The two spent a week in Florence and then went to Rome where they foregathered with Story, and after a few days there Lowell set out alone on his return to London. He made a brief stay in Paris, and wrote thence to Mr. Field, 29 November, 1881: “I walked a good deal yesterday and felt very well, but to-day my head aches and things have come back. I met young Longfellow, who was to start for London last evening; also Thornton Lothrop, who came back with me to my hotel (where, by the way, I have a small suite—drawing-room, dining-room, two bedrooms with their own door of entrance on the staircase—first floor—for twenty-five francs, service y compris), and gave me heaps of Boston and Cambridge news. I am going to breakfast with him at the Bristol presently. I called at the Hôtel de Lorraine[78] and met the Revolution in person. The whole Hôtel de France part—the whole inside that is—was a heap of rubbish in the street. With some trouble I penetrated to Madame Guillaume, who led me into a tiny cavern in the rear, where I found Madame Garrier transformed into a cave-dweller. I expected to hear the growl of the ursus speluncæ, or whatever they call him. The darkness of a pocket (without any chink in it) would be illumination compared with it.... But Madame was very cordial. Presently Marie came in grown a tall girl and with very pretty manners. I took her out into the light and found her the image of her father. Him I did not see. Doubtless he was talking politics or taking snuff with some gossip or other of his. I remember he always disappeared in moments of crisis like the repair of the salle à manger which took place in my time. He is a singed cat, having seen two revolutions and the Commune.”
It was after his return to London that Lowell was in the thickest of the contention which began not long after his appointment to the post of American minister and continued through more than half of his term, as long, that is, as the period of acute disturbance of the relations between England and Ireland. Other international questions arose during his term of service, but none that called for the exercise of so much sound diplomatic discretion, or gave rise to so much angry criticism. Lowell’s judgment regarding Irish affairs was not the result merely of what he now saw and heard in London. No American who had followed public questions at home could escape the formation of some opinion respecting the Irish character and the relation in which Ireland stood to England, and through her emigrants to America. In 1848, when Smith O’Brien, Meagher, and other Irish leaders were agitating for reform through insurrection, Lowell commented on the situation in one of his editorial articles in the National Anti-Slavery Standard. He had no faith in the measures which these leaders proposed; he thought the only radical cure for the evils of Ireland lay in peasant proprietorship and education. “The only permanent safeguard,” he writes, “against famine is to give the people a deeper interest in the soil they cultivate and the crops they raise. It is the constant sense of insecurity that has made the Irish the shiftless and prodigal people which they are represented to be by all travellers. Education will be of no avail unless at the same time something be given them on which they can bring it to a practical bearing. Take away English opposition and the present insurrection is directed against—what? We confess ourselves at a loss for an answer. The only insurrection which has done Ireland any real service was the one headed by Father Mathew. The true office of the Irish Washington would be to head a rebellion against thriftlessness, superstition, and dirt. The sooner the barricades are thrown up against these the better. Ireland is in want of a revolution which shall render troops less necessary rather than more so.”
