you must lay it to the fact that I am officiating this morning as
general nurseryman and babytender, and am consequently obliged
every now and then to ripple the otherwise smooth current of my
epistolary communications with such dishevelled oratorical
flourishes as “kitser, kee--eetser!” “jigger jig, jigger jig!” and
the like accompanied with whatever extemporary hushmoney may be
within grasp in the shape of spoons, whistles, pieces of paper and
rattles. As I can conceive of no severer punishment that could be
inflicted on certain authors than to be Robinson Crusoed on some
desolate island with no companion but the offspring of their brain,
so I do not know of any blessing more absorbing of all the
faculties, demanding more presence of mind and more of that eternal
vigilance which is the price of liberty, but which in this case
fails to attain it, than that of being islanded in a room eighteen
feet square with the “sole daughter of one’s house and home.”
Then, besides these parental responsibilities, there are the
_aliena negotia centum_ which have in the present instance made a
gap of three hours between this sentence and the last. Added to all
these is the metallic pen which I resisted manfully, but to which I
have succumbed at last, and which, while it obliterates all
distinctions of chirography, has, in conjunction with the other
accoutrements of easy writing (such as Reviews and newspapers),
hastened the decline and fall, and finally made complete shipwreck
of the letterwriters, as well as of the foliomakers. It is no
longer ‘the mob of _gentlemen_ who write with ease,’ but the very
mob itself--that _profanum vulgus_ whom Horace Naso (_sic_) would
have us hate and keep at arm’s length--can buy steel pens by the
gross and proceed Master of arts _per saltum_. We have got now to
that pitch when uneducated men (self-educated they are called) are
all the rage, and the only learned animals who continue to be
popular are pigs. The public will rush after a paper which they are
told is edited by a practical printer, and is eager to shape its
ideas after the model of men who have none. We shall ere long see
advertised “Easy lessons in Latin by a gentleman who can bring
testimonials that he knows no more of the language than Mr. Senator
Webster;” “The High School Reader, being a selection of popular
pieces for reading and declamation by a Lady, who is just learning
the alphabet under the distinguished tuition of herself, and who is
nearly mistress of that delightful _mélange_ of literary
miscellanies.” The injury to letters arising from an author’s
losing that space for meditation which was formerly afforded him by
the wise necessity of mending his pen is incalculable. Every one
nowadays can write decently and nobody writes well. “Painfulness”
is obsolete as a thing as well as in the capacity of a noun. No
more Horace Walpoles, no more Baxters, and Whole Duties of men!
But one would think that I had the whole summer before me for the
writing of this letter. Let me come a little nearer the matter in
hand. I wish a distinct understanding to exist between us in regard
to my contributions for the _Standard_. When Mrs. Chapman first
proposed that I should become a contributor I told her frankly that
it was a duty for which (having commenced author very early and got
indurated in certain modes of authorship and life) I was totally
unfitted. I was satisfied with the _Standard_ as it was. The paper
has never been so good since I have seen it, and no abolitionist
could reasonably ask a better. I feared that an uncoalescing
partnership of several minds might deprive the paper of that
_unity_ of conception and purpose in which the main strength of
every understanding lies. This, however, I did not urge, because I
knew that a change was to be made at any rate. At the same time I
was not only willing but desirous that my name should appear,
because I scorned to be indebted for any share of my modicum of
popularity to my abolitionism without incurring at the same time
whatever odium might be attached to a complete identification with
a body of heroic men and women whom not to love and admire would
prove me unworthy of either of those sentiments, and whose
superiors in all that constitutes true manhood and womanhood I
believe never existed. There were other considerations which
weighed heavily with me to decline the office altogether. In the
first place, I was sure that Mrs. Chapman and Mr. Garrison greatly
overrated my popularity and the advantage which it would be to the
paper to have my name attached to it. I am not flattering myself (I
have too good an opinion of myself to do so), but judge from
something Garrison said to me. It is all nonsense. However it may
be in that glorious Hereafter (toward which no man who is good for
anything can help casting half an eye) the reputation of a poet who
has a high idea of his vocation, is resolved to be true to that
vocation and hates humbug, must be small in his generation. The
thing matters nothing to me, one way or the other, except when it
chances to _take in_ those whom I respect, as in the present case.
I am _teres atque rotundus_, a microcosm in myself, my own author,
public, critic, and posterity, and care for no other. But we
abolitionists must get rid of a habit we have fallen into of
affirming all the geese who come to us from the magic circle of
Respectability to be swans. I said so about Longfellow and I said
so about myself. What does a man more than his simple duty in
coming out for the truth? and if we exhaust our epithets of
laudation at this stage of the business, what shall we do if the
man turns out to be a real reformer, and does _more_ than his
duty? Beside, is it any sacrifice to be in the right? Has not being
an abolitionist (as Emerson says of hell) its “infinite
satisfactions” as well as those _infiniti guai_ that Dante tells us
of? To my mind
“All other pleasures are not worth its pains.”
In the next place (turn back a page or two and you will find that I
have laid down a “firstly”), if I have any vocation, it is the
making of verse. When I take my pen for that, the world opens
itself ungrudgingly before me, everything seems clear and easy as
it seems sinking to the bottom would be as one leans over the edge
of his boat in one of those dear coves at Fresh Pond. But, when I
do prose, it is _invitâ Minerva_. I feel as if I were wasting time
and keeping back my message. My true place is to serve the cause as
a poet. Then my heart leaps on before me into the conflict. I write
to you frankly as becomes one who is to be your fellow-worker. I
wish you to understand clearly my capabilities that you may not
attribute that to lukewarmness or indolence which is truly but an
obedience to my Demon. Thirdly (I believe it is thirdly), I have
always been a very Quaker in following the Light and writing only
when the Spirit moved. This is a tower of strength which one must
march out of in working for a weekly newspaper, and every man owes
it to himself, so long as he does the duty which he sees, to remain
here impregnably intrenched.
Now, it seems to me that we contributors should write just enough
to allow you this privilege of only writing when the wind sits
fair. Having stated the poetical _cons_, I will now state the plain
_pros_ of the matter. I will help you as much as I can and ought. I
had rather give the cause one good poem than a thousand indifferent
prose articles. I mean to send all the poems I write (on whatever
subject) first to the _Standard_, except such arrows as I may deem
it better to shoot from the ambushment of the _Courier_, because
the old Enemy offers me a fairer mark from that quarter. I will
endeavor also to be of service to you in your literary selections.
