JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
AT “ELMWOOD”
Unfortunately, Mr. Lowell is not at home. He is in his own country and among his own people; but he is not at Elmwood. For nearly a decade now his friends have ceased to pass under the portal of those great English trees and find him by the chimney-fire, “toasting his toes,” or engaged in less meditative tasks amid the light and shadow of his books. Loss to them has been gain to us; for in the more open life of a man of the world and of affairs, at Madrid and London, the public has seemed to see him more intimately, and has been pleased to feel some share in his honor as a representative American gentleman of what must be called an ageing, if not the old, school. But for lovers of the author, as for his neighbors and acquaintances and his contemporaries in literature, Lowell is indissolubly set in Elmwood, and is not to be thought of elsewhere except as in absence. There, sixty-seven years ago, when Elmwood was but a part of the country landscape of old Cambridge, he was born of an honorable family of the colonial time, and learned his alphabet and accidence, and imbibed from the cultivated and solid company that gathered about his father the simplicity of manners and severe idealism of mind of which he continues the tradition; there, in college days, he “read everything except his text-books,” and with his æquales of the class of 1838 won a somewhat reluctant sonship from a displeased Alma Mater; being in his youth, as he once remarked to the rebellious founders of The Harvard Advocate, “something of a revolutionist myself”; and it was from there he went out as far as Boston, to begin that legal career which was not to end in the glory of a justice’s wig. And after the early volume of poems was published and a kindly fire had exhausted the edition, and when The Pioneer—what a name that was to gather into its frontiersman-stroke Hawthorne, Story, Poe, Very and the brawny Mrs. Browning!—had gone down in the first financial morass, still the pleasant upper room at Elmwood, looking off over the sweep of the Charles and the lines of the horizon-hills, was as far from being the scene of forensic discussion as it was from taking its conversational tone from the ancient clergymen who, with their long pipes, looked down on the poet’s friends from an old panel over the fireplace. The Bar has lost many a deserter to the Muses, and it was a settled thing with the birds of Elmwood—and the place is still a woodland city of them—that although they “half-forgave his being human,” they would not forgive his being a lawyer. So, Lowell kept to his walks in the country and confided the knowledge of his haunts to the readers of his verses, and from the beginning rhymed the nobler human tone with the notes of nature; and he married, and many reminiscences remain, among the men of that day of that brief happiness, one bright episode of which was his Italian journey. The first series of “The Biglow Papers” appeared, and so his literary life began definitely to share in public affairs and to take on the quasi-civic character which was to become more and more his distinction, until it should reach its development, on the side of his genius, in the patriotic odes, and its acknowledgment, on the part of the people, in his offices of national trust. Seldom, indeed, has the peculiar privacy of a poet’s life passed by so even and natural a growth into the publicity and dignity of the great citizen’s.
But, in the narrow space of this sketch, one must not crowd the lines; and in the way of biography, of which little can be novel to the reader, it is enough to recall to mind the general course of Lowell’s life; how he founded The Atlantic, which was to prove a diary of the contemporary literary age; and in the Lowell Institute first displayed on a true scale the solidity and acuteness of his critical scholarship, and gave material aid to the national cause and the war on slavery, as he had always done, by his brilliant satire, his ambushing humor and more marvelous pathos; and became the Harvard professor, succeeding Longfellow; and after a residence in Leipsic settled again at Elmwood to give fresh books to the world, and to be, perhaps, the most memorable figure in the minds of several generations of Harvard students. Nor can one leave unmentioned the more familiar features of the social life in these years of his second marriage—a life somewhat retired and quiet but filled full of amiability, wit and intellectual delight, led partly in Longfellow’s study, or in the famous Saturday Club, or in the weekly whist meetings, and partly in Elmwood itself. That past lives in tradition and anecdotage, and in it Lowell appears as the life and spirit of the wine, with a conversational play so rich in substance and in allusion that, it is said, one must have heard and seen with his own eyes and ears, before he can realize that what seems the studied abundance and changeableness of his essays is in fact the spontaneity of nature, the mother-tongue of the man.
It will be expected, however, that the writer of this notice will take the reader to the privacy of Elmwood itself, not in this general way, but at some particular time before its owner discontinued his method of fire-side traveling under the care of safe and comfortable household gods, and tempted the real ocean to find an eight-years’ exile. The house—an old-fashioned, roomy mansion, set in a large triangular wooded space, with grassy areas, under the brow of Mount Auburn—has been familiarized through description and picture; and the author himself, of medium height, well set, with a substantial form and a strikingly attractive face, of light complexion, full eyes, mobile and expressive features, with the beard and drooping mustache which are so marked a trait of his picture, and now, like the hair, turning gray,—he, too, is no stranger. Some ten years ago this figure, in the “reefer” which he then wore, was well known in the college yard, giving an impression of stoutness, and almost bluffness, until one caught sight of the face with its half-recognition and good-will to the younger men; and in his own study or on the leafy veranda of the house, one perceived only the simplest elements of unconscious dignity, the frankness of complete cultivation, and the perfect welcome. If one passed into his home at that time he would have found a hall that opened out into large rooms on either hand, the whole furnished in simple and solid fashion, with a look that betokened long inhabitancy by the family; and on the left hand he would have entered the study with its windows overlooking long green levels among the trees on the lawn—for though the estate is not very extensive in this direction, the planting has been such that the seclusion seems as inviolable as in the more distant country. The attachment of its owner to these “paternal acres” is sufficient to explain why when others left Cambridge in summer—and then it is as quiet as Pisa—he still found it “good enough country” for him; but besides this affection for the soil, the landscape itself has a charm that would content a poet. To the rear of this room, or rather of its chimney, for there was no partition, was another, whose windows showed the grove and shrubbery at the back toward the hill; and this view was perhaps the more peaceful.
Here in these two rooms were the usual furnishings of a scholar’s study—tables and easy-chairs, pictures and pipes, the whole lending itself to an effect of lightness and simplicity, with the straw-matting islanded with books and (especially in the further room) strewn with scholar’s litter, from the midst of which one day the poet, in search of “what might be there,” drew from nearly under my feet the manuscript of Clough’s “Amours de Voyage.” The books filled the shelves upon the wall, everywhere, and a library more distinctly gathered for the mere love of literature is not to be found. It is not large as libraries go—some four thousand volumes. To tell its treasures would be to catalogue the best works of man in many languages. Perhaps its foundation-stone, in a sense, is a beautiful copy of the first Shakspeare folio; Lord Vernon’s “Dante” is among the “tallest” volumes, and there are many rare works in much smaller compass. The range in English is perhaps the most sweeping, but the precious part to the bibliophile is the collection, a very rich one, of the old French and other romantic poetry. More interesting in a personal way are the volumes one picks up at random, which are mile-stones of an active literary life—old English romances, where the rivulet is not of the text but of the blue-pencil, the preliminary stage of a trenchant essay on some Halliwell, perhaps; or possibly some waif of a useless task, like a reëdited “Donne,” to whose manes the unpoetic publisher was unwilling to make a financial sacrifice. But the limit is reached. That time in which the scene of this brief description is set, was the last long summer that Lowell spent in Elmwood.
George E. Woodberry.
[Mr. Lowell died August 12, 1891.—Editors.]
DONALD G. MITCHELL (IK MARVEL)