of nations.
It may militate against a respect for Lowell’s judgment in such matters, that after a score of years the vaticinations which he ventured to express in this despatch have not yet found a realization; yet twenty years is a short period in a nation’s life, and these opinions carry with them so much political faith, and are delivered with so much moderation, that they form interesting reading to-day, and may well be repeated here.
“My own conclusion,” he writes, “is that sooner or later (perhaps sooner than later) the final solution (of existing political problems) will be a conservative republic like that of France. Should the experiment there go on prosperously a few years longer, should the French Senate become sincerely republican at the coming elections, the effect here could not fail to be very great, perhaps decisive. In one respect, the Spanish people are better prepared for a Republic than might at first be supposed. I mean that republican habits in their intercourse with each other are and have long been universal. Every Spaniard is a caballero, and every Spaniard can rise from the ranks to position and power. This also is in part from the Mahometan occupation of Spain. Del rey ninguno abajo is an ancient Spanish proverb implying the equality of all below the King. Manners, as in France, are democratic, and the ancient nobility here as a class are even more shadowy than the dwellers in the Faubourg Saint Germain.
“In attacking Señor Cánovas the opposition papers dwell upon the censorship of the press, upon the reëstablishment of monachism under other names, and upon the onerous restrictions under which the free expression of thought is impossible. The ministerial organs reply to the first charge that more journals were undergoing suspension at one time during the liberal administration of Señor Sagasta than now, and this is true. The fact is that no party, and no party leader, in Spain, is capable of being penetrated with the truth, perhaps the greatest discovery of modern times, that freedom is good above all because it is safe. Señor Cánovas is doing only what any other Spaniard would do in his place, that is, endeavoring to suppress opinions which he believes to be mischievous. But of the impolitic extreme to which the principle is carried under his administration, though, I suspect, without his previous consent, the following fact may serve as an example. Señor Manuel Merelo, professor in the Instituto del Cardenal Cisneros, published in 1869 a compendium of Spanish history for the use of schools. In speaking of the Revolution of 1868, he wrote, ‘It is said that the light conduct (las léviandades) of Queen Isabel II. was one of the causes of this catastrophe.’ After an interval of nine years, he has been expelled from his chair and his book suppressed.