I have told you what _I_ expect to do. You must tell me in return
what _you_ expect me to do. I agree with you entirely in your
notions as to the imprint and the initials.[58] The paper must seem
to be unanimous. Garrison is point blank the other way. But his
vocation has not been so much to feel the pulse of the public as
to startle it into a quicker heat, and if we who make the paper
can’t settle it, who shall? I have one or two suggestions to make,
but shall only hint at them, hoping to see you at Dedham on the
14th prox^o. It seems to me eminently necessary that there should
be an entire concert among us, and that, to this end, we should
meet to exchange thoughts (those of us who are hereabout) and to
wind each other up. We ought to know what each one’s “beat” is, and
what each is going to write.
Then, too, would it not be well to have a _Weekly Pasquil_ (I do
not call it _Punch_ to avoid confusion), in which squibs and
facetiæ of one kind or other may be garnered up? I am sure I come
across enough comical thoughts in a week to make up a good share of
any such corner, and Briggs and yourself and Quincy could help.
You will find a squib of mine in this week’s _Courier_. I wish it
to continue anonymous, for I wish Slavery to think it has as many
enemies as possible. If I may judge from the number of persons who
have asked me if I wrote it, I have struck the old hulk of the
Public between wind and water. I suppose you will copy it, and if
so I wish you would correct a misprint or two.... Give our best
regards to your wife, and believe me, very truly your friend,
J. R. LOWELL.
I shall send you a poem next week.[59]
The “squib” to which Lowell refers in this letter was the first of the
afterward famous “Biglow Papers,” introduced by the rustic letter of
Ezekiel Biglow to Mister Eddyter. The poem was the one beginning
“Thrash away, you’ll _hev_ to rattle
On them kettle-drums o’ yourn,”
and the stanzas themselves have the inspiriting dash and electrifying
rat-tat-tat of this new recruiting-sergeant in the little army of
anti-slavery reformers. Lowell himself felt that he had sounded a real
summons in these verses, yet singularly enough it was more than a
twelvemonth before he followed with another in the same vein. The poem
was at once copied into the _Standard_ before the corrections its author
sent could be made, and the next week appeared the first of Lowell’s
prose contributions, a column and a half on Daniel Webster, whose
intellectual strength made him the special mark of those men of New
England who wished to turn all the artillery of native make against the
great foe. Whittier’s two poems “Ichabod” and “The Lost Occasion”
express nobly the mingled love, pride, and deep anger with which the
anti-slavery men regarded this strong nature. “Ichabod” was written
after Webster’s speech of 7 March, 1850, and Whittier may well have
carried in his memory a sentence from Lowell’s trenchant unsigned
article: “Shall not the Recording Angel write _Ichabod_ after the name
of this man in the great book of Doom?”
For some unexplained reason, though the connection was now made, for
eighteen months after this editorial article Lowell printed little in
the _Standard_ save an occasional poem. The real connection was not made
till the spring of 1848. In the number of the paper for 6 April of that
year it was announced that for the ensuing volume the _Standard_ would
be under the charge of the present editor, Sydney Howard Gay, but with
James Russell Lowell as corresponding editor. His name appeared thus on
the headline of the paper and continued to keep its place until 31 May,
1849, when Edmund Quincy’s name was bracketed with it. For a while Mr.
Quincy’s name took the second place, but as his contributions increased
and Lowell’s diminished, they changed places in order, and finally
Lowell’s name, though without any public announcement, was dropped from
the headline 27 May, 1852, many months after he had practically ceased
to contribute.
The definite arrangement which Lowell made with the Executive Committee
of the American Anti-Slavery Society, who were the general managers of
the _Standard_, was effected in a personal interview with Mr. Gay, who
had come on to Dedham and there met Lowell. The conditions were simple
and are rehearsed in a letter to Briggs, 26 March, 1848. Lowell was to
receive a salary of $500 a year, and for this was to furnish a weekly
contribution, either in verse or prose, but the verse was not to be
restricted to direct attacks on slavery, and in his prose he now and
then went outside the line of domestic politics, and occasionally even
took up a distinctly literary topic. “The Committee,” writes Mr. Gay,
“accepts your proviso of a termination to the arrangement whenever
either party please, and accord to you any reasonable latitude in the
choice of subjects that you may desire.” It was plain from the outset
that Lowell was not overconfident of his ability to make the agreement
one of mutual satisfaction. He felt that in his independence of thought
he was not likely always to be at one with his associates, yet he was so
heartily in accord with them in the fundamental doctrine of opposition
to slavery, morally and politically, that he was glad of the opportunity
of taking an active part in the fight. And then he undoubtedly looked to
some advantage from the stimulus he should receive from the necessity of
a weekly contribution. “I did not like,” he writes to Briggs, “to take
pay for anti-slavery work, but as my abolitionism has cut me off from
the most profitable sources of my literary emoluments, as the offer was
unsolicited on my part, and as I wanted the money, I thought I had a
right to take it. I have spent more than my income every year since I
have been married, and that only for necessities. If I can once get
clear, I think I can keep so. I do not agree with the abolitionists in
their disunion and non-voting theories. They treat ideas as ignorant
persons do cherries. They think them unwholesome unless they are
swallowed stones and all.”
The first number of the _Standard_ under this new arrangement, that for
6 April, 1848, which contained the announcement, held as Lowell’s
initial contribution his “Ode to France,” which no doubt he had written
without regard to this publication, for it bears date “February, 1848,”
and indicates that in his study at Elmwood he was looking out on the
large world, and was brooding over those great general ideas of freedom
which were the intellectual and moral furniture of his being. He could
exclaim:--
“Since first I heard our North-wind blow,
Since first I saw Atlantic throw
On our grim rocks his thunderous snow,
I loved thee, Freedom: as a boy
The rattle of thy shield at Marathon
Did with a Grecian joy
Through all my pulses run:
But I have learned to love thee now
Without the helm upon thy gleaming brow,
A maiden mild and undefiled,
Like her who bore the world’s redeeming child.”
And in the next number of the paper he had an article on “The French
Revolution of 1848,” in which he wrote wittily of the flight of the
“broker-king,” and exultingly of the triumph of the idea of the people.
“Louis Philippe,” he wrote, “extinguished the last sparks of loyalty in
France as effectually as if that had been the one object of his eighteen
years’ reign. He had made monarchy contemptible. He had been a
stock-jobber, a family match-maker. The French had seen their royalty
gradually
‘melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a _Jew_.’
During a long and peaceful reign, the king had in no way contrived to
_grow on to_ the people. He was in no sense of the word a Head to them.
A nation can be loyal to a Man, or to the representative of an Idea.
