It was not till the end of December that Lowell could speak and write of his wife with anything like relief from the burden of anxiety. During this time he took long walks with his friend Mr. Field, and attended to his necessary work at the legation. His spirits began to rise, but the strain he had been undergoing had been intense. Later, when the critical condition was over, though relapses still occurred, he could rehearse something of his experience: “I have had a very long and very terrible trial, which the strange country and alien tongue have made worse, and these ups and downs almost desperate. And yet without the intervals of reason and hopeful convalescence from time to time, I know not how I could have endured it. Indeed I cannot now comprehend how I pulled through. Friendship has helped us, it is true. During the first weeks Doña Emilia de Riaño (Gayangos’s daughter) came every night to watch with Fanny, and her husband, Don Juan, came to see me every day. And my secretary, a most true-hearted, affectionate fellow, sat up with me night after night when I could not sleep, and kept me from eating into myself all the time. Otherwise I was without even an acquaintance, for everybody leaves Madrid during the summer. Lately the dear Fields have been a great prop.
“If I could only get her away! But that is out of the question at present. And all the while I have had to write cool little bulletins to Mabel, turning the fair side outward when my heart was aching with anxiety and apprehension. I must have expiated many sins this summer. I feel now as if nothing could kill me, and am saddened more than ever with a conclusion arrived at long ago by experience, that this poor human nature of ours gets used to almost anything—a conclusion of far-reaching and, in some ways, disheartening consequence.”
As the year waned, Lowell found himself required to give his attention to the change of the Spanish ministry, a political event which caused more excitement than he had seen at any time during his stay in Madrid. He analyzed the situation in his despatch to the government, No. 222, dated 15 December, 1879, and in his conclusion wrote: “It is hardly yet time to estimate the effect of recent events on the peninsular or colonial destinies of the country, but the result thus far has been to weaken the man who has hitherto been acknowledged leader and inspirer of the Liberal-Conservative, and one might say therefore of the Dynastic, party of Spain. Yet it should be remembered in estimating his chances that he is a man of far greater resources, of prompter courage in taking responsibility, and of more convincing and persuasive oratory than any of his contemporaries and rivals in party-leadership. All sorts of wild rumors are in circulation, but I am inclined to await events rather than to trust in the vaticinations of journalists who mutually excite and outbid each other in the bewildering competition of immediate inspiration.”
Twelve days later, in despatch No. 223, Lowell returned to the subject of the change of ministry, and after some shrewd and witty conjectures as to the course of events, drawn in part from his study of the Spanish mind, he took up a more serious matter.
“The crucial question for the new cabinet will not, I conceive, arise from domestic politics, but rather from the economic reforms demanded by the Island of Cuba. Señor Cánovas assured me a week ago that he ‘was ready and should be glad to concede any reforms that would not produce a deficit in the Cuban budget, but that he could not consent to make the island a burden on the peninsula.’ The minister of Ultramar said substantially the same thing to me last evening. I told him smilingly that I had a deep interest in the matter, because I feared that I should have my hands full of Cuban claims if they delayed much longer.
“The Cuban deputies and senators are, I believe, very much discontented with the turn things have taken. Several have already gone home, and more are to follow. The affairs of Cuba certainly look ominous, but those who prophesy a general movement for separation there seem to forget that the island is inhabited by two distinct and mutually suspicious races, and that the whites, being of Spanish origin, are as obstinately divided in political sentiment as their kinsmen here. General Grant’s visit to Cuba seems to attract some attention. The Minister for Foreign Affairs asked me about it yesterday. I answered carelessly that I knew nothing more than what I saw in the newspapers; that the same motives no doubt carried the general thither that had carried him to Europe and Asia; that he was also to visit Mexico, a circumstance which I had seen connected by some journalists with an apocryphal movement in that country for annexation to the United States. You can infer what rumors are rife by a question asked me by the Pro-nuncio here, ‘whether negotiations were on foot for a purchase of Cuba by the United States.’ I told him that such a report was very likely to arise from the well-known fact that General Prim when in power had favored such a scheme, and turned the conversation to something else.”
Early in 1880, entirely without Lowell’s knowledge or motion, a suggestion from one or two friends, conspiring with the wishes of the State Department at Washington, led to the offer of a transfer from Madrid to London. On 22 January, Lowell wrote to his daughter: “Day before yesterday I was startled with a cipher telegram. My first thought was ‘Row in Cuba—I shall have no end of bother.’ It turned out to be this: ‘President has nominated you to England. He regards it as essential to the public service that you should accept and make your personal arrangements to repair to London as early as may be. Your friends whom I have conferred with concur in this view.’ You see that is in very agreeable terms, and at least shows that Government is satisfied with my conduct here. I was afraid of its effects on mamma at first; but she was pleased, and began at once to contrive how I could accept, which she wished me to do. I answered: ‘Feel highly honored by the President’s confidence. Could accept if allowed two months delay. Impossible to move or leave my wife sooner.’”
How intimately Lowell connected the change with the condition of his wife, and how her state subdued any exhilaration he might have felt, appears further from a letter written 13 February, 1880, to a friend who had been moving in the matter at home. “I did not know that you had any hand in it when I wrote to Mr. Evarts and told him that had I been consulted I should have had grave doubts about accepting. Accordingly I wish you would contrive to let them know at Washington that I was in utter ignorance of what my friends were doing. Indeed, I hardly know even now what I shall (or rather what I can) do. When the telegram came Fanny had been going on well for six weeks, but about a fortnight ago came another relapse and she is now in a very nervous state again,—not absolutely out of her head, but incapable of controlling herself.... If this relapse should prove transitory like the others, I shall probably be obliged to leave Fanny here, and go to London for my presentation, and then come back on leave. For I cannot very well renounce the appointment now after having consented to accept it. Fanny was so well when the telegram came that I did not hesitate to consult her about it. She was very much pleased and insisted on my accepting, but now I have the dreadful suspicion that it was the excitement of this news that upset her again. It is true that the change did not show itself for more than a week, and there are reasons for attributing it to physical causes, but I cannot shake off the bitter reproach of having been imprudent. And yet what could I do? The doctor had told me that in a month at farthest I should be able to move her, and she was so perfectly herself then that I had no fears. It is now twelve o’clock (noon) and she is still asleep. The nurse thinks her better. She woke for a few moments, took some beef tea, and dropped off again. Sleep is always good for her. I hope it is a good sign that this relapse has not been so bad as the last before it. Before that she had been better for a few days only and I was never sure that the excitement of the brain was more than diminished. But when this began she had been perfectly self-possessed for weeks, and we took great comfort together in the twenty-third psalm. I am glad I was born long enough ago to have some superstitions left. They stand by one somehow, and the back feels that it has a brother behind it.[73] I long to be at home again, and it will not be a great while now. If we get to England, it is more than half way.”