When Lowell was earnestly opposing the suicidal course of the South before the actual outbreak of the war for the Union, secession being then the shibboleth, he took Scotland and Ireland in their relation to Great Britain for parallel historic instances in support of his position. “There is no such antipathy,” he wrote, “between the North and the South as men ambitious of a consideration in the new republic, which their talents and character have failed to secure them in the old, would fain call into existence by asserting that it exists. The misunderstanding and dislike between them is not so great as they were within living memory between England and Scotland, as they are now between England and Ireland. There is no difference of race, language, or religion. Yet, after a dissatisfaction of near a century and two rebellions, there is no part of the British dominion more loyal than Scotland, no British subjects who would be more loath to part with the substantial advantages of their imperial connection than the Scotch; and even in Ireland, after a longer and more deadly feud, there is no sane man who would consent to see his country irrevocably cut off from power and consideration to obtain an independence which would be nothing but Donnybrook Fair multiplied by every city, town, and village in the island. The same considerations of policy and advantage, which render the union of Scotland and Ireland with England a necessity, apply with even more force to the several States of our Union.”[79]
When, therefore, Lowell found himself in England as the representative of the United States at a period when the chronic irritation between England and Ireland was at an acute stage through the operation of the so-called coercion act, it is not surprising that be should take a very lively interest in affairs. As a part of his diplomatic duty, he kept his government informed not so much of the facts which were the news of the day, as of the interpretation to be put upon the political situation. Accordingly, on 7 January, 1881, he wrote to Mr. Evarts, then Secretary of State:—
“Seldom has a session of Parliament begun under more critical circumstances. The abnormal condition of Ireland and the question of what remedy should be sought for it have deeply divided and embittered public opinion. Not only has the law been rendered powerless and order disturbed (both of them things almost superstitiously sacred in England), but the sensitive nerve of property has been rudely touched. The opposition have clamored for coercion, but while they have persisted in this it is clear that a change has been gradually going on in their opinion as to how great concessions would be needful. It seems now to be granted on all sides that the Irish people have wrongs to be redressed and just claims for rights to be granted. I think that the government have at least gained so much by the expectant and humane policy which they have persevered in under very great difficulties, and in spite of a criticism the more harassing as it seemed to have some foundation in principles hitherto supposed to be self-evident.
“Added to this was the fact (at least I believe it to be a fact) that there was a division of opinion in the Cabinet itself. This probably led to the one mistake in policy that has been made by the prosecution of Mr. Parnell and some of his associates—a mistake, because, in the exceedingly improbable contingency of the jury agreeing to convict, the belief will be universal in Ireland that they have been packed, and the government will have a dozen martyrs on its hands of whom it would be at a loss how to dispose,—a half-ludicrous position which could not fail to involve a loss of prestige.
“There can be no doubt that Mr. Parnell was unpleasantly surprised by the land league, and has been compelled to identify himself with a movement having other and more comprehensive (perhaps more desperate) aims than that which he originated. So far as can be judged, a great deal of the agitation in Ireland is factitious, and large numbers of persons have been driven by timidity to profess a sympathy with it which they do not feel. This, of course, strengthens the probability of its being possible to allay it by generally acceptable measures of reform. I am sure that the reasonable leaders or representatives of Irish opinion see the folly of expecting that England would ever peaceably consent to the independence of Ireland; that they do not themselves desire it; and that they would be content with a thorough reform of the land laws and a certain amount of local self-government. Both of these measures, you will observe, are suggested in the speech from the throne. You will readily divine that one of the great difficulties with which the ministry has had to struggle has been the presentiment that a change in the conditions of land tenure in Ireland will be followed by something similar, certainly by an agitation for something similar, on this aide the Irish channel.
“The Cabinet, I am safe in saying, are earnestly desirous of doing justice to Ireland, and not only that, but of so shaping reform as to make the cure as lasting as such a cure can be. No government can consent to revolution (though this was deemed possible in some quarters as respects some governments twenty years ago), but the present ministry are willing to go all lengths that are feasible and wise in the way of reform and reparation. Their greatest obstacle will be the overweening expectations and inconsiderate temper of the Irish themselves, both of them the result of artificial rather than natural causes. For no reform will be effectual that does not gradually nullify the unhappy effects produced by the influence, through many generations, of the pitiable travesty of feudal relations between landlord and tenant, making that relation personal instead of mercantile, and thus insensibly debauching both.
“The condition of Ireland is not so disturbed now as it has been at several periods during the last eighty years, and precisely the same system of organization was brought to bear against the collection of tithes fifty years ago that has now been revived to resist the payment of what are considered excessive rents. The landlords are represented as the minions of a foreign and hated domination, and the use of the epithet foreign has at least this justification, that there is certainly an imperfect sympathy between the English and Irish characters which prevents each from comprehending either the better qualities of the other or, what is worse, the manner of their manifestion.
“I cannot perceive that the public opinion of the country has withdrawn itself in any appreciable measure from sympathy with the Cabinet, though there is considerable regret among thoughtful liberals that coercion should have been deemed necessary and that the proposed reforms should not have gone farther. If the Irish could only be brought to have as much faith in Mr. Gladstone as he has desire for their welfare, there might be more hope than I can now see for a permanent solution of the Irish question.”