Louis Philippe was neither. When all the Royalty of France can be
comfortably driven out of it in a street-cab, one would think the
experiment of a Republic might be safely ventured upon. To us the late
events in Paris seem less a Revolution, than the quiet opening of a
flower, [which,] before it can blossom, must detrude the capsule which
has hitherto enveloped and compressed it.” The article disclosed
Lowell’s eager faith in the French people as receptive and swift to
appreciate and assimilate an idea. When in the summer the news came of
mob violence, he wrote again, defending the workmen of Paris, and
insisting upon it that the social order was to blame. “The great problem
of the over-supply of labor,” he wrote, “is not to be settled by a
decimation of the laboring class, whether by gunpowder or starvation.
Society in a healthy condition would feel the loss of every pair of
willing and useful hands thrust violently out of it. That these Parisian
_ouvriers_ were driven to rebellion by desperation is palpable. That
they had ideas in their heads is plain from their conduct immediately
after the Revolution. They were suffering then. It was they who had
achieved the victory over the old order of things. In the then
anarchistic state of the capital, rapine, had that been their object,
was within easy reach. But the revolution of February was not the
chaotic movement of men to whom any change was preferable to the
wretched present. Not so much subversion as subversion for the sake of
organization was what they aimed at. The giant Labor did not merely turn
over from one side to the other for an easier position. Rather he rose
up
‘Like blind Orion hungry for the morn.’
It was _light_ which the people demanded. Social _order_ was precisely
the thing they wished for in the place of social chaos. Government was
what they asked. They had learned by bitter experience that it was on
the body of old King Log Laissez-faire that King Stork perched to devour
them. _Let-alone_ is good policy after you have once got your perfect
system established to let alone. There is not in all history an instance
of such heroic self-denial as that which was displayed by what it is the
fashion to call the Mob of Paris during the few days immediately
following the flight of the Orleans dynasty. What was the shield which
the noble Lamartine held up between the Provisional Government and the
people? Simply the Idea of the Republic! And this Idea was respected by
starving men with arms in their hands.”
The verses “To Lamartine,” also, which appeared in August, illustrate
the appeal which French idealism made to Lowell’s mind. It is not
surprising that the year 1848, which seemed at the time to witness the
lifting of the lid from the Republican pot which was at the boiling
point, should not only have quickened the pulse of lovers of freedom in
America, but should have given generous-minded men here a twinge of
envy as they contrasted the sanguine expectancy of Europe with what they
saw of the seared conscience of America; and in the papers just quoted
Lowell turns fiercely upon the public expressions of sympathy with the
ruling powers of Europe. It was a natural transition from these
reflections on the movements in France to ask bitterly in his next
editorial article, “Shall we ever be Republicans?” In this he speculates
on the extraordinary lack of agreement in the United States between
names and things, and finds slavery the opiate which has made men’s
minds drowsy.
“The truth is,” he declares, “that we have never been more than nominal
republicans. We have never got over a certain shamefacedness at the
disrespectability of our position. We feel as if when we espoused
Liberty we had contracted a _mésalliance_. The criticism of the
traveller who looks at us from a monarchical point of view exasperates
us. Instead of minding our own business we have been pitifully anxious
as to what would be thought of us in Europe. We have had Europe in our
minds fifty times, where we have had God and conscience once. Our
literature has endeavored to convince Europeans that we are as like them
as circumstances would admit. The men who have the highest and boldest
bearing among us are the slaveholders. We are anxious to be acknowledged
as one of the great Powers of Christendom, forgetful that all the fleets
and navies in the world are weak in comparison with one sentence in the
Declaration of Independence. When every other argument in favor of our
infamous Mexican war has been exhausted, there was this still left--that
it would make us more respected abroad. We are as afraid of our own
principles as a raw recruit of his musket. As far as the outward
machinery of our government is concerned, we are democratic only in our
predilection for little men.
“When will men learn that the only true conservatism lies in growth and
progress, that whatever has ceased growing has begun to die? It is not
the conservative, but the retarding element which resides in the pocket.
It is droll to witness the fate of this conservatism when the ship of
any state goes to pieces. It lashes itself firmly to the ponderous
anchor it has provided for such an emergency, cuts all loose, and--goes
to the bottom. There are a great many things to be done in this country,
but the first is the abolition of slavery. If it were not so arrant a
sin as it is, we should abolish it (if for no other reason) that it
accustoms our public men to being cowards. We are astonished, under the
present system, when a Northern representative gets so far as to surmise
that his soul is his own, and make a hero of him forthwith. But we shall
never have that inward fortunateness without which all outward
prosperity is a cheat and delusion, till we have torn up this deadly
upas, no matter with what dear and sacred things its pestilential roots
may be entwined.”
Lowell had said to Briggs that he was not at one with the Abolitionists
who favored disunion, and with that sanity of political judgment which
made it impossible for him to be a revolutionist even in theory, he saw
not in politics and political institutions that finality which rests in
an organic national life. Thus he never could be a blind partisan, and
he was quick to see the shams and concealments which were hidden in the
conventions of political terms. A clever English publicist once said
that the Constitution forms a sort of false bottom to American political
thinking, and Lowell, who was as ardent and sensitive an American as
ever lived, played most amusingly in one of the earliest of these
newspaper articles with the conceit of “The Sacred Parasol.” He told Gay
afterward that he wished he had put his paper into rhyme. If he had, he
would doubtless have caught and held more attention by such a satire.
Citing the marvellous incident reported by Father John de Peano Carpini
of the people in the land of Kergis, who dwelt under ground because they
could not endure the horrible noise made by the sun when it rose, he
applied the parable to American politics, only it is the mode of thought
that is subterranean, not the habit of living. “As we manage everything
by Conventions, we get together and resolve that the sun has not risen,
and so settle the matter, as far as we are concerned, definitively.
Meanwhile, the sun of a new political truth got quietly above the
horizon in our Declaration of Independence. Watchers upon the mountain
tops had caught sight of a ray now and then before, but this was the
first time that the heavenly lightbringer had gained an objective
existence in the eyes of an entire people.” This was all very well,
until the light began to penetrate dark places which it was for the
interest of certain people to keep dark. “Fears in regard to
_heliolites_ became now very common, and a parasol of some kind was
found necessary as a protection against this celestial bombardment. A
stout machine of parchment was accordingly constructed, and, under the
respectable name of a Constitution, was interposed wherever there seemed
to be danger from the hostile incursions of Light. Whenever this is
spread, a dim twilight, more perplexing than absolute darkness, reigns
everywhere beneath its shadow.... It is amazing what importance
anything, however simple, gains by being elevated into a symbol.
