“If any change should take place, which I confess I do not expect, but which, in a country of personal government and pronunciamentos, is possible to-morrow, I think the new administration will find that with the best intentions in the world a country which has been misgoverned for three centuries is not to be reformed in a day. At the same time, I believe Spain to be making rapid advances toward the conviction that a reform is imperative, and can only be accomplished by the good-will and, above all, the good sense of the entire nation. There are strong prejudices and rooted traditions to be overcome, but with time and patience I believe that Spain will accomplish the establishment of free institutions under whatever form of government.”
In the course of Lowell’s incumbency, General Grant visited Spain on his journey round the world, and the embassy, of course, was busy in its attention to the great American. Lowell’s despatch to his government is a model of orderly, dignified statement of the incidents attending Grant’s visit, without the least of that free, personal note which characterizes so many of Lowell’s despatches. His letters home on the same event naturally are more gossipy, but they express well his admiration of Grant’s qualities.
In the spring of 1879 Lowell seems to have been in some uncertainty about his continued stay. There had been some talk of transferring him to Berlin, which he did not desire, but the President emphatically declared his wish that Lowell should remain at Madrid. He longed to be at home, yet since he had become adjusted to the place, he wished to secure the advantage and increase his acquaintance with Spain and the character of the Spanish. He was alert and ready now to make more confident notes regarding the people among whom he was living. In speaking of a friend who had been most kind to them, and who had a quartering of English race in her, he says:—
“She speaks both languages equally well, but is, I think, cleverer in Spanish, and gives it a softness of intonation which is almost unexampled here where the voices of the women are apt to be harsh and clattering like those of the Irish. Doesn’t Madame Daulnay say something of the kind? Nothing strikes me more than the rarity of agreeable voices, and (what I never noticed in any other country) one hears in the street the same tones as in the salon. I am for once inclined to admit an influence of climate. To jump from the physical to the moral, the Spaniards are the most provincial people conceivable, as much so as we were forty years ago. It is comfortable, for they think they have the best of everything—even of governments, for aught I know. But the everything must be Spanish. Even their actors they speak of in a way that would be extravagant even of Rachel, and I never saw worse. Perhaps the most oriental thing in this semi-oriental people is the hyperbole of praise which the critics allow themselves. It is quite beyond belief. The press, by the way, at least that of Madrid, is remarkably decorous, and never hints at private scandal. It may be because the duel is still a judicial ceremony—though hardly, for there is never any harm done. It may be that every one is conscious of a skylight in his own roof, through which a stone might come. On the whole, I think it is a relic of the old Spanish hidalguia, of which in certain ways I think there is a good deal left. But I don’t pretend to know the Spaniards yet—if ever I shall. When a man at sixty doesn’t yet know himself, he is apt to get startled and carried off by the readiness with which he hears shallow men pronounce judgment on a whole people. The only way to do this, I suppose, would be to read all history, to compare the action of different races or nations under similar circumstances (if circumstances ever are similar), and then, eliminating all points of likeness common to human nature, to analyze what was left, if anything should be left.”
Since it was determined that he should continue to be minister to Spain, Lowell proposed to use his yearly furlough by a hurried visit home in the summer of 1879, leaving Mrs. Lowell at Tours. “I wish Fanny could spend the summer with you in Maiche,” he writes to Mr. John W. Field who, with his wife, had been their companions for a while in Spain; “but we both think the other plan wiser, though not so agreeable. She will learn more French in Tours, and I think we can find a good family for her to go into through the French pasteur or the British chaplain, for there are both in the town. I hope to be in Paris by the 25th, and to find you still here. Delay for a day or two, I beseech you, for my sake. I can’t stay long, for I have to give a week to my friends in England on my way through. I can hardly contain myself at the thought of going home. It excites me more than I could have conceived—at my time of life! Were I as young as you it wouldn’t be surprising.”