Lowell carried out the plan he had outlined. His friends, Mr. and Mrs. John W. Field, were in Madrid, and he left Mrs. Lowell under their watchful supervision, and went reluctantly to England, reaching London 7 March, 1880. His friends kept him informed daily by telegraph and letter of the condition of the invalid, and it so chanced that she had another relapse shortly after he had left her. He was in despair, and heaped reproaches upon himself for having gone; yet when he reasoned, he saw he had done only what he must do. A more reassuring telegram came on the 9th of March, and on the 14th he was persuaded that Mrs. Lowell had issued from this crisis and come fairly out on the other side. In a week more, he had had his audience with the Queen, and taking brief leave of absence, had set out for Madrid, whence he was now able to remove his wife to England. The life of both of them was brightened during the summer that followed by the coming of Mr. and Mrs. Burnett on a brief visit from America.
The two and a half years that Lowell passed at Madrid formed an excellent preparation for the more important post which he was to occupy near the Court of St. James. The etiquette of a high diplomatic position does not differ greatly in the different capitals; if anything, more punctilio would be observed in Madrid than in London. It was something, at any rate, to have become wonted to the function of a minister plenipotentiary. But this was a trifle compared with the advantage which Lowell enjoyed in the possession now of self-confidence. He had tried on the coat and found it fitted him well; he could wear it in London where he would be in a far more conspicuous position. He had practised the diplomatic art in a country where the language was foreign and the race unfamiliar, and if in his short residence he could, with some assurance, analyze the internal political conditions, he might hope more quickly to be able to apprehend nice discriminations in the current politics of a country where he was at home in language, literature, and history.
It is scarcely to be doubted that his performance of diplomatic duties in Spain had made it easy for the President to appoint him to the highest foreign station. But it is also likely that the choice was made mainly upon the ground of Lowell’s fitness to act as a mediator between the two countries. With the exception of Motley, there never had been an American minister to England who was first and foremost a man of letters, and yet in no other field of human endeavor was there so great a community of intelligence. Literature had been honored in its representatives in many courts of Europe and in consular offices, but the presumption is that heretofore political and commercial relations with England had been of so complex a character that it was thought desirable to have a trained man of affairs or of law and statesmanship at the post. Moreover, it was a great political prize, and men of letters are, as a rule, non-combatants in politics. But Lowell had been initiated in Spain, and it was a far more simple process, so far as political effect might be considered, to transfer him to England than to have made that a direct appointment.
The educated men of America were delighted with the appointment. They felt at once that they had a spokesman. And it may fairly be said that Americans generally were gratified; for a man of letters who has won high recognition, especially if his work has been in the field of poetry, history, or general literature, occupies a secure place in the regard of his countrymen, and is subject to less suspicion or jealousy than one in any other conspicuous position. By its very nature a literary reputation is widespread and not local. A very great lawyer, unless he has also been in the public eye as a member of government, is taken on trust by all but his professional brethren. A great author through the process of growing great has become known to increasing numbers of his countrymen. It is doubtful if any other author, save Longfellow, would at once have been so accepted by Americans as their proper representative in London.
On the other side, though the English as a great reading body are not very familiar with American literature, the leaders of opinion, the class that stands nearest the government, know it generously, and while it would be necessary to make the acquaintance of a representative of American law, business, or politics, a representative of American letters and scholarship would already be a familiar name. Certain it is that Lowell in going to London went at once into the midst of friends. He had been there but two or three days when he wrote: “I am overwhelmed already with invitations though I have not put my arrival in the papers;” and a few days later: “I lunched with Tennyson yesterday. He is getting old and looks seedy. I am going in to take a pipe with him the first free evening. Pipes have more thawing power than anything else.”
And yet it must not be forgotten that Lowell himself had been a frank critic of England and carried in his own mind a temper which it might seem would be in the way of a perfectly cordial relation. In his political papers and in the second series of the “Biglow Papers” he had been very outspoken. His well-known article on “A Certain Condescension in Foreigners,” with its pungent sentences, was not easily to be overlooked, and there is a letter[74] which Mr. Norton prints, written in 1865, that may be taken as a truthful report of the attitude held by Lowell toward England during the great war, and modified only slightly by time. There was therefore a little consciousness on his part as if he were not wholly a persona grata, and also that he must stand by his colors, which gave him a certain brusqueness in his early public appearances. It did not take long, however, for him to adjust himself in his new relations, for after all it was the greater England to which he was sent, and the world with which he came immediately into contact was very hospitable. At the same time, throughout his stay in England he showed a certain vigilance as the champion of American institutions, speech, and manners which gave him the air of combativeness. An Englishman who was often his host said: “I like Mr. Lowell. I like to have him here. I keep him as long as I can, and I am always in terror lest somebody shall say something about America that would provoke an explosion.” Mr. Smalley, who quotes this, adds that Lowell had seen the inside of more country houses in England than any American who ever lived; and that there was not one in which he had not let fall some good American seed.[75]
“Sometimes,” says Max Müller, “even the most harmless remark about America would call forth very sharp replies from him. Everybody knows that the salaries paid by America to her diplomatic staff are insufficient, and no one knew it better than he himself. But when the remark was made in his presence that the United States treated their diplomatic representatives stingily, he fired up, and discoursed most eloquently on the advantages of high thoughts and humble living.”[76]
The official business which occupies an American minister in England is the formal occasion for accrediting him to the Court; but there has been a growing disposition to treat this as after all a secondary consideration beside the less tangible one of increasing good feeling between the peoples of the two countries. Special envoys, telegrams, and despatches might serve for the transaction of business, but just as the countless personal letters which pass between correspondents on both sides of the Atlantic go to make the invisible web which unites the two nations, so the personal intercourse which the American minister has with Englishmen may have a weighty effect in preserving an entente cordiale.