Mahomet’s green breeches were doubtless in themselves common things
enough and would perhaps have found an indifferent market in Brattle or
Chatham Street. They might have hung stretched upon a pole at the door
of one of those second-hand repositories without ever finding a customer
or exciting any feeling but of wonder at the uncouthness of their cut.
But lengthen the pole a little, and so raise the cast-off garment into a
banner or symbol, and it becomes at once full of inspiration, and
perhaps makes a Western General Taylor of the very tailor who cut and
stitched it and had tossed it over carelessly a hundred times.... In the
same way this contrivance of ours, though the work of our own hands, has
acquired a superstitious potency in our eyes. The vitality of the state
has been transferred from the citizens to this. Were a sacrilegious
assault made upon it, our whole body politic would collapse at once.
Gradually men are beginning to believe that, like the famous _ancile_ at
Rome, it fell down from heaven, and it is possible that it may have been
brought thence by a distinguished personage who once made the descent.
Meanwhile our Goddess of Liberty is never allowed to go abroad without
the holy parasol over her head to prevent her from being tanned, since
any darkening of complexion might be productive of serious inconvenience
in the neighborhood of the Capitol.” With this grave banter Lowell goes
on to instance cases where the Sacred Parasol has caused a shifting of
relations in the twilight created by it, and warns people of the danger
they would be in if exposed to the direct rays of the Sun of
Righteousness.
The article shows the kind of reënforcement which Lowell brought to the
anti-slavery camp. Edmund Quincy had something of the same wit and
irony, but he had also a greater love of detail and busied himself over
current incidents with the eagerness of a political detective, running
down fugitives from divine justice with an ardor which was always
heightened by the complexities of the case. Lowell, though he did not
neglect to use incidents for the illustration of his argument, never got
far away from the elemental principles for which his wit and sense of
justice and love of freedom stood. He played with his subject often, but
it was the play of a cat with his captive--one stroke of the paw, when
the time came, and the mouse was dead.
Meanwhile the little band of the faithful, for whom the _Anti-Slavery
Standard_ was a weekly rally, read with delight the incisive editorial
articles, and though they were not always supplied with downright
arguments from this source, they had, what they scarcely got otherwise
in the midst of their tremendous seriousness, the opportunity to rub
their hands with glee over a telling rapier thrust, and also to have
their horizon suddenly enlarged by the historical and literary
comparisons which were swept into range by this active-minded scout.
The grim earnest in which Mr. Gay was working, in preparing for this
weekly bombardment, left him little leisure for sitting down and
admiring the mechanism of his guns, and Lowell in his retirement at
Elmwood was more or less conscious of a certain doubt whether he was not
firing blank cartridges. “You see,” he wrote, “that I have fallen into
the fault which I told you I should be in danger of, viz., dealing too
much in generalities. The truth is, I see so few papers except what are
on our side that I cannot write a controversial article. I intend to
review Webster’s speech and to write an article on the Presidential
nomination. Perhaps they will be more to the purpose. Meanwhile, how can
you expect a man to work with any spirit if he never hears of his
employer? Why don’t you write me and say frankly how you are satisfied
or dissatisfied, and what you want?” Gay wrote later: “You may be sure
I shall write you fast enough when you write what you ought not; until I
do you may be sure that I--so far as that is of any consequence--am
pleased. I hear your articles spoken of highly from all quarters, and
have heard only one criticism from one or two persons,--that they seemed
to be written rather hastily. But that I believe is the way you write
everything. It is a bad way to get into, though, and newspaper writing
is a great temptation to it.”
The political doctrines which Lowell advocated were naturally not those
of expediency, but of downright frankness and honesty. It is true that
he and his associates had the great advantage, in proclaiming
principles, of being quite unable to carry them out successfully at the
polls. Such a position reënforces candor. Just as the Gold Democrats in
the political contest of 1896 could draw up the most admirable platform
that has been seen for many years, since they were out in the open, and
were neither on the defensive nor preparing to carry their candidates
into office, so the Abolitionists in 1848 felt under no obligation to
support either Taylor or Cass, and could speak their minds freely
concerning both. But Lowell, in the article which he wrote on “The
Nominations for the Presidency,” characteristically struck that note of
independence in politics which was a cardinal point in his political
creed and was to be exemplified forcibly his life through, both in
speech and conduct. In this he was not illustrating a principle which he
maintained, so much as he was living a natural life. Independence was a
fundamental note in his nature.
“The word NO,” he wrote, “is the shibboleth of politicians. There is
some malformation or deficiency in their vocal organs which either
prevents their uttering it at all, or gives it so thick a pronunciation
as to be unintelligible. A mouth filled with the national pudding, or
watering in the expectation of it, is wholly incompetent to this
perplexing monosyllable. One might imagine that America had been
colonized by a tribe of those nondescript African animals, the Aye Ayes.
As Pius Ninth has not yet lost his popularity in this country by issuing
a bull against slavery, our youth, who are always ready to hurrah for
anything, might be practised in the formation of the refractory negative
by being encouraged to shout _Viva Pio Nono_.[60]
“If present indications are to be relied upon, no very general defection
from the ranks of either party will result from the nominations.
Politicians, who have so long been accustomed to weigh the expediency of
any measure by its chance of success, are unable to perceive that there
is a kind of victory in simple resistance. It is a great deal to conquer
only the habit of slavish obedience to party. The great obstacle is the
reluctance of politicians to assume moral rather than political
grounds.”[61]
It was, after all, a man of letters and not a journalist who was engaged
on these weekly diatribes, and Lowell showed his instinctive sense of
literary art not only in the abundance of allusion and in the use of
such special forms as irony, but even now and then in the very structure
of his essays, for essays they were rather than editorial articles, for
the most part. Thus, taking his suggestion in topic from an attempt at
running away slaves from the District of Columbia, he composes an
Imaginary Conversation between Mr. Calhoun, Mr. Foote, and General Cass.
There is an amusing, faint reflection of Landor in the manner of the
piece, and the three personages are decidedly more discriminated in
character than his old men of straw, Philip and John, so that the reader
really seems to hear these worthies discoursing together, and not
struggling against the betrayal of the master of the show, who is
shifting his voice from one to the other. To be sure, no one would
mistake the delicious irony of Lowell’s Mr. Foote for the grave and
pious language of the real Mr. Foote, but the imitation is given with an
air of seriousness. “It is a sentiment of the Bible,” Mr. Foote is made
to say, “that riches have the wings of the morning and fly to the
uttermost parts of the earth. But the South labors under this greater
misfortune, that her property is endowed with legs of a kind of brute
instinct (understanding I will not call it) to use them in a northerly
direction. It is a crowning mercy that God has taken away the wings from
our wealth. The elder patriarchs were doubtless deemed unworthy of this
providential interference. It was reserved for Christians and Democrats.
