His greatness not so much in genius lies
As in adroitness, when occasions rise,
Lifelong convictions to extemporize.
This morning I find the last lines quoted by Auberon Herbert in a letter to the Times, but luckily without my name. It is a warning.”
“I am living a futile life here,” he writes to Mr. Norton, “but am as fond of London as Charles Lamb. The rattle of a hansom shakes new life into my old bones, and I ruin myself in them. I love such evanescent and unimportunate glimpses of the world as I catch from my flying perch. I envy the birds no longer, and learn better to converse with them. Our views of life are the same.” It was the summer also when Dr. Holmes made his royal progress through England, and Lowell had the pleasure of seeing the hearty welcome his old friend received. To Mr. Field he wrote, 27 July, 1886:—
“I met Mrs. Archibald Forbes the other day and had much talk with her about you. She did not give me much comfort,—except in telling me that you had gone away from Washington for the summer. This means, I suppose, that you are well enough to go to Ashfield, which I take as a good sign. I constantly meet old friends of yours here who ask after you affectionately. I give them what comfort I can by telling them how bravely both of you bear up under your common sorrow....
“Old Mrs. Proctor told me a good story lately which may amuse you. She was breakfasting with Rogers. Thackeray and Kinglake were there among others. So was Abraham Hayward, who began abusing Houghton (then Monkton Milnes), a great favorite of hers. Kinglake tried in vain to divert or stop him. At last Mrs. P. in a pause broke out with, ‘Mr. Hayward, for the first time in my life I wish I were a man that I might call you out and make you, for the first time in your life, a gentleman!’ She is as young as ever and as jealous of her lovers, tolerating no rivals.
“I am to meet Doña Emilia next Friday at dinner, and shall take upon myself to give her your kindest regards. I fear she is not very well, but she is so fond of London that it will be better for her than a course of the waters at Wiesbaden. I shall be very glad to see her again. I last met her in London four years ago.... By the way, I saw Don Palo (Francisco) Giher at Oxford whither I went to help Holmes on with his gown. It was a pleasant surprise to me when he rushed forward with both hands outstretched in the Master’s drawing-room at Balliol and began at me in Spanish. As the window was behind him I could not see his face and did not at once recognize him. My Spanish naturally creaked a little on its hinges after such long disuse, but, with that hidalquia which is common to all his race, he told somebody afterwards that I spoke the most exquisite Castilian! Even at twenty I shouldn’t have believed—and at sixty-seven!
“I have been whirling round like a marble on the van of a windmill and am worn as smooth. I roll off on the slightest incline. But I can lie still on the lap of an old friendship such as ours. Good-by and God bless you.”
When Lowell went abroad in the spring of 1886 he had been asked to give the address in November at the 250th anniversary of the founding of Harvard University. The thought of it harassed him during the summer. “I am distressed with the thought of that abominable address,” he wrote near the end of July. “I have not yet accepted and would decline could I give any better reason than that I have nothing to say. Nobody ever thinks that of any importance! What have I done to have this fly thrust into my pot of ointment which grows more precious every day by diminution like the Sibyl’s leaves?” And after his return to Deerfoot Farm late in September, when he could not avoid his destiny, he wrote: “I am in direful dumps about my address,—the muse obstinately dumb.” Once more, 6 October, he wrote: “I have been mulling over my address and to-day mean to break into it in earnest by blocking out an exordium. It doesn’t take hold of me, and I always feared it wouldn’t. It isn’t exactly in my line. To fill so large a bowl as an hour I shall have to draw on the cow with the iron tail,—and pumping is an exercise that always wearies me beyond most.”
His equanimity was further shaken by a disagreeable experience when the son of an old friend, making a show of a friendly visit, led him on into discourse about England and English affairs, and then, relying on his memory, decanted the conversation into an article for a New York paper with which he was connected. “If he had reported what I really said, instead of his version of it, I should not feel so bitterly,” was Lowell’s comment, and to a friend he wrote: “As for —— he knew that I didn’t know he was interviewing me. To any sane man the shimble-shamble stuff he has made me utter is proof of it. I say ‘made me utter’ deliberately, because, though he has remembered some of the subjects (none of my choosing) which we talked about, he has wholly misrepresented the tone and sometimes falsified the substance of what I said.... The worst of ——’s infidelity (I mean to keep my temper) is that it is like a dead rat in the wall,—an awful stink and no cure.”
It is not easy to say just what gave rise to the peculiarly American academic custom of making a celebration to consist of an oration and a poem, but Harvard was fortunate in being able to summon from her graduates Holmes to deliver a poem and Lowell an oration. To Lowell himself the occasion was stimulating, not only because of the pride and loyalty with which he regarded the college, but because he had given it twenty years of service, and came back to it now after nearly a decade in which he had abundant opportunity for comparison of its fruit with that which hung on the boughs of older institutions. As one reads again an address which was listened to with eagerness, one follows the course which Lowell’s thought took with a deepening sense that he was speaking out of a full mind, not so much upon the specific questions of university education as upon the large aspects of education and life which rose to view as an historical survey laid them bare. The address was the outcome of Lowell’s life as a scholar broadening into the experience of a man who had had to do with the affairs of a great world. The affectionate pride which he had in New England as exemplified in his historic study, “New England Two Centuries Ago,” had grown into a feeling of reverence which leads him in the opening passages of his address to set forth the founders of the college in a manner to leave on the minds of his hearers the impression of an august body chosen out of the greatest of their time to lay the foundation of a noble institution; and toward the close of his address he returns to this theme and presents it anew with an eloquence and beauty of phrase that make the passage one which may be read without fear beside the sonorous Latin which faced the audience in Sanders Theatre.