The English more than any other nation have cultivated the dinner-table and the social meeting for the purpose of exchanging ideas regarding public affairs. Where an American public man will send for a reporter of a widely read newspaper if he has some important message to deliver to his constituents or the people at large, the Englishman will accept an invitation to a dinner of some society, and take that occasion for making a speech which will be reported and commented on in all the great dailies of the city and the provinces. Dinners, unveilings, cornerstones, meetings of societies,—these all become the accepted occasions for the propagation of ideas, and the most unrhetorical people in civilization blurt out their views at such times with a certain scorn of eloquence and admiration of candor. Moreover, the smallness of the great legislative chambers conduces to the conversational tone, and thus public speakers are trained to the disuse of oratory.
It was natural that Lowell should be in demand on such occasions, and it was inevitable that he should make a remarkable impression. He had for years cultivated the art of speaking to small assemblies when he had a congenial subject and a responsive audience. He had the readiness of a practised writer, and he had above all a spontaneousness of nature which made him one of the best of conversationalists. It was but a slight remove from his lecture-room at Harvard, or his study at Elmwood, to an English dinner-table, and the themes on which he was called upon to speak were very familiar to him. Literature, the common elements of English and American life, the distinctiveness of America, these were subjects on which he was at home, and he brought to his task a manner quiet yet finished by years of practice. Had set orations been his business, he would scarcely have made so remarkable an impression as he made by his off-hand speeches. Yet it must not be supposed that these were careless, impromptu affairs. He was helped by his readiness, but he did not rely upon it. He thought out carefully his little address, and sometimes wrote it out in advance even when he made no use of manuscript. It was not unalloyed pleasure. “I am to speak at the Academy dinner to-morrow,” he writes to a friend, after he had had a couple of years practice in such functions, “which does not make me happy,—and not a fit word to say has yet occurred to me. They think I like to speak, I ‘do it so easily.’” He was not one to rise with the declaration that he had nothing to say, and then to say it. He respected his audience, and above all, with all his bonhomie, he never forgot that he was not a private guest, but the representative of a great nation. Not that he always harped on the one string of a community of nature and interest in the two countries, but he remembered that he was invited not simply as a man of letters but as the American minister.
When Lowell went to England he apprehended difficulty in maintaining the position of an American minister on his salary, which could not greatly be increased from his modest fortune. Indeed, he said frankly that it would have been quite impossible to play the host as it should be played, except for the unhappy fortune which compelled Mrs. Lowell to withdraw from society. His friends told him, with that candor which makes English society at once so refreshing and so amusing, that since Mrs. Lowell could not entertain, he was quite at liberty to accept all manner of invitations, and be under no obligation to return them. So his public duties called him in many directions socially, and he was able, besides doing a little business by the way in these diversions, to see the best of the intellectual life of the day. He had a choice group of friends who had known him before he was a public man, and his position gave shim the entrée in all society, but he whispered: “I think on the whole I find no society so good as what I have been accustomed to at home.”
All this brought him, moreover, an endless correspondence which quite effectually interfered with the friendly letters which had been so natural an outlet of his moods. “Did you ever happen,” he writes to Mr. Field, 20 August, 1880, “to be watching the top of a post when a snowstorm was beginning? You would have seen first a solitary flake come wavering down and make a lodgment, then another and another, till finally a white nightcap covered the whole knob. My head is very like that wooden protuberance, and that’s the way letters descend upon it. While I am answering one a dozen more have fallen, and if I let a day go by, I am overwhelmed. And days go by without my knowing it. You tell Mabel that five have passed since you wrote—which is simply absurd. I think it was about fifteen minutes ago that I got it.”
“During Mr. Lowell’s service as Minister to England,” writes Mr. R. R. Bowker, who was at this time resident in London, “Mrs. Lowell was constantly an invalid, as the after effect of typhus fever while in Spain, and it was delightful to see Mr. Lowell’s gallantry—for no other word expresses it—as she was brought down in her invalid chair to the dining-room or drawing-room. But she never lost the happy laugh so characteristic of her, and her charm of direct and pleasant manner. Her condition made it impossible for Mr. Lowell to give receptions or large dinners, so that his household guests were confined to a few Americans. In an invitation to dine on Christmas day of 1880, he writes: ‘We shan’t be very jolly, but there will be a spice of home.’ It was at that dinner, I think, that Mrs. Lowell had quite set her heart on having cranberry sauce with the turkey, and so had obtained from that wonderful American storehouse at 45 Piccadilly a supply of cranberries. But the servants, who had mostly come with the Lowells from Spain, could not be made to understand what was wanted, and it was only when, two or three courses after the turkey, Mrs. Lowell hit upon calling for the ‘compote rouge’ that we obtained our cranberry sauce as a separate course....
“Mr. Lowell was always charmingly gallant, and on one occasion at the house in Lowndes Square there was present a young American actress from whom he asked some recitation. She offered to read the balcony scene from ‘Romeo and Juliet’ but said she had no Romeo, whereupon Mr. Lowell volunteered, the Juliet reciting from behind the sofa, and the most charming of Romeos, though somewhat elderly for the part, reading from in front.”
