James Russell Lowell, A Biography; vol 2/2

by Horace Elisha Scudder

On the other side, though the English as a great reading body are not very familiar with American literature, the leaders of opinion, the class that stands nearest the government, know it generously, and while it would be necessary to make the acquaintance of a representative of American law, business, or politics, a representative of American letters and scholarship would already be a familiar name. Certain it is that Lowell in going to London went at once into the midst of friends. He had been there but two or three days when he wrote: “I am overwhelmed already with invitations though I have not put my arrival in the papers;” and a few days later: “I lunched with Tennyson yesterday. He is getting old and looks seedy. I am going in to take a pipe with him the first free evening. Pipes have more thawing power than anything else.”

And yet it must not be forgotten that Lowell himself had been a frank critic of England and carried in his own mind a temper which it might seem would be in the way of a perfectly cordial relation. In his political papers and in the second series of the “Biglow Papers” he had been very outspoken. His well-known article on “A Certain Condescension in Foreigners,” with its pungent sentences, was not easily to be overlooked, and there is a letter[74] which Mr. Norton prints, written in 1865, that may be taken as a truthful report of the attitude held by Lowell toward England during the great war, and modified only slightly by time. There was therefore a little consciousness on his part as if he were not wholly a persona grata, and also that he must stand by his colors, which gave him a certain brusqueness in his early public appearances. It did not take long, however, for him to adjust himself in his new relations, for after all it was the greater England to which he was sent, and the world with which he came immediately into contact was very hospitable. At the same time, throughout his stay in England he showed a certain vigilance as the champion of American institutions, speech, and manners which gave him the air of combativeness. An Englishman who was often his host said: “I like Mr. Lowell. I like to have him here. I keep him as long as I can, and I am always in terror lest somebody shall say something about America that would provoke an explosion.” Mr. Smalley, who quotes this, adds that Lowell had seen the inside of more country houses in England than any American who ever lived; and that there was not one in which he had not let fall some good American seed.[75]

“Sometimes,” says Max Müller, “even the most harmless remark about America would call forth very sharp replies from him. Everybody knows that the salaries paid by America to her diplomatic staff are insufficient, and no one knew it better than he himself. But when the remark was made in his presence that the United States treated their diplomatic representatives stingily, he fired up, and discoursed most eloquently on the advantages of high thoughts and humble living.”[76]

The official business which occupies an American minister in England is the formal occasion for accrediting him to the Court; but there has been a growing disposition to treat this as after all a secondary consideration beside the less tangible one of increasing good feeling between the peoples of the two countries. Special envoys, telegrams, and despatches might serve for the transaction of business, but just as the countless personal letters which pass between correspondents on both sides of the Atlantic go to make the invisible web which unites the two nations, so the personal intercourse which the American minister has with Englishmen may have a weighty effect in preserving an entente cordiale.

The English more than any other nation have cultivated the dinner-table and the social meeting for the purpose of exchanging ideas regarding public affairs. Where an American public man will send for a reporter of a widely read newspaper if he has some important message to deliver to his constituents or the people at large, the Englishman will accept an invitation to a dinner of some society, and take that occasion for making a speech which will be reported and commented on in all the great dailies of the city and the provinces. Dinners, unveilings, cornerstones, meetings of societies,—these all become the accepted occasions for the propagation of ideas, and the most unrhetorical people in civilization blurt out their views at such times with a certain scorn of eloquence and admiration of candor. Moreover, the smallness of the great legislative chambers conduces to the conversational tone, and thus public speakers are trained to the disuse of oratory.

