Studies of Lowell (from Literary Friends and Acquaintance) — Reading Notes

Conversational Habits and Self-Interruption

Howells captures Lowell's talk through its rhythms and digressions. He notes that Lowell liked to "idle the time away" with a companion, postponing work. The memoir reproduces the texture of these evenings: Lowell lighting his pipe, settling into an easy chair, and drawing out his guest's shyness. Yet Howells also records moments when Lowell's patience frayed—as when he corrected Howells's Western woulds and shoulds in a copy of one of his books. The portrait is built from such small, precise observations: Lowell's habit of writing on a pasteboard pad on his knees, his defense of words like undisprivacied and disnatured, and his admission that he had been "hurt for literature by his scholarship."

Editorial Generosity and Its Limits

Howells, who served as editor of the Atlantic Monthly, describes Lowell's willingness to help other writers—but with a wry awareness of the cost. Lowell once invited a fellow man of letters to stay a fortnight in his house and share his study, a sacrifice Howells calls "truly dear" to any author of fixed habits. Yet Lowell also showed restraint: he seldom burdened Howells with manuscripts. The one exception was a Virginian's diary, which Lowell edited with "discreet pruning" until he grew too fond of the diarist to cut anything. This anecdote reveals both Lowell's generosity and his inability to maintain editorial detachment when his sympathies were engaged.

Political Conscience and Party Loyalty

Howells addresses Lowell's political actions with the same specificity he brings to personal habits. He recounts that after the 1876 election, some friends urged Lowell, as a Republican elector, to vote for Tilden and throw the presidency to him. Lowell refused, arguing that usage had made electors "strictly the instruments of the party which chose them." Howells reports this in a single paragraph, noting the "faintest trace of indignation" in Lowell's voice as he lit his pipe. The episode is not analyzed but presented as a window into Lowell's sense of honor—a man who felt tenderness for the "broken and ruined South" yet would not break faith with his party.

The Distance of Friendship

Throughout the memoir, Howells registers the subtle shifts in his relationship with Lowell. After Lowell's absence abroad, Howells observes that they had "lost the habit" of each other. This understatement—"that says much in such matters"—is characteristic of Howells's method. He does not dramatize estrangement but lets the reader infer it from the texture of the prose. The portrait is finally about the limits of intimacy: Howells loved Lowell, but always felt the weight of an older civilization. The memoir's value lies in its refusal to smooth over these tensions, preserving instead the exact grain of a friendship conducted across a gap of class, region, and temperament.

Diction as a Window into Character

Howells repeatedly returns to Lowell's attention to language. He notes that Lowell insisted characters in fiction should not say they "wanted" to do something but "wished." He records Lowell's own verbal preferences and his willingness to defend unusual words. These observations are not mere pedantry; they reveal Lowell's conception of literature as a craft with standards. Howells himself had a different view of democracy in language—"more of the heart"—and the tension between their approaches runs through the memoir. The result is a portrait that feels earned, built from the evidence of how Lowell spoke, wrote, and corrected others.

Howells's study is best read as a series of vignettes rather than a systematic biography. The reader should attend to the small gestures—the dry inkstand, the corrected woulds, the pipe lit before a political confession—that accumulate into a portrait of a man both generous and exacting. Howells never claims completeness; he offers only what he saw, at this moment and at that. The memoir's authority lies in its modesty.

I keep thinking about Howells’s Lowell—how someone can hold firm opinions and yet remain warm in conversation. It stayed with me, that quiet balance. Something similar lingers in The Lost Road — Background and Themes, where memory and principle weave together gently. I found myself pausing there too, not to finish, just to sit with it awhile.