The legs we can generally manage, but it would have been inconvenient to
be continually clipping the wings, not to mention possible damage to the
stock. For these and other comforts make us duly thankful!
“MR. CASS.
“My friend Louis Philippe--ah, I had forgotten: I should have said
my late friend.
“MR. CALHOUN.
“The unfortunate are never the friends of the wise man.
“MR. CASS.
“I was about to say that the Count de Neuilly has often remarked to
me that we were fortunate in having so conservative an element as
‘persons held to service or labor’ (I believe I do not venture
beyond safe Constitutional ground) mingled in a just proportion
with our otherwise too rapidly progressive institutions. There is
no duty of a good statesman, he said, at once so difficult and so
necessary as that of keeping steadily behind his age. But, however
much satisfaction a sound politician who adheres to this theory may
reap in the purity of his own conscience, he will find that the
dust incident to such a position will sometimes so choke him as to
prevent his giving an intelligible answer to the often perplexing
questions of his constituents. Yet I know not whether in such
exigencies a cough be not the safest, as it is the readiest reply.
It is an oracle susceptible of any retrospective interpretation.
“MR. CALHOUN.
“A politician who renders himself intelligible has put a rope round
his own neck, and it would be strange indeed if his opponents
should be unable to find a suitable tree. The present Revolutionary
Government of France has taken many long strides towards the edge
of that precipice which overhangs social and political chaos, but
none longer than in bringing Government face to face with the
people. That government is the most stable which is the most
complicated and the most expensive. Men admire most what they do
not understand, and cling tightest to what they have paid or are
paying most for. They love to see money spent liberally by other
people, and have no idea that every time Uncle Sam unbuttons his
pocket, he has previously put his hand into their own. I have great
fears for France. The Provisional Government talks too much and too
well,--above all things it talks too clearly. In that wild
enthusiasm generated by the turmoil of great and sudden social
changes, and by contact with the magnetism of excited masses of
men, sentiments are often uttered, which, however striking and
beautiful they might be if their application were restricted to
the Utopias of poetry, are dangerous in their tendencies and
results if once brought into contact with the realities of life.
Despotisms profited more than the Catholic Church by shutting up
Christ in the sepulchre of a dead language. A prudent and
far-seeing man will confine his more inspired thoughts to the
solitude of his closet. If once let loose, it is impossible to
recall these winged messengers to the safer perch of his finger. He
may keep an aviary of angels if he will, but he must be careful not
to leave the door open. They have an unaccountable predilection for
entering the hut of the slave, and for seating themselves beside
the hearth of the laborer. Mr. Jefferson,[62] by embodying some
hasty expressions in the Declaration of Independence, introduced
explosive matter into our system.”
And so the conversation goes on touching upon current topics, all having
some bearing on the great underlying theme. One sees the three men
moving over the ice, cautiously, and not daring to try its firmness by
stamping on it, Mr. Calhoun alone maintaining a rigidity of posture as
if he had satisfied himself that his theory of the probable thickness
of the ice was irrefutable.
Lowell complained to Gay that their position was so purely destructive
as to require them to look at everything from a point of criticism, and
that this became wearisome. In saying this, he was thinking probably of
the general attitude which was by necessity taken by a small knot of
political and moral agitators employing their engines against a strongly
intrenched evil. Criticism, however, in its more comprehensive sense,
was the weapon which he most naturally used, but he turned his critical
inquiry rather upon men than upon institutions, or even upon political
measures. In this Imaginary Conversation, for example, the public men
satirized were examined for their mental and moral characteristics.
Through his studies in literature and history, with his insight as a
poet and man of imagination, and his habit of holding up before his mind
fundamental ideas such as truth and freedom, Lowell was chiefly
interested in the characters of public men; in applying his criticism to
Foote, Cass, Calhoun, Clay, Webster, and other of his contemporaries,
though he was mainly testing them by their attitude toward slavery, he
was constantly measuring them by great and permanent standards. The
larger the man, the more thoroughly interested was he in penetrating the
man’s words and deeds, and seeking to come at the bottom facts of his
nature.
I have already referred to the early occasion he took, in his connection
with the _Standard_, to try his judgment upon Webster, and it is
interesting to observe that no other statesman of the time was so
constantly the subject of his criticism. In common with others, he
watched with eagerness the course of Webster in connection with the Whig
nomination for the presidency in 1848, when the disappointment of the
Massachusetts senator was so little disguised. “What Will Mr. Webster
Do?” was the title of the article which he published in the _Standard_
after General Taylor had been nominated--that nomination “not fit to be
made.” Lowell never had the modern journalist’s faculty for jumping at
once into the centre of his subject. Like his own “musing organist,” he
is very apt to “begin doubtfully and far away,” but he is also pretty
sure to strike a note at the outset which has, it turns out, a real
relation to the theme he means to play. Thus in this article he begins
with the reflection: “It is astonishing to see how fond men are of
company. We demand a select society even upon the fence, and will not
jump on this side or that till we have made as accurate a prospective
census as possible;” and so on for several paragraphs of acute and
amusing variations, noting especially the disposition to set expediency
in the place of principle, when looking out for the majority with whom
we wish to side. “After all,” he goes on, “even in estimating
expediencies, we are loath to trust ourselves. We desire rather the
judgment of this or that notable person, and dare not so much as write
_Honesty is the best policy_, or any other prudent morality, till he has
set us a copy at the top of the page. In Massachusetts just now there
are we know not how many people waiting for Mr. Webster’s action on the
recent nomination for the Presidency, and no doubt there is hardly a
village in the country which has not its little coterie of
self-dispossessed politicians expecting in like manner the moment when
the decision of some person, whose stomach does the thinking for theirs,
shall allow them to take sides.
“‘What will Mr. Webster do?’ asks Smith. ‘Greatest man of the age!’ says
Brown. ‘Of any age,’ adds Jones triumphantly. Meanwhile the greatest
mind of any age is sulking at Marshfield. It has had its rattle taken
away from it. It has been told that nominations were not good for it. It
has not been allowed to climb up the back of the Presidential chair. We
have a fancy that a truly great mind can move the world as well from a
three-legged stool in a garret as from the easiest cushion in the White
House. Where the great mind is, there is the President’s house, whether
at Wood’s Hole or Washington.
“We would not be understood as detracting in the least from Mr.