It was natural that Lowell should be in demand on such occasions, and it was inevitable that he should make a remarkable impression. He had for years cultivated the art of speaking to small assemblies when he had a congenial subject and a responsive audience. He had the readiness of a practised writer, and he had above all a spontaneousness of nature which made him one of the best of conversationalists. It was but a slight remove from his lecture-room at Harvard, or his study at Elmwood, to an English dinner-table, and the themes on which he was called upon to speak were very familiar to him. Literature, the common elements of English and American life, the distinctiveness of America, these were subjects on which he was at home, and he brought to his task a manner quiet yet finished by years of practice. Had set orations been his business, he would scarcely have made so remarkable an impression as he made by his off-hand speeches. Yet it must not be supposed that these were careless, impromptu affairs. He was helped by his readiness, but he did not rely upon it. He thought out carefully his little address, and sometimes wrote it out in advance even when he made no use of manuscript. It was not unalloyed pleasure. “I am to speak at the Academy dinner to-morrow,” he writes to a friend, after he had had a couple of years practice in such functions, “which does not make me happy,—and not a fit word to say has yet occurred to me. They think I like to speak, I ‘do it so easily.’” He was not one to rise with the declaration that he had nothing to say, and then to say it. He respected his audience, and above all, with all his bonhomie, he never forgot that he was not a private guest, but the representative of a great nation. Not that he always harped on the one string of a community of nature and interest in the two countries, but he remembered that he was invited not simply as a man of letters but as the American minister.

When Lowell went to England he apprehended difficulty in maintaining the position of an American minister on his salary, which could not greatly be increased from his modest fortune. Indeed, he said frankly that it would have been quite impossible to play the host as it should be played, except for the unhappy fortune which compelled Mrs. Lowell to withdraw from society. His friends told him, with that candor which makes English society at once so refreshing and so amusing, that since Mrs. Lowell could not entertain, he was quite at liberty to accept all manner of invitations, and be under no obligation to return them. So his public duties called him in many directions socially, and he was able, besides doing a little business by the way in these diversions, to see the best of the intellectual life of the day. He had a choice group of friends who had known him before he was a public man, and his position gave shim the entrée in all society, but he whispered: “I think on the whole I find no society so good as what I have been accustomed to at home.”

All this brought him, moreover, an endless correspondence which quite effectually interfered with the friendly letters which had been so natural an outlet of his moods. “Did you ever happen,” he writes to Mr. Field, 20 August, 1880, “to be watching the top of a post when a snowstorm was beginning? You would have seen first a solitary flake come wavering down and make a lodgment, then another and another, till finally a white nightcap covered the whole knob. My head is very like that wooden protuberance, and that’s the way letters descend upon it. While I am answering one a dozen more have fallen, and if I let a day go by, I am overwhelmed. And days go by without my knowing it. You tell Mabel that five have passed since you wrote—which is simply absurd. I think it was about fifteen minutes ago that I got it.”

“During Mr. Lowell’s service as Minister to England,” writes Mr. R. R. Bowker, who was at this time resident in London, “Mrs. Lowell was constantly an invalid, as the after effect of typhus fever while in Spain, and it was delightful to see Mr. Lowell’s gallantry—for no other word expresses it—as she was brought down in her invalid chair to the dining-room or drawing-room. But she never lost the happy laugh so characteristic of her, and her charm of direct and pleasant manner. Her condition made it impossible for Mr. Lowell to give receptions or large dinners, so that his household guests were confined to a few Americans. In an invitation to dine on Christmas day of 1880, he writes: ‘We shan’t be very jolly, but there will be a spice of home.’ It was at that dinner, I think, that Mrs. Lowell had quite set her heart on having cranberry sauce with the turkey, and so had obtained from that wonderful American storehouse at 45 Piccadilly a supply of cranberries. But the servants, who had mostly come with the Lowells from Spain, could not be made to understand what was wanted, and it was only when, two or three courses after the turkey, Mrs. Lowell hit upon calling for the ‘compote rouge’ that we obtained our cranberry sauce as a separate course....

“Mr. Lowell was always charmingly gallant, and on one occasion at the house in Lowndes Square there was present a young American actress from whom he asked some recitation. She offered to read the balcony scene from ‘Romeo and Juliet’ but said she had no Romeo, whereupon Mr. Lowell volunteered, the Juliet reciting from behind the sofa, and the most charming of Romeos, though somewhat elderly for the part, reading from in front.”