The duties of his office in the first part of his service were not onerous except as multitudinous details bring weariness, but the long illness of President Garfield during the summer of 1881 brought a strain upon the emotions, and called for the constant exercise of a refined courtesy. For, aside from the formal exchange of sympathy which would be inevitable under such circumstances, there was that spontaneous and varied expression of grief on all sides, to which Lowell refers with so much feeling and such exquisite reserve of speech in the address on Garfield which was given at the Memorial Meeting in Exeter Hall, 24 September, 1881, and is preserved in “Literary and Political Addresses.” Lowell was there speaking to Americans in the presence, as it were, of all England, and the note of sobriety and deep feeling and strong faith which he struck still has the beauty and richness with which it fell on the ears of his sympathetic audience. He was constantly called upon during that anxious season of the President’s illness to respond to letters of sympathy. A despatch which he sent to the Secretary of State a fortnight after the blow shows the same dignity in his official communication, and illustrates also the atmosphere in which he was living throughout the summer. It is No. 219, and is dated 16 July, 1881:—
“Warm expressions of sympathy with the President, with Mrs. Garfield, and with the people of the United States, and of abhorrence of the atrocious attempt on the President’s life have reached this Legation from all parts of England and Scotland. From the Queen to the artisan, the feeling has been universal and very striking in its manifestation. The first question in the morning and the last at night for the first ten days after the news came was always: ‘How is the President?’ Had the President’s life not been spared, the demonstration of feeling would have been comparable with that which followed the assassination of Mr. Lincoln.
“The interest of the Queen was shown in an unusually marked way, and was unmistakable in its sincerity and warmth. By her special request all our telegrams were at once forwarded to her at Windsor. At Marlborough House, on the 14th she sent for me, in order to express in person her very great satisfaction that the condition of the President was so encouraging.
“I need not waste words in telling you with what profound anxiety your telegrams were awaited, nor how much encouragement and consolation were brought by the later ones. I may be permitted to thank you, however, for the entire composure which characterized them, and which enabled me to maintain my own while prophets of evil were hourly sending me imaginary news.
“The impression produced here by the President’s dignity and fortitude may be almost called a political event, for I believe that it has done more to make a juster estimate of American character possible here than many years of commercial or even social intercourse would have done.”
It was with a great sense of relief from tension, after the death of the President, that Lowell took a leave of absence, and made a short trip to Italy. “I am just starting,” he writes to T. W. Higginson, 8 October, 1881, “for the continent on a leave of absence which I sorely need. Wish me joy, I am going to Italy! Whether I may not find somebody else in my chair at the Legation when I come back is one of those problems that I cannot solve, and care little about, though now that I have made friendships here I should like to stay on a little longer. Did you know that I have five grandchildren?”
Unfortunately Mrs. Lowell was not sufficiently restored to health to accompany him, but he had the good fortune to find Mr. and Mrs. Field at the end of his journey. “We reached Flushing,” he wrote Mrs. Lowell from Frankfort, 10 October, “at half-past six in the morning and there took the train for this place. We travelled several thousand miles, as it seemed to me, through Holland, every now and then seeing a hunchbacked church gathering its village under its wings like a clucking hen when she sees the hawk in the air, at every turn a windmill and low fields bordered with trees that always look just beginning to grow—Heaven knows why. After crossing the Prussian frontier, the dead level continued as far as Cologne. The only difference was that the trees were larger and often one saw pretty linden-alleys leading up to the little towns. The railway officials had a more close-buttoned military air, and were always saluting invisible superiors.”
On the 12th he wrote from Weimar: “I left Frankfort at noon on Monday and got here towards seven in the evening. The first half of the journey was through one of the loveliest valleys (of the broad and basking kind) I ever saw. The only name I recognized in this part of the way was Offenbach, where Goethe had his adventures with Lilli a hundred and more years ago, but after passing Elm the names grew more familiar and famous. Fulda, Gotha, Erfurt, Eisenach. Weimar is a neat little capital which looks about as large as Salem, and where the one stranger is as much stared at as there. Why it is a capital, and especially why it should be where it is, puzzles me. The park is really delightful, with fine trees and one of the most beautiful streams running through it I ever saw. The water is so clear as to seem almost luminous, the water-mosses are as green as those of the sea, and some horse-chestnuts that had fallen in shone like live coals. I walked about the town all the forenoon.”
He paid a visit to Goethe’s house and the next day went on to Dresden, where he reflected that it was just twenty-five years since he was living there, a young man then, an old man now, but that he should find the Sistine Madonna and a few other old friends as young as ever. From Dresden he went to Venice, and there he found his friend Mr. Field. “He is as young and social as ever,” he wrote to Mr. Norton, 31 October; “has made the acquaintance here of everybody he didn’t know before, and goes with me to Florence on Thursday. The Brownings have also been here, but go to-morrow morning. The weather has been brutto assai, only two partly fine days during the time I have been here, and to-day it rains. We hear of three inches of snow at Vicenza, and I can well believe it, so cold has it been. Che tempo straongante! Still, Venice has been beautiful and dear for all that. Browning begins to show his seventy years (he will be seventy next February) a little, though his natural [force] be not abated. I hear that I am to stay in England, all rumors to the contrary notwithstanding.[77] Fanny continues better. She did not venture to come with me. I shall probably go on as far as Rome, and get back to London in time for the best fogs.”
To Mrs. Lowell be wrote from Venice, 1 November: “To-day the sky is bright for the third time since my arrival. All the other days have been cloudy or rainy, with a cold tramontana blowing steadily and strongly.... You remember that Lady Gordon told me I should find a bateau mouche plying on the Grand Canal. I did not expect to be personally inconvenienced by it; but as it lessened the custom of the gondoliers they have all struck work this morning, and one can’t get a barca for love or money. Poor fellows, they will find, as others have done, that steam is stronger than they.... I have given up Rimini owing to the cold, and shall start for Florence day after to-morrow with Field, who is younger and livelier than ever,—and makes more acquaintances every day than I should in a year.”
