A FABLE FOR CRITICS, THE BIGLOW PAPERS, AND THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL
1847-1848
It was while he was most busily engaged in contributing to the
_Standard_ his weekly poems, criticisms, and editorial articles, that
Lowell wrote and published a group of books, varied in subject and
treatment, dashed off each and all with an eager abandonment to the
intellectual excitement which produced them, and read by a later
generation as capital illustrations not only of their author’s
spontaneity, but also of the permanent direction of his nature. It is
not unfair to suppose that the steady application to work in connection
with a cause which appealed to moral enthusiasm aroused in a mind like
Lowell’s an exhilaration of temper very provocative of creation. The
poems which he sent, one after the other, in a continuous flight, were
witnesses to this activity of imagination, and the very tension of his
mind kept him in a state of excitement, so that his diversions took the
form of intellectual amusement. Two or three numbers of the “Biglow
Papers” had appeared, when Lowell wrote his friend Briggs that he was at
work on a satirical poem, but apparently he did not disclose its exact
character, though he intimated at the beginning that he meant to give
the poem to his friend. In point of fact, Lowell appears to have written
at full speed five or six hundred lines of “A Fable for Critics” in
October, 1847, and then to have been so busily engaged in getting ready
his new volume of “Poems,” which appeared at the end of the year, that
he laid it aside. “I have been waiting with a good deal of impatience,”
Briggs writes, 7 November, 1847, “for the manuscript of the satirical
poem which you promised to send me. As I have not seen anything
advertised which sounds like you I am half afraid that you are not going
to publish it. But you must be convinced from the great popularity that
Hosea’s efforts have received that the sale of the poem will be large
and profitable.”
In his reply, 13 November, Lowell says: “My satire remains just as it
was; about six hundred lines I think are written. I left it because I
wished to finish it in one mood of mind, and not to get that and my
serious poems in the new volume entangled. It is a rambling, disjointed
affair, and I may alter the form of it, but if I can get it read I know
it will take. I intend to give it some serial title and continue it at
intervals.... I shall send you my satire in manuscript when it is
finished. Meanwhile, here is a taste and I want your opinion. Here is
Emerson. I think it good.--There, I have given you three or four
specimen bricks--what think you of the house?... Remember that my satire
is a secret. Read the extract to Page.” Mr. Briggs was delighted with
what was shown him, and longed for more. “The characteristics of
Alcott,” he says, “I could not judge of, although they are most happily
expressed, as I have known nothing about him; but the character of
Emerson was the best thing of the kind I have read.” He returns to the
subject on Christmas day, but is still ignorant of Lowell’s intention as
to the disposition of the manuscript. “I think that the book would be a
very popular one, but still, it strikes me that your subjects are too
localized to be widely understood; but they would have all the merit of
fictions at least, and your method would make them universally
acceptable.”
But now Lowell gives his friend a more explicit statement of his
intention as to the publication of his satire. The volume of poems was
out of the way, and on the last day of 1847 he writes as follows: “I
have not time left to say much more than happy New Year! I have been
hard at work copying my satire that I might get it (what was finished of
it, at least) to you by New Year’s day as a present. As it is, I can
only send the first part. It was all written with one impulse, and was
the work of not a great many hours; but it was written in good spirits
(_con amore_, as Leupp said he used to smoke), and therefore seems to me
to have a hearty and easy swing about it that is pleasant. But I was
interrupted midway by being obliged to get ready the copy for my volume,
and I have never been able to weld my present mood upon the old, without
making an ugly swelling at the joint.
“I wish you to understand that I make you a New Year’s gift, not of the
manuscript, but of the thing itself. I wish you to get it printed (if
you think the sale will warrant it) for your own benefit. At the same
time I am desirous of retaining my copyright, in order that if
circumstances render it desirable, I may still possess a control over
it. Therefore, if you think it would repay publishing (I have no doubt
of it, or I should not offer it to you), I wish you would enter the
copyright in your own name and then make a transfer to me ‘in
consideration of etc.’
“Now I know that you are as proud as--you ought to be, but if the
proceeds of the sale would be of service to you, you have no right to
refuse them. I don’t make you a pecuniary present, though I trust you
would not hesitate to accept one from me, if you needed it, and I could
raise the money, but I give you something which I have made myself, and
made on purpose for you.
“I know nothing about your circumstances. If beloved W. P. needs it
most, let him have it, and I know that you would consider it the best
gift I could make _you_. I will not consent to that disposal of it,
however, unless he need it most. In case the proceeds amount to anything
handsome (for it _may_ be popular) and you intend them for W. P., let it
be done in this way, which would please him and me too, and nobody but
myself would be the gainer. Do you in that case sit to Page for your
portrait--the said effigies to belong to your humble servant.
“I am making as particular directions as if I were drawing my will, but
I have a sort of presentiment (which I never had in regard to anything
else) that this little bit of pleasantry will _take_. Perhaps I have
said too much of the Centurion.[67] But it was only the comicality of
his _character_ that attracted me,--for the man himself personally never
entered my head. But the sketch is clever?--I want your opinion on what
I have sent immediately.”[68]
Mr. Briggs replied at once, accepting the gift in the spirit in which it
was given, delighting in the poem, and proposing to arrange immediately
for its publication by Putnam. He was confident, as was Page, that the
book would be a great hit, and promptly provided for the disposition of
the profits. “One third,” he wrote, “should be invested for Queen Mab,
to be given her on her eighteenth birthday; one third to be disposed of
in the same manner for my little angel; and the other third to be given
to Page, for which he should paint your portrait for me and mine for
you. This would be making the best disposition of the fund that I could
devise, and I think will not be displeasing to you. If the profits
should be small, I will divide them equally between the little ones. It
will be something quite new for two young ladies to receive their
marriage portions from the profits of an American poem.”
