Boston Family
BOSTON holds a unique and some no doubt might assert an out- moded place in the American story. Site of the Tea Party, then of the first " battle " of the War of Independence, and the city from which the British forces first beat a retreat, it might have survived as the home of revolutionary ardour, a Marseilles of the United States. But on the contrary, as the years advanced, the city grew in dignity, grace and even aristocracy, and retained very distinct traces of Englishry. It was, an anonymous " looker-on" thought in 1846, the " American Athens—where merchant-princes reside, in homes to which commerce has invited genius and taste." In 1871 E. L. Godkin, then editor of The Nation, wrote: "Boston is the one place in America where wealth and the knowledge of how to use it are apt to coincide." Near by at Cambridge lies Harvard, the American Oxford where, as this book reminds us, it took an Englishman, Harold Laski, to ruffle the waters.
It was an excellent idea of Mr. Greenslet to weave together the lives of some of the Lowells, the distinguished. American family who have always been linked intimately with Boston and Harvard. For they indeed are the creme de la creme of this side of American life, the " Brahmins " who married among themselves or into the few families whom they reckoned of the elect. They differed from the English eighteenth-century aristocracy in that their fortune was founded not upon the land but on the Bar and the mill. But they had the same sense of social responsibility and the same love of learning as had the best of our own great families. In the nineteenth century the Lowells built very adequate fortunes, and in the twentieth these helped to produce considerable works of art, science and literature.
The first Lowell who settled in Newburyport, north of Boston, in 1639 must have been a remarkable character. He was sixty-seven when with his children and grandchildren he undertook the hazar- dous Atlantic crossing, and he died at the age of ninety-three com- fortably surviving his eldest son. One suspects that he was what we call an organiser. His great-great-grandion, the Reverend John Lowell, went to Harvard College when he was thirteen, and after seven years of study was called to the third parish church of New- buryport. He repudiated Whitefield, saw his church tower struck by lightning, declared himself a Unitarian and added the phrase
" Occasionem cognosce" to the family coat of arms. It was the divine's eldest son Lowever, who in fact seized his opportunities and founded the family fortunes. Born in 1743 and known ultimately as " The Old Judge," this John Lowell began life as—a young loyalist and criminal advocate. He made a number of profitable marriages and useful connections. As the war drew near he smelt which way the wind was blowing, and notified the inhabitants of Newburyport in the local journal that though he might have been injudicious enough to sign an address to Governor Thomas Hutchin- son of Massachusetts he never wished " to have any of their liberties abridged." A civil war is often the time to make astute investments as well as to risk lives, and Lowell was able to retire from the active practice of law at the age of forty-two. In 1784 he was elected to the Board of Harvard, and thenceforward for ovcr a century and a half there was only one decade during which a Lowell was not a member of the Corporation, Board of Overseers or Faculty.
From the " Old Judge's " time the Lowells blossomed in every direction. Of his three sons by three different wives one known somewhat Confusingly as the "Rebel " was a keen pamphleteer for the Federalist Party, a promoter of libraries, savings banks and other good works ; Francis Cabot Lowell carried back in his bead from England ideas for modern cotton machinery, and established a flourishing family firm in Boston. The third, Charles, entered the Church and wrote poetry. But it was among the old Judge's grand- sons that the really notable characters were found: John Amory Lowell who established The Lowell Offering and Magazine, Written and Edited by Female Operatives of the family mill, a successful magazine praised by Harriet Martineau and Charles Dickens ; John Lowell " Junior " who devoted his share in the family fortune to world travel and, after crossing Ethiopia on an Arab horse, died in Bombay at the age of thirty-seven ; and James Russell Lowell who, after losing his mother, wife and children, became a professor of literature at Harvard at a time when Henry Adams described Cam- bridge as " a social desert that would have starved a polar bear." But though James Russell Lowell holds a high though perhaps exaggerated place in American literature, it is in quite modern times that the Lowells provided their most extraordinary figures in letters and art: Percival Lowell who after having won a reputation as a fine writer on Japan, where he lived many years, made a second reputation as an astronomer—one of the leading investigators into life on Mars; Lowell, the architect who spent fourteen years in designing te City of New York Court House and died before it was completed ; Amy Lowell, the biographer of Keats, who was herself inspired to write poetry by the acting of Duse and one or two distinguished historians including Abbott Lawrence Lowell who wrote The Government of England and, as President of Har- vard, came out in defence of Professor Laski.
Mr. Greenslet had good qualifications to write this book ; he was the friend of Amy Lowell and was able to make use of many family letters. It is not in any way distinguished writing ; it contains some historical slips, is pleasant enough journalism, and the author has surmounted many of the obvious difficulties of all family histories. An introduction by the Earl of Halifax reminds one irresistibly of a speech before laying a foundation stone or opening a, bazaar.
M. P. ASHLEY.
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