Elmwood, Wednesday,
Jan., 1865.
. . . I am not a fool, and you are all wrong about England.
You think better of them than they deserve, and I like them full as well as you
do. But because there are a few noble fellows there like Goldwin Smith whom one
instinctively loves, it doesn't blind me to the fact that they are not England
and never will be — that England is an idea, that America is another, that they
are innately hostile, and that they will fight us one of these days. God
forbid! you say. Amen! say I. But we are fighting the South at this moment on
no other grounds, and there are some fine fellows at the South too. England
just now is a monstrous sham, as we were five years ago when she smiled on us
as one augur did at another. Now, I don't believe in being meek towards foreign
nations that are never senza guerra (so far as we are concerned) ne'
cor de' suoi tiranni. But I do believe in doing what is right, whether as
nations or men. As for any row that the New York papers may have made about
Coursal, I have not to learn at forty-five that men always behave like boys
when they are angry, and the Government has not gone mad after all. Were the
English wiser about the Trent? About the Florida? I should not be
a crazy statesman, but a poet doesn't deserve to have been born in a country if
he can't instinctively express what his countrymen have in their hearts. No
nation is great enough to put up with insult, for it is the one advantage of
greatness to be strong enough to protect herself from it. I think a war with
England would be the greatest calamity but one — the being afraid of it. I
would do everything to avoid it, except not telling her what I think of her in
return for the charming confidences with which she so constantly favours us.
Goldwin Smith tells us she has changed since 1815. But has there been any great
war since? Especially any great naval war? The root of our bitterness is not
that she used to do so and so, but that we know she would do it again.
The wolf was wrong in eating the lamb because its grandmother had muddied the
stream, but it would be a silly lamb that expected to be friends with any
animal whose grandmother was a wolf. Farewell. I won't fight you, because
my father loved your grandfather and I love you.
J. R. L.
SOURCE: Charles Eliot Norton, Editor, Letters of
James Russell Lowell, Volume 1, p. 384-5
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