James Russell Lowell, A Biography; vol 2/2

by Horace Elisha Scudder

When the commotion over the rectorship was going on, Lowell was having a holiday in Paris, where he was able to take Mrs. Lowell for a couple of months. An anonymous writer in the Atlantic Monthly,[88] who saw the Lowells at this time, has recorded some impressions created by Lowell’s conversation, and among them one respecting his interest in the Jewish race. When he was writing his paper on Rousseau, his interest was awakened, and the interest took a personal turn as he associated his own family name of Russell with that of the French philosopher. He was led to enquire into the representation of the race in America, and no doubt his interest was heightened by his sojourn in Spain. But it was after he went to England, where be had manifold opportunities for making observations, that the whole subject of the Jewish element in society came to be a very frequent topic of conversation with him. It was just such a subject as would appeal to his love of paradox, his subtle curiosity, and his liking for brilliant forays into new territory. It does not appear that Lowell ever set down in writing his deliberate convictions. Rather he kept this theme for the pastime of conversation, driving the ball indeed at times with an energy which would suggest the professional athlete.

“One evening,” says the writer in the Atlantic, “I was dining with Mr. and Mrs. Lowell and three other friends, and he began to lament the renaming of old streets which was going on, and the obliteration of the last traces of the Paris of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,—the Paris of the schoolmen and their open-air debates. He spoke of the local history that lay in the mere names of streets and squares,—Rue du Fouarre, Rue des Gauvais Garçons, and several more of which he gave the origin and legend. In the midst of this picturesque and learned disquisition he stumbled upon the class of a celebrated philosopher of those times, seated on their bundles of straw,—a well-known teacher whose name I cannot now recall,—and stated that he was a Jew.

“He instantly began to talk of the Jews, a subject which turned out to be almost a monomania with him. He detected a Jew in every hiding-place and under every disguise, even when the fugitive had no suspicion of himself. To begin with nomenclature: all persons named for countries or towns are Jews; all with fantastic, compound names, such as Lilienthal, Morgenroth; all with names derived from colors, trades, animals, vegetables, minerals; all with Biblical names, except Puritan first names; all patronymics ending in son,—sohn, sen, or any other version; all Russels, originally so called from red-haired Israelites; all Walters, by long descended derivation from wolves and foxes in some ancient tongue; the therefore Cecilia Metella, no doubt St. Cecilia too, consequently the Cecils, including Lord Burleigh and Lord Salisbury; he cited some old chronicle in which he had cornered one Robert de Cæcilia and exposed him as an English Jew. He gave examples and instances of these various classes with amazing readiness and precision, but I will not pretend that I have set down even these few correctly. Of course there was Jewish blood in many royal houses and in most noble ones, notably in Spain. In short, it appeared that this insidious race had and permeated the human family more universally than any other influence except original sin. He spoke of their talent and versatility, and of the numbers who had been illustrious in literature, the learned professions, art, science, and even war, until by degrees, from being shut out of society and every honorable and desirable pursuit, they had gained the prominent positions everywhere.

“Then he began his classifications again: all bankers were Jews, likewise brokers, most of the great financiers,—and that was to be expected; the majority of barons, also baronets; they had got possession of the press, they were getting into politics; they had forced their entrance into the army and navy; they had made their way into the cabinets of Europe and become prime ministers; they had slipped into diplomacy and become ambassadors. But a short time ago they were packed into the Ghetto: now they inhabited palaces, the most aristocratic quarters, and were members of the most exclusive clubs. A few years ago they could not own land; they were acquiring it by purchase and mortgage in every part of Europe, and buying so many old estates in England that they owned the larger part of several counties.

“Mr. Lowell said more, much more, to illustrate the ubiquity, the universal ability of the Hebrew, and gave examples and statistics for every statement, however astonishing, drawn from his inexhaustible information. He was conscious of the sort of infatuation which possessed him, and his dissertation alternated between earnestness and drollery; but whenever a burst of laughter greeted some new development of his theme, although he joined in it, he immediately returned to the charge with abundant proof of his paradoxes. Finally he came to a stop, but not to a conclusion, and as no one else spoke, I said, ‘And when the Jews have got absolute control of finance, the army and navy, the press, diplomacy, society, titles, the government, and the earth’s surface, what do you suppose they will do with them and with us?’ ‘That,’ he answered, turning towards me, and in a whisper audible to the whole table, ‘that is the question which will eventually drive me mad.’”

On the return of the Lowells from Paris to London they moved into a larger and more commodious house still in Lowndes Square, but No. 31. “We have been having a mild winter,” Lowell writes to Mr. Field, 19 January, 1884, “with only a couple of days or so of frost thus far. Everything is looking as green as summer (by everything I mean the grass in the Parks) and the thrushes are using up all their best songs before the curtain of spring rises. The Season hasn’t begun yet, but I am dining out more or less as usual. Fanny goes too sometimes, but can’t stand much of it. You will have seen that I have resigned my rectorship, but I was at once chosen president of the Birmingham and Midland Institute so that I might have another chair to sit down in.”