The two spent a week in Florence and then went to Rome where they foregathered with Story, and after a few days there Lowell set out alone on his return to London. He made a brief stay in Paris, and wrote thence to Mr. Field, 29 November, 1881: “I walked a good deal yesterday and felt very well, but to-day my head aches and things have come back. I met young Longfellow, who was to start for London last evening; also Thornton Lothrop, who came back with me to my hotel (where, by the way, I have a small suite—drawing-room, dining-room, two bedrooms with their own door of entrance on the staircase—first floor—for twenty-five francs, service y compris), and gave me heaps of Boston and Cambridge news. I am going to breakfast with him at the Bristol presently. I called at the Hôtel de Lorraine[78] and met the Revolution in person. The whole Hôtel de France part—the whole inside that is—was a heap of rubbish in the street. With some trouble I penetrated to Madame Guillaume, who led me into a tiny cavern in the rear, where I found Madame Garrier transformed into a cave-dweller. I expected to hear the growl of the ursus speluncæ, or whatever they call him. The darkness of a pocket (without any chink in it) would be illumination compared with it.... But Madame was very cordial. Presently Marie came in grown a tall girl and with very pretty manners. I took her out into the light and found her the image of her father. Him I did not see. Doubtless he was talking politics or taking snuff with some gossip or other of his. I remember he always disappeared in moments of crisis like the repair of the salle à manger which took place in my time. He is a singed cat, having seen two revolutions and the Commune.”
It was after his return to London that Lowell was in the thickest of the contention which began not long after his appointment to the post of American minister and continued through more than half of his term, as long, that is, as the period of acute disturbance of the relations between England and Ireland. Other international questions arose during his term of service, but none that called for the exercise of so much sound diplomatic discretion, or gave rise to so much angry criticism. Lowell’s judgment regarding Irish affairs was not the result merely of what he now saw and heard in London. No American who had followed public questions at home could escape the formation of some opinion respecting the Irish character and the relation in which Ireland stood to England, and through her emigrants to America. In 1848, when Smith O’Brien, Meagher, and other Irish leaders were agitating for reform through insurrection, Lowell commented on the situation in one of his editorial articles in the National Anti-Slavery Standard. He had no faith in the measures which these leaders proposed; he thought the only radical cure for the evils of Ireland lay in peasant proprietorship and education. “The only permanent safeguard,” he writes, “against famine is to give the people a deeper interest in the soil they cultivate and the crops they raise. It is the constant sense of insecurity that has made the Irish the shiftless and prodigal people which they are represented to be by all travellers. Education will be of no avail unless at the same time something be given them on which they can bring it to a practical bearing. Take away English opposition and the present insurrection is directed against—what? We confess ourselves at a loss for an answer. The only insurrection which has done Ireland any real service was the one headed by Father Mathew. The true office of the Irish Washington would be to head a rebellion against thriftlessness, superstition, and dirt. The sooner the barricades are thrown up against these the better. Ireland is in want of a revolution which shall render troops less necessary rather than more so.”
When Lowell was earnestly opposing the suicidal course of the South before the actual outbreak of the war for the Union, secession being then the shibboleth, he took Scotland and Ireland in their relation to Great Britain for parallel historic instances in support of his position. “There is no such antipathy,” he wrote, “between the North and the South as men ambitious of a consideration in the new republic, which their talents and character have failed to secure them in the old, would fain call into existence by asserting that it exists. The misunderstanding and dislike between them is not so great as they were within living memory between England and Scotland, as they are now between England and Ireland. There is no difference of race, language, or religion. Yet, after a dissatisfaction of near a century and two rebellions, there is no part of the British dominion more loyal than Scotland, no British subjects who would be more loath to part with the substantial advantages of their imperial connection than the Scotch; and even in Ireland, after a longer and more deadly feud, there is no sane man who would consent to see his country irrevocably cut off from power and consideration to obtain an independence which would be nothing but Donnybrook Fair multiplied by every city, town, and village in the island. The same considerations of policy and advantage, which render the union of Scotland and Ireland with England a necessity, apply with even more force to the several States of our Union.”[79]
When, therefore, Lowell found himself in England as the representative of the United States at a period when the chronic irritation between England and Ireland was at an acute stage through the operation of the so-called coercion act, it is not surprising that be should take a very lively interest in affairs. As a part of his diplomatic duty, he kept his government informed not so much of the facts which were the news of the day, as of the interpretation to be put upon the political situation. Accordingly, on 7 January, 1881, he wrote to Mr. Evarts, then Secretary of State:—
“Seldom has a session of Parliament begun under more critical circumstances. The abnormal condition of Ireland and the question of what remedy should be sought for it have deeply divided and embittered public opinion. Not only has the law been rendered powerless and order disturbed (both of them things almost superstitiously sacred in England), but the sensitive nerve of property has been rudely touched. The opposition have clamored for coercion, but while they have persisted in this it is clear that a change has been gradually going on in their opinion as to how great concessions would be needful. It seems now to be granted on all sides that the Irish people have wrongs to be redressed and just claims for rights to be granted. I think that the government have at least gained so much by the expectant and humane policy which they have persevered in under very great difficulties, and in spite of a criticism the more harassing as it seemed to have some foundation in principles hitherto supposed to be self-evident.
“Added to this was the fact (at least I believe it to be a fact) that there was a division of opinion in the Cabinet itself. This probably led to the one mistake in policy that has been made by the prosecution of Mr. Parnell and some of his associates—a mistake, because, in the exceedingly improbable contingency of the jury agreeing to convict, the belief will be universal in Ireland that they have been packed, and the government will have a dozen martyrs on its hands of whom it would be at a loss how to dispose,—a half-ludicrous position which could not fail to involve a loss of prestige.
“There can be no doubt that Mr. Parnell was unpleasantly surprised by the land league, and has been compelled to identify himself with a movement having other and more comprehensive (perhaps more desperate) aims than that which he originated. So far as can be judged, a great deal of the agitation in Ireland is factitious, and large numbers of persons have been driven by timidity to profess a sympathy with it which they do not feel. This, of course, strengthens the probability of its being possible to allay it by generally acceptable measures of reform. I am sure that the reasonable leaders or representatives of Irish opinion see the folly of expecting that England would ever peaceably consent to the independence of Ireland; that they do not themselves desire it; and that they would be content with a thorough reform of the land laws and a certain amount of local self-government. Both of these measures, you will observe, are suggested in the speech from the throne. You will readily divine that one of the great difficulties with which the ministry has had to struggle has been the presentiment that a change in the conditions of land tenure in Ireland will be followed by something similar, certainly by an agitation for something similar, on this aide the Irish channel.
