“I may be permitted to add that I have had repeated assurances from the highest authority that there would be great reluctance in arresting a naturalized citizen of the United States were he known to be such. But it is seldom known, and those already arrested have acted in all respects as if they were Irishmen, sometimes engaged in trade, sometimes in farming, and sometimes filling positions in the local government. This I think is illustrated by a phrase in one of Mr. ——’s letters, to the effect that he never called himself an American. He endeavors, it is true, in a subsequent letter, to explain this away as meaning American born; but it is obviously absurd that a man living in his native village should need to make any such explanation. Naturalized Irishmen seem entirely to misconceive the process through which they have passed in assuming American citizenship, looking upon themselves as Irishmen who have acquired a right to American protection, rather than as Americans who have renounced a claim to Irish nationality.”
It is not surprising that the whole affair caused much fury of words both in Congress and out. An organization existed which was bent on making all the trouble it could for the British government, and there was still plenty of political capital in Irish wrongs. A great mass-meeting was held in New York at which Lowell was denounced severely, and from this time till his return from England every opportunity was taken by a certain class of men to sneer at him for what they were pleased to regard as his apostasy from American principles. He was defended, however, both in Congress and in the press. His course was well summed up in an editorial article, in which the writer says:—
“Mr. Lowell, who has been denounced by Mr. Randall for his ‘sickening sycophancy to English influence,’ has treated the matter not as an English, Irish, or American question, but purely as a point of international law. He has had no sympathy with the coercion legislation, and has even taken pains to characterize it as exceptional and arbitrary.... That law [the ‘protection’ law] legalized the arrest of the suspects in districts where the writ of habeas corpus had been suspended, and where the natives were not allowed the privilege of a jury trial. To have demanded their unconditional release, when no discrimination had been made between them and the natives, would have been an open affront to a friendly power. What Mr. Lowell did was to follow the best precedents of criminal jurisdiction in international cases, several of which had been established during the American civil war, when British subjects were arbitrarily arrested and denied the privilege of trial. At the same time, he has conducted the negotiations with the Foreign Office with so much tact and decision that we are inclined to expect a speedy clearance of the Irish jails from suspects whose citizenship in the United States is authenticated.” And the next day the same journal said: “Mr. Lowell’s negotiations for the release of the Irish-American suspects have been crowned with partial success. Before the mass-meeting at Cooper Institute disgraced itself by heaping reproaches upon him, the Department of State had received official information that all but three of these prisoners had been set at liberty in response to the request of the United States minister.... Mr. Frelinghuysen[83] reports that the negotiations have been carried on between the two governments for some time ‘in a spirit of entire friendship.’ This result had been promoted by the cordial relations existing between Lord Granville and Mr. Lowell. The fact that our government has been represented in these negotiations by one of our foremost men of letters has been a most fortunate circumstance. Mr. Lowell had won the respect and admiration of the best men in English public life, and when he came to plead for these suspects his personal character and popularity were of direct service to them.... Mr. Mr. Lowell made, as our cable despatches have stated, every effort consistent with diplomatic usage, and at the same time performed a most delicate duty with such consummate tact as to remove all sources of irritation.”[84]
The whole situation was plainly one that called for great tact, and for that delicate use of language in which the shadows of words are not to be left out of account. It was probably with reference to this particular encounter that the London Spectator said shortly after Lowell’s death: “There was a question at one time whether the late Lord Granville or Mr. Lowell were the more accomplished and subtle in conveying, without offence, the suggestion or conviction which it might be the duty of either of them to impress on any one to whom the communication might not be welcome. And probably this is a point which would be very differently determined by different people. But though equal in courtesy and grace of manner to Lord Granville, we should say that Mr. Lowell had the greater power of the two to impress his meaning, even where it was a meaning painful and difficult to enforce, without conveying even the slightest tincture of personal discourtesy. Lord Granville was perhaps even fuller of the suaviter in modo, but Mr. Lowell never forgot the necessity, where the necessity existed, of conveying also the impression of the fortiter in re. With all his grace, there was a plainness of purpose in him which could not be mistaken.”[85]
Lowell himself, writing to Dr. Holmes shortly before leaving England, recalls the situation and says: “Some of my Irishmen had been living in their old homes seventeen years, engaged in trade or editing nationalist papers, or members of the poor-law guardians (like MacSweeney), and neither paying taxes in America nor doing any other duty as Americans. I was guided by two things—the recognized principles of international law, and the conduct of Lord Lyons when Seward was arresting and imprisoning British subjects. We kept one man in jail seven months without trial or legal process of any kind, and, but for the considerateness and moderation of Lyons, might have had war with England. I think I saved a misunderstanding here.... When I had at last procured the conditional (really unconditional) release of all the suspects, they refused to be liberated. When I spoke of this to Justin McCarthy (then the head of the Irish Parliamentary party, Parnell being in Kilmainham), he answered cheerfully, ‘Certainly: they are there to make trouble.’”[86] One of the intimations of what lay in his mind throughout all the delicate business may be read in a note to Mr. John W. Field, 19 January, 1884: “I wonder, by the way, when we shall see an American politician able to appreciate and shrewd enough to act on Curran’s saying about his countrymen, that ‘an Irishman is the worst fellow in the world to run away from.’”
