In August he went to Washington to close his business with the State Department, and made with great pleasure the acquaintance of Mr. Bayard, then Secretary of State, and later like him to represent the country in London. He met President Cleveland also, and saw in him “a legitimate birth of Democracy and not a byblow like Butler and his kind.”
Lowell was solicited both by the editor of the Atlantic and other friends to take up again his contributions to literature, but he put them off. He had no inclination to write—he was glad of the solace of books and letters, but the spur to literary activity had been dulled. Yet he kept his Muse at least as a sort of friendly companion, as when on the seventy-fifth birthday of his neighbor and associate Dr. Asa Gray he wrote:—
“Just Fate, prolong his life well spent,
Whose indefatigable hours
Have been as gaily innocent
And fragrant as his flowers!”
For a time he was content to drift, and to let the indolence which he had overmastered all his life get the upper hand of him now, even though the pressure of circumstance still lay heavy on him. “I am delighted,” he wrote 13 December, 1885, to Mr. John W. Field, “to hear that you are getting on so well—better than I feared—and cannot enough admire your pluck. ’Tis all the more admirable in a man like you who have the art of finding (or making) life worth living so much more than most of us. As for me I am a little tired now and then, and consent to grow old only because I can’t decently help it.... As for my coming on to Washington—I don’t know what to say. I should like to see you and Eliza, but don’t see how I can find the time at present. I have a great deal to do if I could only do it. But I am beginning to feel ‘old and slow,’ as Ulysses said to Dante. Especially do I feel slow as compared with what I once was.... I am just now bothered with an address to be given next week at the opening of a public library in Chelsea. When I have done that I mean to hold my tongue for evermore. Why should I make myself wretched when there is so much that will do it without my help?”
The address at Chelsea was the one on “Books and Libraries,” included in his “Literary and Political Addresses,” an address, almost conversational in its manner, marked not so much by felicity of expression as by a sanity of tone and the easy deliverance of a full mind.
A public function quite in accord with his academic and literary tastes was the presidency, which he accepted, of the American Archæological Institute. He took also the post of chairman of a committee to raise funds for the society’s school at Athens. “I find myself a little out of place,” he writes to Mr. Reverdy Johnson, 28 December, 1885, “but I consented to serve because I was so thoroughly persuaded both of the excellence of the object proposed and of the honor it has already done and is likely to do us in convincing Europe that we are not wholly given over as a nation to the pursuit of material good. The English school received its final impulse from the existence and success of ours.”
At the end of January, 1886, Lowell went to Washington, at the urgent request of the Copyright League, to advocate the cause of international copyright. Two separate bills designed to bring this about had been offered in the Senate by Senators Hawley and Chace, and there was to be a hearing on them before the Committee on Patents. Several publishers, authors, and members of the League had argued in favor of some action, and one gentleman, the late Mr. Gardiner G. Hubbard, had appeared in opposition. Mr. Hubbard, who was well known as the most active promoter of the then rather new Bell telephone, argued that an author’s right in his literary property differed from that in any other kind of property; “that while he has the manuscript of his thoughts in his own possession, it is his own, and that when he gives it out to the world it ceases to be his own and becomes the property of the world.”[92] He laid great stress, further, on the grounds of the granting of copyright by Congress, as for the benefit of the public, and not for the benefit of authors, and finally claimed that an international copyright would be injurious to the public by tending to raise the price of books.
Lowell came in while Mr. Hubbard was speaking, and was called upon by the chairman, Senator Platt of Connecticut, as soon as Mr. Hubbard had sat down. He had not intended to address the committee other than by answering such questions as might be put to him, but the last speaker’s positions nettled him, and he began at once by attacking them.
“There are one or two things in the very extraordinary speech which Mr. Hubbard has just addressed to you which, I think, call for some comment on my part. He began by stating what is a very common fallacy, that there could be no such thing as property in books. It is generally put in another way, that there can be no such thing as property in an idea. There is a feeling, I know, among a great many people that books, even when they are printed, are like umbrellas, feræ naturæ; but by Mr. Hubbard we are carried farther back than that, to the very conception of the book.
“Now, nobody supposes that there can be property in an idea. The thing is a fallacy on the face of it. What we do suppose is that there is a property in the fashioning that is given to the idea, the work that a man has put into it, and I think the Constitution has already recognized that in granting patents. Patents are nothing but ideas fashioned in a certain way. For instance, the Bell telephone is precisely a parallel case to that of books, and I think there are a great many people in this country who are interested in the Bell telephone and believe it to be property.