Webster’s reputation as a man of great power. He has hitherto given
evidence of a great force, it seems to us, rather than of a great
intellect. But it is a force working without results. It is like a
steam-engine[63] which is connected by no band with the machinery which
it ought to turn. A great intellect leaves behind it something more than
a great reputation. The earth is in some way the better for its having
taken flesh upon itself. We cannot find that Mr. Webster has
communicated an impulse to any of the great ideas which it is the
destiny of the nineteenth century to incarnate in action. His energies
have been absorbed by Tariff and Constitution and Party--dry bones into
which the touch of no prophet could send life....
“‘What will Mr. Webster do?’ This is of more importance to him than to
the great principle which is beginning to winnow the old parties. This,
having God on its side, can do very well without Mr. Webster--but can he
do as well without it? The truth of that principle will not be affected
by his taking one side or the other. But _occasio celeris_, and the
great man is always the man of the occasion. He mounts and guides that
mad steed whose neck is clothed with thunder, and whose fierce _ha! ha!_
at the sound of the trumpets appals weaker spirits. Two or three years
ago we spoke of one occasion which Mr. Webster allowed to slip away from
him. That was the annexation of Texas. Another is offered him now. We do
not believe that party ever got what was meant for mankind. Mr. Webster
has now once more an opportunity of showing which he was meant for. If
party be large enough to hold him, then mankind can afford to let him
go. Nevertheless, it is sad to imagine him still grinding for the
Philistines. We cannot help thinking that his first appearance as Samson
grasping the pillars of the idol temple would draw a fuller house than
Mr. Van Buren in the same character....
“Let us concede to Mr. Webster’s worshippers that he has heretofore
given proof enough of a great intellect, and let us demand of him now
that he make use of, perhaps, his last chance to become a great _Man_.
Of what profit are the hands of a giant in the picking up of pins? Let
him leave Banks and Tariffs to more slender fingers. If ever a man was
intended for a shepherd of the people, Daniel Webster is. The people are
fast awakening to great principles: what they want is a great man to
concentrate and intensify their diffuse enthusiasm. And it is not every
sort of greatness that will serve for the occasion. Webster, if he would
only let himself go, has every qualification for a popular leader. The
use of such a man would be that of a conductor to gather, from every
part of the cloud of popular indignation, the scattered electricity
which would waste itself in heat lightnings, and grasping it into one
huge thunderbolt, let it fall like the messenger of an angry god among
the triflers in the Capitol.
“Let Mr. Webster give over at last the futile task of sowing the barren
seashore of the present, and devote himself to the Future, the only
legitimate seed-field of great minds. Slimmer and glibber men will slip
through the labyrinth of politics more easily than he. He will always be
outstripped and outwitted. Politics are in their nature transitory. He
who writes his name on them, be the letters never so large, writes it on
the sand. The next wind of shifting opinion puffs it out forever. It is
never too late to do a wise or great action. We do not yet wholly
despair of hearing the voice of our Daniel reading the _Mene, Mene_,
written on the wall of our political fabric.”
The Buffalo Convention indorsed the nomination of Martin Van Buren, by
the Barnburners, or anti-slavery wing of the Democratic party, with the
result that the disaffected Whigs came to the support of General Taylor,
and Webster rather tardily came forward and cast in his influence on
that side. Lowell had been watching for his action, and at once wrote
one of his bantering yet serious articles.
“Mr. Webster,” he said, “with the tan of the Richmond October sun not
yet out of his face, is shocked beyond measure at Mr. Van Buren’s former
pro-slavery attitude. Sitting upon the fence at Marshfield, he tells his
neighbors that, should he and Mr. Van Buren meet upon the same political
platform, they could not look at each other without laughing. If Mr.
Webster’s face looks as black as it is said to have done just after the
Philadelphia nomination, we think it the last thing in the world that
any one would venture even a smile at. Mr. Webster finds fault with Mr.
Van Buren because Northern Democratic Senators voted in favor of the
annexation of Texas. But where was Mr. Webster himself? If he foresaw
that Texas would be a Trojan horse, why did he not say so? If people
would not come to hear him in Faneuil Hall, could he not have gathered
his friends and neighbors together at Marshfield, as he did last week?
It is perfectly clear now by actual demonstration, as it was clear then
to persons who thought about the matter, that if Mr. Webster had put
himself at the head of the opposers of annexation, Texas would never
have been annexed, and he would have been the next President of the
United States. The effect of the Free Soil movement, led by men with not
a tithe of his influence, upon the Compromise Bill, puts this beyond a
question. Where was the Wilmot Proviso then? At the Springfield
Convention a year ago, Mr. Webster laid claim to this as ‘his thunder.’
In the Marshfield speech he dates its origin as far back as 1787. A
precocious Cyclops, truly, to be forging thunderbolts in his fifth year!
If Mr. Webster should live till 1852, and his retrospective anti-slavery
feeling go on increasing at its present ratio, he will tell us that he
established the _Liberator_ in 1831.”
Quite at the end of Lowell’s stated contributions to the _Standard_ came
the longest of his articles in the form of a running comment on
Webster’s fateful seventh of March speech, and in his comment he
pronounced that judgment which was inevitable from an anti-slavery
prophet. “It has been characterized,” he says, “like most of Mr.
Webster’s speeches, as a ‘masterly effort.’ Some of them have been
masterly successes, but this we sincerely hope and believe _was_ an
effort.... It is the plea of a lawyer and an advocate, but not of a
statesman. It is not even the plea of an advocate on the side which he
was retained to argue. We have heard enough of Democratic defalcations:
here is a great Whig defalcation which dwarfs them all, for it is not
money which has disappeared in this instance, but professions, pledges,
principles. Men do not defend themselves in advance against accusations
of inconsistency unless they feel an uncomfortable sense that there is
some justice in the charge. This feeling pervades a great part of Mr.
Webster’s speech like a blush.” He uses a fine scorn in dissecting Mr.
Webster’s specious plea that slavery is nowhere directly prohibited in
the teachings of the New Testament, and quietly asks if incest is
anywhere forbidden there. “But if,” he adds, Mr. Webster were really in
search of a scriptural prohibition of slavery, we think he might find it
in that commandment which forbids us to covet anything that is our
neighbor’s. For if we may not do that, then _a fortiori_ we may not
covet our neighbor himself.... Mr. Webster, we have said, avoids
carefully all the moral points of the argument. He falls in with the
common assumption that this is a question of political preponderance
between the North and the South.... It is not a question between the
North and the South. It is a struggle between the South (we had almost
said Calhoun) and the spirit of the nineteenth century after Christ....
