“They who, on a tiny clearing pared from the edge of the woods, built here, most probably with the timber hewed from the trees they felled, our earliest hall, with the solitude of ocean behind them, the mystery of forest before them, and all about them a desolation, most surely (si quis animis celestibus locus) share our gladness and our gratitude at the splendid fulfilment of their vision. If we could have but preserved the humble roof which housed so great a future, Mr. Ruskin himself would almost have admitted that no castle or cathedral was ever richer in sacred associations, in pathos of the past, and in moral significance. They who reared it had the sublime prescience of that courage which fears only God, and could say confidently in the face of all discouragement and doubt, ‘He hath led me forth into a large place; because He delighted in me, He hath delivered me.’ We cannot honor them too much; we can repay them only by showing, as occasions rise, that we do not undervalue the worth of their example.”
It was out of this natural consideration of the origin of the University that Lowell passed by an historical process to an analysis of the objects had in founding it and the spirit in which these objects had been pursued. He troubled himself not at all with the external affairs of the college and used no time in tracing its material development. He had found its chief office to be that of maintaining and handing down the traditions “of how excellent a thing Learning was,” and his main contention was that the chief office of the University still is to train in learning rather than in knowledge. It was in urging this that he made a plea for the broad and not the special interpretation of the term Learning. As the result of his own study and observation he contended earnestly for the Humanities as the paramount interest.
Lowell admitted in a letter he wrote to G. H. Palmer, one of the most intelligent advocates of those new methods in education which found their fullest expression in what is known as the “elective system,” that he based some parts of his address rather on his experience as a teacher there than on the later conditions of teaching in the college; but after all his dispute was with the elective system, for he distrusted what looked to him like a departure from the “unbroken experience and practice of mankind.” One does not need to doubt or believe in this particular collegiate method to give full assent to Lowell’s dictum that “the most precious property of culture and of a college as its trustee is to maintain higher ideals of life and its purpose, to keep trimmed and burning the lamps of that pharos, built by wiser than we, that warns from the reef and shallows of popular doctrine.” For as he moves forward in his address, he is drawn inevitably into a consideration of what was, first and last, the fundamental social question with him, the democratic idea. He had refrained, as we have seen, from touching in his English address on Democracy upon the perils which beset it in its American stronghold, but here, at home, in the very heart of its stoutest defence, he must needs use these perils to emphasize his doctrine that the prime business of the college is to “set free, to supple, and to train the faculties in such wise as shall make them most effective for whatever task life may afterwards set them, for the duties of life rather than for its business, and to open windows on every side of the mind where thickness of wall does not prevent it.”
The whole address is an exemplification of how surely Lowell’s mind had come to base all speculations on the broad bottom of a political organism. And as he was still unequivocally an idealist, the very melancholy of his foreboding, cropping out in this and other addresses, bore testimony not to his faintheartedness but to his apprehension of the distance which prevailed between his ideal and the fact. He saw in the whole the sum of the particulars, and, as individual character working in freedom was the ultimate end in persons, he would listen to nothing else when he applied his ear to the movement of the people; and thus it was that he distrusted any departure of the University in its methods from that line which had resulted in the historic democracy that he believed to have found its true exemplar in New England.
When Lowell was in England in the summer of 1886 he had written to Mr. Gilder that his friend Miss Mary Boyle had some letters of Landor which she had intrusted to him for publication, and he proposed to preface them with an introduction of his own if Mr. Gilder would publish the paper in the Century. His letters show that he was moved not by any desire to write on Landor, but to help an old friend, and now that his Harvard address was off his hands, he applied himself to the task. He had the curiosity to look up his early paper on Landor in the Massachusetts Quarterly,[95] in which he remarks he found one good sentence and one other that he could not understand.[96] He sent the paper to Mr. Gilder, 23 December, 1886: “I send you a Christmas gift. I have made more of it than I expected, but you may eat only the plums if you like and give to the poor the pudding in which I have hidden them. The letters, thank Heaven, are better than I thought. The last (on Powers’s death) is charming. I have arranged them as well as I could without books. There is one on the Chinese War which I could date could I remember the year of that outrage—1841 or 2? You might find out.
“Have I added too much of my own? And is it dull? I am, but that’s nothing to the purpose. I could easily have held my peace, but I promised to play the Master of Ceremonies and must proclaim the rank of my guests.
“I am sorry that some of the letters are copied on both sides. Most of them are in proper form. Send me proof here unless I say otherwise.
If the hunting up of Christmas gifts hasn’t killed her,
Give my love to Mrs. Gilder.”[97]
The paper, which is included in “Latest Literary Essays and Addresses,” was a most agreeable compound of criticism and personal reminiscence, and contains what Lowell rarely ventured on in his printed work, but now and then in his letters with real success—the portraiture of a man.
The article did not appear for a year; meanwhile he was in correspondence with Mr. Aldrich respecting some poems, and he had engaged to write the introduction to a subscription book, “The World’s Progress.” He had the assurance that the work thus introduced was a serious one, but his introduction had no special relation to it; it was an independent paper. “It rather attracts me,” he wrote, “through my sense of humor. It will be pure creation made out of nothing, not even nebula or star-dust,” and he added, what was indeed the secret of his undertaking the work, “the money it will fetch me will be a great medicine. Grandfathers get miserly. I never saved a penny till I had two [grandchildren].” As the new year opened, and he found himself in the midst of this set task: “I don’t get on with the world at all since I half promised to write an introduction to ‘The World’s Progress,’ a megatherium of a book in two volumes, quarto. I hear their heavy footfall behind me wherever I go, and am sure they will trample me into the mud at last.”