“The Cabinet, I am safe in saying, are earnestly desirous of doing justice to Ireland, and not only that, but of so shaping reform as to make the cure as lasting as such a cure can be. No government can consent to revolution (though this was deemed possible in some quarters as respects some governments twenty years ago), but the present ministry are willing to go all lengths that are feasible and wise in the way of reform and reparation. Their greatest obstacle will be the overweening expectations and inconsiderate temper of the Irish themselves, both of them the result of artificial rather than natural causes. For no reform will be effectual that does not gradually nullify the unhappy effects produced by the influence, through many generations, of the pitiable travesty of feudal relations between landlord and tenant, making that relation personal instead of mercantile, and thus insensibly debauching both.
“The condition of Ireland is not so disturbed now as it has been at several periods during the last eighty years, and precisely the same system of organization was brought to bear against the collection of tithes fifty years ago that has now been revived to resist the payment of what are considered excessive rents. The landlords are represented as the minions of a foreign and hated domination, and the use of the epithet foreign has at least this justification, that there is certainly an imperfect sympathy between the English and Irish characters which prevents each from comprehending either the better qualities of the other or, what is worse, the manner of their manifestion.
“I cannot perceive that the public opinion of the country has withdrawn itself in any appreciable measure from sympathy with the Cabinet, though there is considerable regret among thoughtful liberals that coercion should have been deemed necessary and that the proposed reforms should not have gone farther. If the Irish could only be brought to have as much faith in Mr. Gladstone as he has desire for their welfare, there might be more hope than I can now see for a permanent solution of the Irish question.”
Mr. Evarts acknowledged the despatch with commendation for its lucid treatment of the subject, but Lowell soon found himself involved in something closer at hand than academic discussion. About three weeks after this despatch, he had occasion to write again of the state of affairs, and to note the final passage of the so-called coercion bill. At the close of this despatch his wrote: “The wild and whirling words of some Irishmen and others from America have done harm to something more than the cause of Irish peasantry, by becoming associated in the public mind with the country whose citizenship they put off or put on as may be most convenient. In connection with this, I beg leave to call your attention to an extraordinary passage in the letter of Mr. Parnell to the Irish National Land League, dated Paris, February 18, 1881, in which he makes a distinction between ‘the American people’ and ‘the Irish nation in America.’ This double nationality is likely to be of great practical inconvenience whenever the coercion bill becomes law. The same actor takes alternately the characters of a pair of twins who are never on the stage simultaneously.”[80]
In his capacity of critic, Lowell heartily condemned the measure taken by the British government. In a letter to the American consul in Cork, he wrote: “The ‘coercion act,’ so-called, is an exceptional and arbitrary measure. Its chief object is to enable the authorities to arrest persons whom they suspect of illegal conduct, without being obliged to produce any proof of their guilt. Its very substance and main purpose are to deprive suspected persons of the speedy trial they desire. This law is, of course, contrary to the spirit and foundation principles of both English and American jurisprudence; but it is the law of the land and it controls all parties domiciled in the proclaimed districts of Ireland, whether they are British subjects or not, and it is manifestly entirely futile to claim that naturalized citizens of the United States should be excepted from its operation.”[81]
But Lowell was not a mere looker-on in London, He was charged with the very delicate duty of discriminating between men who were American citizens and innocent of any infraction of British laws and men who used the cloak of naturalization, whether genuine or pretended, to cover illicit actions and designs. He had to uphold the real dignity of the American citizen, and at the same time to avoid entangling his country and Great Britain by an unwary protection of some one who had no title to protection. The cases which now began to succeed each other with confusing rapidity involved not only a mass of correspondence and the sifting of evidence, but the application constantly of personal judgment, and the exercise of much ingenuity in the reading of character. An illustration may be found in a despatch of Lowell to his government, dated 4 June, 1881. After an analysis of the political situation, he says:—
“I think that the necessity of a radical and prompt reform in the relations of landlord and tenant in Ireland is forcing conviction into the mind of even the Conservative Party, though the violence of language and the incitement to violence of action on the part of those who claim to be the true friends of Ireland are doing much to endanger the success of remedial measures.
“Among the most violent are often the Irishmen who have been naturalized in America, and then gone back to Ireland with the hope, and sometimes, I am justified in saying, with the deliberate intention, of disturbing the friendly relations between the United States and England. Such a one called upon me the other day. His name was——, naturalized in 1875 at Baltimore, and going over to Ireland immediately after on the plea that his health could not resist the American climate. He is now at least a remarkably robust and florid man. He told me that he was a draper in Charleville, County Cork, and hearing that a warrant was out for his arrest, he had come over to London to claim my protection. He had been acting as treasurer of the Land League in that place. He professed not to know on what grounds the warrant had been issued, but I satisfied myself in the course of our conversation that he knew perfectly well it was for seditious language and incitement to violence. He favored me with a good deal of this sort of rhetoric with a manner that implied no earnestness of conviction, and as if repeating something he had learned by rote. He several times repeated that the ‘best thing would be a war between England and the United States.’ After hearing this man’s talk, my belief was that he had purposely exposed himself to the chances of arrest in the hope of adding to the difficulties of the government. I asked him if he had considered the enormous interests at stake, quite apart from any moral consideration, and that England was our greatest customer for cattle, corn, and cotton? He merely repeated what he had said before as to the desirability of war. —— declared that he meant to return to America whenever his health would permit, but admitted that it would take at least five years to wind up his business, and I think his intention may fairly be questioned. As he declared himself ready to be quiet for the future if not arrested, I thought it prudent to mention his name unofficially to Lord Granville, and to suggest that the warrant should not be put in force unless further offence were given.
“I have spoken at some length of his case, because I think it of some importance that the Department should be informed as to the kind of persons who may ask its intervention, and as to the doctrines they preach. Under ordinary circumstances they would be harmless, and are made mischievous only by the excited state of the country. My own judgment is that the ministry have gone to the extreme limit of public opinion in their concessions to Irish necessities; that they are perfectly honest in their desire to be generously just; and that the best friends of Ireland are not those who, however sincerely, throw obstacles in their way. The real cure, which I believe to be a larger measure of Home Rule, will be made easier by the better state of things which, in the opinion of those best competent to judge, is likely to result from the passage of the Land Bill.”