Is slavery the only thing whose sensitiveness is to be respected?
Freedom has been thought by some to have her finer feelings also.” And
he closes the discussion of the speech in these words:--
“If Mr. Webster’s speech should not find any one to confute it in the
Senate,--a hard task, for assumptions and tergiversations are not easily
replied to,--it will not be without answers abundant and conclusive. It
will be answered by every generous instinct of the human heart, by every
principle which a New Englander has imbibed in the Church, the
Schoolhouse, or the Home, but especially by those inextinguishable
sentiments which move men’s hatred of treachery and contempt for the
traitor.”
The agreement which Lowell had with the _Standard_ left him at liberty
to send either prose or poetry, and as his prose had not necessarily a
direct reference to the anti-slavery contest, so his poetry was to be
independent of any polemic consideration. It was Lowell the writer whom
Gay wished most to attach to the paper for the added weight and
influence he would bring, and Lowell in making and holding to his
agreement was not indifferent to the gentle stimulus which a regular
engagement afforded. He was to send something on Friday if possible, on
Saturday at any rate, of each week, and when the end of the week came, a
sudden suggestion might turn him away from a half-finished article to
let loose a poem in its place. The first five “Biglow Papers” were
published in the _Courier_, the last four in the _Standard_, where also
appeared, early in the connection, that poem entitled “Freedom,” which
holds the essence of Lowell’s thought on this large subject, and is the
best expression of the attitude of his mind as he entered with a certain
sense of special enlistment upon the direct business of a crusade
against slavery. The suggestion came from the revolution in France
which swept Louis Philippe from his throne, and from that light blaze of
revolutionary fire which for a moment kindled hopes in Germany and
Italy. During this time appeared also several poems which reflected with
varying lights the thought that stirred in him at the new birth, as it
seemed, with which humanity was travailing. Such are the apologue of
“Ambrose,” that grim poem “The Sower,” “Bibliolatres,” “A Parable,” but
here also were “Beaver Brook,” first called “The Mill,” occasionally a
poem like “Eurydice” which had been lying unprinted in his portfolio,
and a few bits of rhymed satire which were thrown off by him on the spur
of the moment, and were too careless in manner to be worth his gathering
later into his volumes.
The active members of the anti-slavery society who controlled the policy
of the _Standard_ were divided in their judgment of the value of
Lowell’s contributions. Those who like Mr. Gay himself were thoroughly
in earnest, but held their minds open on other sides than the
north-north-east, regarded Lowell as an important acquisition. His fame
was growing, and he could have found a ready market for his wares if he
had chosen to turn them to the best commercial account, but he
cheerfully gave his time and thought to a paper which was always in an
impecunious condition, so that the editor found it hard enough to pay
the very moderate stipend agreed upon. Lowell, as we have seen, hated to
be paid for his services to the anti-slavery cause, and never complained
of the inadequacy of his salary; but he took a rational view of the
case, and accepted what the paper could give, not measuring his own
contributions by the meagre standard of his pay. Nor did he show any
sensitiveness when his work came under editorial stricture. The
intensity of feeling which possessed the anti-slavery men who were in
the thick of the fight made them abnormally critical of those who seemed
in any way to hold back, and when Lowell wrote a long review, with
hearty praise, of a new volume of Whittier’s poetry, signing it with his
initials, Mr. Gay did not scruple to prefix an editorial note, in which
he denounced Whittier for his course in 1840, when he refused to follow
the lead of those abolitionists who insisted upon the acceptance of
women delegates at the London convention. The quarrel then aroused led
to a break in the unity of the anti-slavery group. “Older
abolitionists,” wrote Gay, “cannot forget what Lowell cannot be aware
of, that in the struggle of 1840, which was a struggle of life and death
to the anti-slavery cause, Whittier the Quaker was found side by side
with the men who would have sacrificed that cause to crush, according
even to their own acknowledgment, the right of woman to plead publicly
in behalf of the slave.” Lowell took the matter quietly enough: “I could
not very well say less, and you could not say more,” was his comment.
Yet how emphatically Mr. Gay valued Lowell’s contributions appears from
all the letters of that anxious and harassed editor. Near the close of
the connection, he wrote to Lowell: “I expected much good for the paper
when I proposed that you should lighten my editorial labor, but it has
received, I know, far more benefit than I looked for, great as that was.
The influence of the _Standard_--leaving myself out of the
question--since it was established has been very great, and it would
also, I am sure, have been very famous had its aim been other than it
was. No small amount of energy and intellect have been bestowed upon it,
and its nursing fathers and mothers have taken good care of its being.
But of this I am sure, and nobody else is in a position to know it so
well as I--that of all the good things ever done for it, no one so good
ever was done, as making you its joint editor. Its influence through you
has been felt where it never was before. Through you it has a reputation
which in all its previous existence it had failed to gain. A respect and
regard is accorded to it because of your efforts, which no other person
ever had, and no other person probably would ever have gained for it.”
But the _Standard_ was not Mr. Gay’s paper to do with as he would, and
there was a section of the committee in control that was impatient of a
contributor who was not as they were, fighting away on foot, with stout
oak staves in their hands, but was flying about as a sort of light-horse
contingent, and sometimes seemed out of sight and yet not in the enemy’s
country. “There is a small class,” Mr. Gay wrote,--“Stephen Foster is a
good representative of it,--who did not consider you worth much, and
many of whom confess they do not understand what you would be at.” The
portrait which Lowell had drawn of Stephen Foster in his letter to Mr.
McKim is likely to help the reader understand that he might possibly
even feel contempt for Lowell’s indirect method of attacking slavery.
“Hard by, as calm as summer even,
Smiles the reviled and pelted Stephen,
The unappeasable Boanerges
To all the Churches and the Clergies.
* * * * *
A man with caoutchouc endurance,
A perfect gem for life insurance,
A kind of maddened John the Baptist,
To whom the harshest word comes aptest,
Who, struck by stone or brick ill-starred,
Hurls back an epithet as hard,
Which, deadlier than stone or brick,
Has a propensity to stick.
His oratory is like the scream
Of the iron-horse’s frenzied steam
Which warns the world to leave wide space
For the black engine’s swerveless race.”
Lowell himself was under no illusions. He was warmly attached to Gay,
and he had a keen intellectual admiration for Edmund Quincy. He
respected to the full his several associates, but he knew well that,
though he identified himself cordially with the small knot of earnest
men and women who cried aloud and spared not, his temperament, his
ideals, and his humor forbade him to shut himself up within the bounds
they set themselves. Despite the independence he claimed and that was
granted him, he could not escape the sense of his restrictions. “I told
you and the Executive Committee honestly before I began,” he wrote Gay,
“that they were setting me about a business for which I was not fitted.