And after his return to America, he wrote to Lady Lyttelton: “You must make up your mind to let Ireland have her head. She may no doubt choose to go over a precipice, though I don’t think that she would, and at any rate a whole legion of devils would go with her as with the Gadarene swine; at best it is all up playing Sisera, for the stars in their courses are rather beyond reach even of the newspapers.” That Lowell had a keen appreciation of the genuine spirit of patriotism which moved the Irish in America in his generation may be discerned by any one who will read the closing sentences in his address on “The Independent in Politics.”
Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton in an article[87] published just after Lowell’s death, tried to sum up his intellectual qualities in a word, and thought he found the expression in “sagacity.” “In life,” he says, “his most striking characteristic—a characteristic indicated not only by the watchful gray eyes and the apparently conscious eyebrows that overshadowed them, but in every intonation of his voice, and every movement of his limbs—was a marvellous sagacity.” “What is called his wit,” he adds, “is merely this almost preternatural sagacity in rapid movement. What is called his humor is this same sagacity at rest and in a meditative mood.” Without pushing this analysis so far, there is no doubt that in his diplomatic capacity Lowell did draw upon his native genius for quick perception and interpretation. The gift which he had multiplied by use in the criticism of literature and in the diagnosis of political situations at home, was at his service both in Madrid and London. It made him not a mere fencer in a diplomatic game, but a man of resources in the serious representation of his country’s interests. That he could couch his demands or protests in witty phrase added to his power of persuasion; and he could not associate as an equal with English statesmen without applying his sagacity to their problems even where these did not immediately concern his own people. Perhaps it was after Majuba that he wrote in one of his despatches: “I asked Lord Lyons whether he did not think suzerainty might be defined as ‘leaving to a man the privilege of carrying the saddle and bridle after you have stolen his horse.’ He assented.”
There was, perhaps, something in the adjustment of Lowell to his surroundings which set the springs of poetry flowing intermittently. At any rate, he was content, conscious that he was of service in a high position, happy both in his own health—“I have never seen a climate that suited me so well,” he wrote—and in his wife’s improvement, and surrounded by congenial companions. These things do not necessarily make for poetry, but Lowell had by this time come into that mellow stage when what he did had about it an absence of apparent effort, when his ripe experience and equipoise of life found easy expression, and poetry was a solace and a pastime. To be sure, there is something to make one smile behind his hand when one sees the American minister sending his “Phœbe” across the Atlantic and following it with almost daily corrections, yet one listens to the note with the feeling that the poet is putting into the reminiscence of a far-off sound not a little of his present apprehension of himself. Nay, the poem in its first form broke at last into two stanzas, wisely omitted in the final recension, which are almost bald in their apologetic confession:—
“Let who has felt compute the strain
Of struggle with abuses strong,
The doubtful course, the helpless pain
Of seeing best intents go wrong.
“We who look on with critic eyes
Exempt from action’s crucial test,
Human ourselves, at least are wise
In honoring one who did his best.”