James Russell Lowell And England

Contemporary Review, July, 2000 by Brendan Rapple

Unlike some other of his compatriots who lived for extended periods in England, Lowell remained distinctly American and was consistently watchful for any slight to his country. He was invariably enraged by any belittlement displayed by the English towards anything American. The Oxford scholar, Max Muller, declared that 'Sometimes even the most harmless remark about America would call forth very sharp replies from him'. English chauvinistic arrogance was particularly galling to Lowell. In 1888 he wrote to his friend Charles Eliot Norton, another American scholar and man of letters: 'there is one thing they always take for granted, namely, that an American must see the superiority of England. They have as little tact as their totem the bull'. Again and again in his writings he contrasts Americans' characters and traits with those of the English, his countrymen generally receiving the greater praise. For example, one evening, during his first trip to Europe in 1851-1852, when Lowell played Bottom in a short ada ptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream at a private theatrical show he was struck by the difference in the reception from the Americans and the English in the audience: 'The minds of our countrymen are infinitely quicker both in perception and conception, and I am certain my prologue would have set a room full of them in roars of laughter'. Almost four decades later in 1889 Lowell referred to 'the dulness of the average English mind. I never come back here without being struck with it'. Moreover, the English, as Lowell wrote somewhat tongue-in-cheek in his 'A Few Bits of Roman Mosaic', can never be real travellers due to their lack of imagination and their unwillingness to leave England behind: 'Bull can seldom be said to travel at all, since the first step of a true traveller is out of himself. He plays cricket and hunts foxes on the Campagna, makes entries in his betting-book while the Pope is giving his benediction, and points out Lord Calico to you awfully during the Sistine Miserere'. On the other hand, th e typical American is necessarily a much more ready traveller: 'He is one drop of a fluid mass, who knows where his home is to-day, but can make no guess of where it may be to-morrow'.

Lowell's antipathy to certain characteristics and attitudes of the English intensified during the Civil War when he abhorred and repeatedly castigated the advocacy of many prominent individuals in England for the dissolution of the Union. In January 1865 in a letter to Norton he even foretold war between the two nations. He was convinced 'that England is an idea, that America is another, that they are innately hostile, and that they will fight us one of these days.... I think a war with England would be the greatest calamity but one -- the being afraid of it'. Over a year later Lowell's bitterness was still palpable in a letter to Leslie Stephen, a well known English writer, where he confessed that he 'had an almost invincible repugnance to writing again to England ... I cannot forget the insult so readily as I might the injury of the last five years'. Lowell's caustic views on what he felt to be English prejudice are particular evident in the section 'Mason and Slidell: A Yankee Idyll' in his best known wor k Biglow Papers. Even after the Civil War, Lowell did not attenuate his criticism of the English sense of superiority as we read throughout the pages of his July 1869 essay 'A Certain Condescension in Foreigners'.