I feel as if the whole of them were looking over my shoulder whenever I
sit down to write, and it quite paralyzes me.” And yet ten days later he
could send his poem, “The Mill,” better known as “Beaver Brook,” and
write, “I am just in time for the mail now, and I positively admire
myself that I can sit down and write a poem to the _Standard’s_ order so
resolutely.”
At the end of his first year’s engagement Lowell began to receive
intimations that the paper was in a hard way financially. “I am very
sorry to see,” he writes the editor, “that the _Standard_ is raised on
so insecure a staff. I did not expect, (and so told the Executive
Committee) that my writing for it would increase the circulation, but, I
say again, as I said before, that they ought to be entirely satisfied
with _you_. Not only is your own editorial work dote with spirit and
vigor, but your selections are such as to render the paper one of the
most interesting I see. But they ought to do something themselves.
Phillips and Quincy could do a great deal if they would. They can’t
expect two persons to give the paper an infinite variety, nor me to
devote myself wholly to it. I have continued to write after my year was
up, but I have had no intimation from the Committee whether they wished
my services any longer or not. I am very willing to continue, for if I
were to give up this engagement, I must find some other, in order to
make the two ends meet.”
It then transpired that there had been a warm discussion in the
Committee over the continuance of the arrangement, and Gay and his
friends had at last effected a compromise by which the salary of $500
was to be divided between Lowell and Quincy, Lowell being required to
contribute every other week only. Lowell accepted the situation
philosophically, and doubtless felt some relief. “All through the year,”
he wrote to Gay, “I have felt that I worked under a disadvantage. I have
missed that inspiration (or call it magnetism) which flows into one from
a thoroughly sympathetic audience. Properly speaking, I have never had
it as an author, for I have never been popular. But then I have never
needed it, because I wrote to please myself and not to please the
people: whereas, in writing for the _Standard_, I have felt that I ought
in some degree to admit the whole Executive Committee into my workshop,
and defer as much as possible to the opinion of persons whose opinion
(however valuable on a point of morals) would not probably weigh a pin
with me on an æsthetic question. I have felt that I ought to work in my
own way, and yet I have also felt that I ought’ to _try_ to work in
_their_ way, so that I have failed of working in either. Nevertheless, I
think that the Executive Committee would have found it hard to get some
two or three of the poems I have furnished from any other quarter.” The
entire letter, which is printed by Mr. Norton,[64] is interesting as
further defining Lowell’s attitude toward his associates in the
anti-slavery cause, and his separation from them on some of the crucial
points. But it is clear that the whole situation was complicated for him
by the pecuniary embarrassment under which he labored. He was ready, if
it would relieve the situation, to release the Committee altogether, but
he was willing to write once a fortnight if they _wished_ him to do so.
“To tell the truth,” he says, “I need money more this year than last. My
father has just resigned a quarter part of his salary,[65] and a large
part of the household expenses must devolve upon me. But I have resolved
to turn as much of our land as I can into money, and invest it, though I
confess I should prefer to leave it as it is, and where I am sure it
would be safe for Mab and the rest.”
At the end of his second year the engagement was ended, though, largely
out of friendship for Gay, Lowell contributed occasionally, and his
name indeed was kept at the head of the paper, bracketed with that of
Mr. Quincy, for another year. He laughed, by the way, at the designation
“corresponding editor.” It has always seemed to me to be nonsense. There
can, in the nature of the thing, be no such person as a _corresponding_
editor. Moreover, in this particular case, my unhappy genius will keep
seeing the double sense in the word _corresponding_, and suggesting that
E. Q. and I correspond in very few particulars,--meaning no offence to
either of us. ‘Contributor’ would be the fitting word.”
The connection with the _Standard_ had not altered Lowell’s position in
politics. It found him independent, and left him so. He was no less a
reformer at the end than he was at the beginning, but he was confirmed
in his belief that the world must be healed by degrees; and as he was a
disbeliever in the short cut to emancipation by way of disunion, so he
was at once a firm believer in radical reform, but skeptical of ultimate
success through the rooting out of individual evils. He found himself
among people who were sure of their panaceas. He himself in the first
flush of his restless desire for activity had been disposed, under the
influence of the woman he loved, to attack the evil of intemperance by
the method of total abstinence, but his zeal was short-lived. He appears
never to have accepted woman suffrage as the solution of the problem of
society, and it is doubtful if at any time he would have given his
adhesion to the mode of immediate emancipation if he had been called on
to discuss it. His imagination and his sense of humor both prevented him
from being a thick and thin reformer, and he refused to allow his hatred
of slavery to be complicated with practical measures for the reform of
various other evils which troubled society. It was because he saw in
slavery in the United States the arch foe of freedom and the insidious
corrupter of national life that he concentrated his reforming energy
upon this evil. He has said of Wordsworth that “fortunately he gave up
politics that he might devote himself to his own noble calling, to which
politics are subordinate;” but it might be said with equal truth of
Lowell that he never gave up poetry, and that when he was writing every
week, or every other week, for the _Standard_, whether in verse or in
prose, he was dominated by an imagination which kept steadily before his
eyes great principles and doctrines which found in the anti-slavery
movement an illustration but not an exclusive end. It is not surprising,
therefore, that he should have seemed to others, and sometimes to
himself, not to see the enemy just in front of him.
Nevertheless, the experience was worth much to him. It resulted, as it
might not except for this stimulus, in the “Biglow Papers,” and it also
demonstrated more clearly than ever the supremacy of the literary
function with him, since he never laid it aside under the strong
provocation which his journalistic work incited, and maintained from
first to last the integrity of his spirit. The conservatism which
underlay and indeed supported his radicalism was confirmed by his
experience, and it issued moreover in a large comprehensiveness, so that
he came out of the ranks not only with a greater sympathy with his
comrades,[66] but with a larger toleration for the men he attacked. “At
this minute,” he writes to Gay, “the song of the bobolink comes rippling
through my opening window and preaches peace. Two months ago the same
missionary was in his South Carolina pulpit, and can I think that he
chose another text, or delivered another sermon there? Hath not a
slaveholder hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed
with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same
diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same summer
and winter as an abolitionist? If you pinch them, do they not bleed? If
you tickle them, do they not laugh? If you poison them, do they not die?
If you wrong them, shall they not revenge? Nay, I will go a step
farther, and ask if all this do not apply to parsons also? Even _they_
are human.”