In the early stages of what proved to be a long and vexatious series of Irish-American cases, Lowell laid down a course of action which he seems to have adhered to consistently. The United States consul at Dublin had on his hands a case which was especially troublesome, because the claim of the arrested man to American protection rested on statements of citizenship which were contradictory, and created naturally a suspicion as to the validity of the claim. After cautioning the consul to make certain enquiries, he adds: “If the fact of his American citizenship should thus be ascertained to your satisfaction, I desire then that you should carefully examine into the grounds of his arrest, and if the precise facts justify the belief that no substantial charge of his complicity with treasonable or seditious objects can be made out, you will communicate this to the authorities in Ireland and request his discharge or to be informed why he is detained. You will please intimate, in respectful terms and without any warmth or suggestion of threats, that you are making these enquiries under my instructions, and are acting precisely as British consuls in the United States acted soon after the civil war, under the directions of the British minister at Washington, in cases of summary arrests of British subjects. It is my duty to protect, so far as I can, all citizens of the United States, whether native or naturalized, who are shown to be innocent of designs to subvert civil order, and I should not perhaps require in such cases evidence of innocence so full and conclusive as that which might be required in a court of law. At the same time I shall by no means try to screen any persons who are evidently guilty of offending against the criminal laws of Great Britain.”
Mr. Blaine, who had succeeded Mr. Evarts as Secretary of State, on being advised of Lowell’s action in this case, wrote that it received “the entire commendation of the Department as discreet and proper.” And a few weeks later, as the case became somewhat more involved, he wrote again: “The prudence you have shown in dealing with ——’s claim to citizenship is commendable, and the statements as to the law in his case, made in your letters to him, are in full accord with the interpretation of this Department.” Mr. Blaine then laid down instructions to meet certain hypothetical cases, and not long after had occasion to call Lowell’s attention to another apparent act of injustice in the arrest of a naturalized American citizen. The friends of the man in America had besieged Mr. Blaine in his behalf, and Mr. Blaine wrote an eloquent despatch to Lowell, in which he said: “If American citizens while within British jurisdiction offend against British laws, this government will not seek to shield them from the legal consequences of their acts, but it must insist upon the application to their cases of those common principles of criminal jurisprudence which in the United States secure to every man who offends against its laws, whether he be an American citizen or a foreign subject, those incidents to a criminal prosecution which afford the best safeguard to personal liberty and the strongest protection against oppression under the forms of law, which might otherwise be practised through excessive zeal.”
Lowell replied somewhat dryly: “It will give me great pleasure to communicate to Lord Granville the views you have so clearly and eloquently expressed as to the injustice of some of the features of the so-called ‘Protection act,’[82] and especially its retroactive character. But I would respectfully suggest whether any step would be gained toward the speedy trial or release of —— by an argument against the law itself under which he was apprehended. So long as Lord Granville expressly declines to make any distinction between British subjects and American citizens in the application of this law, a position which I presume may be justified by precedents in our own diplomatic history, I submit to your better judgment whether the only arguments I can use in favor of —— must not be founded upon some exceptional injustice in the way in which he has been treated. If this shall appear by the report of the consul to have been practised, I shall press for his trial or release with great earnestness. But if it shall be shown that he has experienced no more harshness than the majority of his fellow-prisoners have suffered, I do not feel by any means sure that your instructions would authorize me to make any special application on his behalf.” Lowell finally secured the release of the man by pointing out that his health was suffering by his imprisonment, and it is not unlikely that Lord Granville was glad of so good an excuse to remove one of the perplexities by which his government was embarrassed.
The whole unhappy business may be said to have been at its height when, in February, 1882, a resolution of the House of Representatives called upon the President for detailed information respecting the arrest of American citizens in Ireland. The State Department accordingly called on the American minister in London to furnish this information, and in his despatch dated 14 March, 1882, Lowell recounts all the cases which up to that time had come under his notice, with all the correspondence relating thereto. There were ten, and the number was increased by a few more before the business was settled. At the close of the despatch, enumerating the ten cases, Lowell says very pertinently:—
“I may be permitted to add that I have had repeated assurances from the highest authority that there would be great reluctance in arresting a naturalized citizen of the United States were he known to be such. But it is seldom known, and those already arrested have acted in all respects as if they were Irishmen, sometimes engaged in trade, sometimes in farming, and sometimes filling positions in the local government. This I think is illustrated by a phrase in one of Mr. ——’s letters, to the effect that he never called himself an American. He endeavors, it is true, in a subsequent letter, to explain this away as meaning American born; but it is obviously absurd that a man living in his native village should need to make any such explanation. Naturalized Irishmen seem entirely to misconceive the process through which they have passed in assuming American citizenship, looking upon themselves as Irishmen who have acquired a right to American protection, rather than as Americans who have renounced a claim to Irish nationality.”