It was in the double office of American minister and poet that he took part in the ceremonies attending the unveiling of the bust of Longfellow in Westminster Abbey, 2 March, 1884. But the personal relation which he bore the poet was uppermost in his mind, especially as he was renewing his intercourse with the family in the person of two of Longfellow’s daughters who were living in England at this time and were present at the unveiling. The occasion was not one for critical judgment, but in the course of his brief speech he made a felicitous point on sonnet writing. “I have been struck particularly,” he said, “with this quality of style in some of my late friend’s sonnets, which seem to me in unity and evenness of flow among the most beautiful and perfect we have in the language. They remind one of those cabinets in which all the drawers are opened at once by the turn of the key in a single lock, whereas we all have seen sonnets with a lock in every line with a different key to each, and the added conundrums of secret drawers.”

In April came the tercentenary commemoration of the University of Edinburgh, when Lowell was present and received the degree of Doctor of Laws. The same degree was conferred on him at his own University a few weeks later.

In May he was called on for two addresses. On the seventh of the month he attended the annual dinner of the Provincial Newspaper Society at the Inns of Court Hotel, London, and a few words which he then said, because spoken apparently without premeditation, are worth recording as expressing a judgment held by him with great sincerity. “I have my own theory,” he said, “as to what after-dinner speaking should be. I think it should be in the first place short; I think it should be light; and I think it should be both extemporaneous and contemporaneous. I think it should have the meaning of the moment in it, and nothing more. But I confess that when I get up here and face you, representing what you call the Provincial Press—and if you will allow me by way of an interjection, I may state that it has been my fortune to live in a number of countries, where it has sometimes been my duty to study the National Press, and I have always and everywhere found it provincial: I have never yet encountered a truly cosmopolitan newspaper—when I feel myself standing for the first time in the presence of a collection of editors, I experience a very serious emotion. I feel as if I were talking to the ear of Dionysius, at the other end of which the world was listening. I do not see any reporters here—I am glad I do not. I cannot help taking this opportunity, with so many persons who have the formation of public opinion before me, of saying one or two words on the growing change which has taken place in the methods of forming public opinion. I am not sure that you are always aware to how great an extent you have supplanted the pulpit, to how great an extent you have supplanted even the deliberative assembly. You have assumed responsibilities, I should say, heavier than man ever assumed before. You wield an influence entirely without precedent hitherto in human history. I do not wish the dinner to be too solemn, but, as I tell you, I have been solemnized standing in this presence. I came here intending only to say a few words of kindly thanks for the friendliness which you have shown toward the country I have the honor to represent, and to me as representing it. But, I cannot forbear to say that, if I were an editor, I should have written up in the room in which I write, ‘Woe to me if I preach not the gospel:’ I mean so much of the Word of God as is manifest to me, and I should strive to preach that word, and to convey it to my fellow-men. I have always thought the case of clergymen a hard one, because they are expected to be inspired once a week. But what is this to yours who must be inspired every day, and who have undertaken to edit the whole world every morning? There has been nothing, as I was just saying, that has, in the history of man, occupied such a position as the Press. You have the formation of public opinion. There is not a man here who values any more than I do, or ever have done, the opinion of Tom, or the opinion of Dick, or the opinion of Harry. But when Tom, Dick, and Harry agree, then we begin to call it public opinion. I am not sure that it always deserves that name; but I am sure of this, that public opinion is of value in precise proportion to the material it is made of. I am sure of this, that two factors go towards the making of that material. One is the editor, and the other is the reader.”

Three days later, 10 May, 1884, he delivered, as president of the Wordsworth Society, the address on that poet which is included in his “Literary and Political Addresses.” He deprecated the notion that he could add materially to what he had written of Wordsworth in his more deliberate earlier paper,[89] for as he says: “Without unbroken time there can be no consecutive thought, and it is my misfortune that in the midst of a reflection or of a sentence I am liable to be called away by the bell of private or public duty.” The speech contains one or two critical passages which may be added to the sum of Lowell’s comment on Wordsworth; but to the student of Lowell’s mind as affected by new conditions and registering itself in new terms, the speech is more interesting because of the main thought in it, that which occupies him upon passing in review the work of Dr. Knight who had by his new edition of the poet enabled the student to perceive more clearly the development of Wordsworth’s thought. Precisely that examination which we are desirous of making of Lowell, Lowell set out to make of Wordsworth; but the eye of the student reveals something of the mind that prompts the eye’s excursion, and Lowell was in a way suggesting the movement of his own thought when, upon enquiring what was the solution by which Wordsworth attempted as he grew in years to justify his own early radicalism with his later conservatism, he found a very powerful influence in that religious conception which dominated Wordsworth’s later thought. “I see no reason to think,” he says, “that he ever swerved from his early faith in the beneficence of freedom, but rather that he learned the necessity of defining more exactly in what freedom consisted, and the conditions, whether of time or place, under which alone it can be beneficent, of insisting that it must be an evolution and not a manufacture, and that it should coördinate itself with the prior claims of society and civilization.” But the roots of freedom were planted in the individual nature, and there they were to be nourished. Development of character—yes, but by what means? “Observation convinced him that what are called the safeguards of society are the staff also of the individual members of it; that tradition, habitude, and heredity are great forces, whether for impulse or restraint. He had pondered a pregnant phrase of the poet Daniel, where he calls religion ‘mother of Form and Fear.’ A growing conviction of its profound truth turned his mind towards the church as the embodiment of the most potent of all traditions, and to her public offices as the expression of the most socially humanizing of all habitudes.”