This was written 15 June, 1879. On the 20th he wrote a line to the same friend to say that they could not start that day, as they had intended, and he could not say when they should, since Mrs. Lowell was not well enough to travel. “Nothing serious,” he adds, but as the days passed his tone changed. Serious indeed her illness proved to be. On the 9th of July he wrote: “Twice yesterday the doctors thought all was over. No motion of the heart could be detected—the hands and feet and nose became cold—and the dear face had all the look of death—the eyes altogether leaden and fixed. She had been without speech for twelve hours. What speech she had had for several days had been mere delirium. Suddenly at about six in the afternoon she revived as by a miracle, said she wished to be changed to another bed, was willing to take stimulants in order to strengthen her for it, and insisted that she could move herself from one bed to the other. This, of course, was out of the question. After being changed she was perfectly tranquil, though excessively weak. During the operation she spoke French to the Sœur who is nursing her, English to me, and Spanish to her maid, all coherently. Both doctors declared they had never seen such a case, or heard of it, and that according to all experience she ought to have died ten times over and days before. I have had two, one to relay the other, so that one could be at her bedside all the time. One has slept in the house—when he could sleep. The question now is of building up strength. It has been typhus of the most malignant kind. That has run its course. All danger is not yet over, but hope has good grounds. The chances are now in her favor, especially as she wishes to live. I will tell you more hereafter. God be praised!”
But the recovery was very slow, with many relapses and with periods of mental disorder. The original purpose was held to as long as it seemed possible, but at last, as summer passed into autumn and autumn into winter, it was plain that all plans of travel must be abandoned. Mr. Field made them a flying visit, then both Mr. and Mrs. Field came to Madrid to be with them and give them help and comfort. Their friends Señor and Señora de Riaño were most attentive, and Mr. Dwight Reed, Lowell’s secretary, had been almost indispensable. “I should have gone quite desperate without him,” Lowell writes; and again, 18 October: “Reed has been a great help. He comes every day to dinner and distracts me a little with rumors from the outer world. He is a thoroughly kind-hearted and affectionate fellow. But I can’t tell you what the loneliness of my night has sometimes been, when I have heard the clock strike every hour and every quarter till daylight came again to bring the certainty that she was no better.”
It was not till the end of December that Lowell could speak and write of his wife with anything like relief from the burden of anxiety. During this time he took long walks with his friend Mr. Field, and attended to his necessary work at the legation. His spirits began to rise, but the strain he had been undergoing had been intense. Later, when the critical condition was over, though relapses still occurred, he could rehearse something of his experience: “I have had a very long and very terrible trial, which the strange country and alien tongue have made worse, and these ups and downs almost desperate. And yet without the intervals of reason and hopeful convalescence from time to time, I know not how I could have endured it. Indeed I cannot now comprehend how I pulled through. Friendship has helped us, it is true. During the first weeks Doña Emilia de Riaño (Gayangos’s daughter) came every night to watch with Fanny, and her husband, Don Juan, came to see me every day. And my secretary, a most true-hearted, affectionate fellow, sat up with me night after night when I could not sleep, and kept me from eating into myself all the time. Otherwise I was without even an acquaintance, for everybody leaves Madrid during the summer. Lately the dear Fields have been a great prop.
“If I could only get her away! But that is out of the question at present. And all the while I have had to write cool little bulletins to Mabel, turning the fair side outward when my heart was aching with anxiety and apprehension. I must have expiated many sins this summer. I feel now as if nothing could kill me, and am saddened more than ever with a conclusion arrived at long ago by experience, that this poor human nature of ours gets used to almost anything—a conclusion of far-reaching and, in some ways, disheartening consequence.”
As the year waned, Lowell found himself required to give his attention to the change of the Spanish ministry, a political event which caused more excitement than he had seen at any time during his stay in Madrid. He analyzed the situation in his despatch to the government, No. 222, dated 15 December, 1879, and in his conclusion wrote: “It is hardly yet time to estimate the effect of recent events on the peninsular or colonial destinies of the country, but the result thus far has been to weaken the man who has hitherto been acknowledged leader and inspirer of the Liberal-Conservative, and one might say therefore of the Dynastic, party of Spain. Yet it should be remembered in estimating his chances that he is a man of far greater resources, of prompter courage in taking responsibility, and of more convincing and persuasive oratory than any of his contemporaries and rivals in party-leadership. All sorts of wild rumors are in circulation, but I am inclined to await events rather than to trust in the vaticinations of journalists who mutually excite and outbid each other in the bewildering competition of immediate inspiration.”