It is not surprising that the whole affair caused much fury of words both in Congress and out. An organization existed which was bent on making all the trouble it could for the British government, and there was still plenty of political capital in Irish wrongs. A great mass-meeting was held in New York at which Lowell was denounced severely, and from this time till his return from England every opportunity was taken by a certain class of men to sneer at him for what they were pleased to regard as his apostasy from American principles. He was defended, however, both in Congress and in the press. His course was well summed up in an editorial article, in which the writer says:—
“Mr. Lowell, who has been denounced by Mr. Randall for his ‘sickening sycophancy to English influence,’ has treated the matter not as an English, Irish, or American question, but purely as a point of international law. He has had no sympathy with the coercion legislation, and has even taken pains to characterize it as exceptional and arbitrary.... That law [the ‘protection’ law] legalized the arrest of the suspects in districts where the writ of habeas corpus had been suspended, and where the natives were not allowed the privilege of a jury trial. To have demanded their unconditional release, when no discrimination had been made between them and the natives, would have been an open affront to a friendly power. What Mr. Lowell did was to follow the best precedents of criminal jurisdiction in international cases, several of which had been established during the American civil war, when British subjects were arbitrarily arrested and denied the privilege of trial. At the same time, he has conducted the negotiations with the Foreign Office with so much tact and decision that we are inclined to expect a speedy clearance of the Irish jails from suspects whose citizenship in the United States is authenticated.” And the next day the same journal said: “Mr. Lowell’s negotiations for the release of the Irish-American suspects have been crowned with partial success. Before the mass-meeting at Cooper Institute disgraced itself by heaping reproaches upon him, the Department of State had received official information that all but three of these prisoners had been set at liberty in response to the request of the United States minister.... Mr. Frelinghuysen[83] reports that the negotiations have been carried on between the two governments for some time ‘in a spirit of entire friendship.’ This result had been promoted by the cordial relations existing between Lord Granville and Mr. Lowell. The fact that our government has been represented in these negotiations by one of our foremost men of letters has been a most fortunate circumstance. Mr. Lowell had won the respect and admiration of the best men in English public life, and when he came to plead for these suspects his personal character and popularity were of direct service to them.... Mr. Mr. Lowell made, as our cable despatches have stated, every effort consistent with diplomatic usage, and at the same time performed a most delicate duty with such consummate tact as to remove all sources of irritation.”[84]
The whole situation was plainly one that called for great tact, and for that delicate use of language in which the shadows of words are not to be left out of account. It was probably with reference to this particular encounter that the London Spectator said shortly after Lowell’s death: “There was a question at one time whether the late Lord Granville or Mr. Lowell were the more accomplished and subtle in conveying, without offence, the suggestion or conviction which it might be the duty of either of them to impress on any one to whom the communication might not be welcome. And probably this is a point which would be very differently determined by different people. But though equal in courtesy and grace of manner to Lord Granville, we should say that Mr. Lowell had the greater power of the two to impress his meaning, even where it was a meaning painful and difficult to enforce, without conveying even the slightest tincture of personal discourtesy. Lord Granville was perhaps even fuller of the suaviter in modo, but Mr. Lowell never forgot the necessity, where the necessity existed, of conveying also the impression of the fortiter in re. With all his grace, there was a plainness of purpose in him which could not be mistaken.”[85]
Lowell himself, writing to Dr. Holmes shortly before leaving England, recalls the situation and says: “Some of my Irishmen had been living in their old homes seventeen years, engaged in trade or editing nationalist papers, or members of the poor-law guardians (like MacSweeney), and neither paying taxes in America nor doing any other duty as Americans. I was guided by two things—the recognized principles of international law, and the conduct of Lord Lyons when Seward was arresting and imprisoning British subjects. We kept one man in jail seven months without trial or legal process of any kind, and, but for the considerateness and moderation of Lyons, might have had war with England. I think I saved a misunderstanding here.... When I had at last procured the conditional (really unconditional) release of all the suspects, they refused to be liberated. When I spoke of this to Justin McCarthy (then the head of the Irish Parliamentary party, Parnell being in Kilmainham), he answered cheerfully, ‘Certainly: they are there to make trouble.’”[86] One of the intimations of what lay in his mind throughout all the delicate business may be read in a note to Mr. John W. Field, 19 January, 1884: “I wonder, by the way, when we shall see an American politician able to appreciate and shrewd enough to act on Curran’s saying about his countrymen, that ‘an Irishman is the worst fellow in the world to run away from.’”
And after his return to America, he wrote to Lady Lyttelton: “You must make up your mind to let Ireland have her head. She may no doubt choose to go over a precipice, though I don’t think that she would, and at any rate a whole legion of devils would go with her as with the Gadarene swine; at best it is all up playing Sisera, for the stars in their courses are rather beyond reach even of the newspapers.” That Lowell had a keen appreciation of the genuine spirit of patriotism which moved the Irish in America in his generation may be discerned by any one who will read the closing sentences in his address on “The Independent in Politics.”
Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton in an article[87] published just after Lowell’s death, tried to sum up his intellectual qualities in a word, and thought he found the expression in “sagacity.” “In life,” he says, “his most striking characteristic—a characteristic indicated not only by the watchful gray eyes and the apparently conscious eyebrows that overshadowed them, but in every intonation of his voice, and every movement of his limbs—was a marvellous sagacity.” “What is called his wit,” he adds, “is merely this almost preternatural sagacity in rapid movement. What is called his humor is this same sagacity at rest and in a meditative mood.” Without pushing this analysis so far, there is no doubt that in his diplomatic capacity Lowell did draw upon his native genius for quick perception and interpretation. The gift which he had multiplied by use in the criticism of literature and in the diagnosis of political situations at home, was at his service both in Madrid and London. It made him not a mere fencer in a diplomatic game, but a man of resources in the serious representation of his country’s interests. That he could couch his demands or protests in witty phrase added to his power of persuasion; and he could not associate as an equal with English statesmen without applying his sagacity to their problems even where these did not immediately concern his own people. Perhaps it was after Majuba that he wrote in one of his despatches: “I asked Lord Lyons whether he did not think suzerainty might be defined as ‘leaving to a man the privilege of carrying the saddle and bridle after you have stolen his horse.’ He assented.”
There was, perhaps, something in the adjustment of Lowell to his surroundings which set the springs of poetry flowing intermittently. At any rate, he was content, conscious that he was of service in a high position, happy both in his own health—“I have never seen a climate that suited me so well,” he wrote—and in his wife’s improvement, and surrounded by congenial companions. These things do not necessarily make for poetry, but Lowell had by this time come into that mellow stage when what he did had about it an absence of apparent effort, when his ripe experience and equipoise of life found easy expression, and poetry was a solace and a pastime. To be sure, there is something to make one smile behind his hand when one sees the American minister sending his “Phœbe” across the Atlantic and following it with almost daily corrections, yet one listens to the note with the feeling that the poet is putting into the reminiscence of a far-off sound not a little of his present apprehension of himself. Nay, the poem in its first form broke at last into two stanzas, wisely omitted in the final recension, which are almost bald in their apologetic confession:—