Lowell was highly entertained by this proposal. “I could not help
laughing,” he wrote, “as I read your proposed disposition of the
expected finances. To look at you in the character of Alnaschar was
something so novel as to be quite captivating to my imagination. Not
that I have any fear that you will kick over the basket, but I am afraid
the contents will hardly be so attractive to the public as to allow the
proceeds of the sale to be divided into three. It is really quite a
triumph to be able to laugh at my practical friend. However, I will not
impoverish your future, but will let you enjoy it as long as it
lasts.... I have now, in addition to what I sent you, and exclusive of
Emerson, etc., about a hundred lines written, chiefly about Willis and
Longfellow. But in your arrangements with the printer, you must reckon
on allowing me at least a month. I cannot write unless in the mood.”
It was when about half the poem had been written that Lowell began his
constant work for the _Standard_, and he was impatient to finish the
poem, yet found it hard to get into the right mood. “I want to get my
windows open,” he wrote to Briggs, 26 March, 1848, “and to write in the
fresh air. I ought not to have sent you any part of it till I had
finished it entirely. I feel a sense of responsibility which hinders my
pen from running along as it ought in such a theme. I wish the last half
to be as jolly and unconstrained as the first. If you had not praised
what I sent you, I dare say you would have had the whole of it ere this.
Praise is the only thing that can make me feel any doubt of myself.”
And then, recurring to Briggs’s air castle to be built with the
proceeds: “As to your plan for dividing the profits I will have nothing
to do with it. I wish they might be a thousand dollars with all my
heart, but I do not see that they will be more than enough to buy
something for my little niece there in New York. If I had not thought it
the only poem I ever wrote on which there was like to be _some_
immediate profit, I should never have given it to you at all. In making
it a present to you, I was giving myself a _douceur_, and the greater
the sale the larger the bribe to myself. A part of the condition is that
if it make a loss--I pay it. If this be not agreed to, the bargain is
null, and I never will finish it.... Now that I _have_ let you into the
secret of the ‘Fable’ before it was finished, I hope you will write and
give me a spur. I suppose you did not wish to say anything about it till
after it became yours. But I wish to be dunned. Tell me whether its
being published at any particular time will make any difference, etc.,
etc., and make any suggestions. I think I shall say nothing about
Margaret Fuller (though she offer so fair a target), because she has
done me an ill-natured turn.[69] I shall revenge myself amply upon her
by writing better. She is a very foolish, conceited woman, who has got
together a great deal of information, but not enough _knowledge_ to save
her from being ill-tempered. However, the temptation may be too strong
for me. It certainly would have been if she had never said anything
about me. Even Maria thinks I ought to give her a line or two.” Briggs
begged him not to leave out Miss Fuller, “she will accuse you of doing
it to spite her.”
The spring months went by with occasional dashes at the “Fable” and on
12 May, Lowell wrote to his friend: “I have begun upon the ‘Fable’ again
fairly, and am making some headway. I think with what I sent you (which
I believe was about 500 lines) it will make something over a thousand. I
have done since I sent the first half, Willis, Longfellow, Bryant, Miss
Fuller, and Mrs. Child. In Longfellow’s case I have attempted no
characterization. The same (in a degree) may be said of S. M. F. With
her I have been perfectly good humored, but I have a fancy that what I
say will stick uncomfortably. It will make you laugh. So will L. M. C.
After S. M. F. I make a short digression on bores in general which has
some drollery in it. Willis I think good. Bryant is funny, and as far as
I could make it immitigably just. Indeed I have endeavored to be so in
all. I am glad I did B. before I got your letter.[70] The only verses I
shall add regarding him are some complimentary ones which I left for a
happier mood after I had written the comic part. I steal from him,
indeed! If he knew me he would not say so. When I steal I shall go to a
specie vault, not to a till. Does he think that he invented the past,
and has a prescriptive title to it? Do not think I am provoked. I am
simply amused. If he had _riled_ me, I might have knocked him into a
cocked hat in my satire. But that, on second thoughts, would be no
revenge, for it might make him President, a cocked hat being now the
chief qualification.[71] It would be more severe to knock him into the
middle of next week, as that is in the future, and he has such a
partiality toward the past.”
In the passage on bores, which follows the lines on Margaret Fuller,
Lowell explains that--
“These sketches I made (not to be too explicit)
From two honest fellows who made me a visit,”--
but he is explicit enough regarding them in the same letter to Mr.
Briggs: I had a horrible visitation the other evening from Mr. ----, of
Philadelphia, accompanied by Messrs. ---- and ----, of Boston. After their
departure, I wrote the ‘digression on bores’ which I mentioned
above. ----, I believe, likes my poetry, but likes his own too well to
appreciate anybody’s else. He is about to start a magazine and has
issued a prospectus of the very most prodigious description. One would
think it to have been written with a quill plucked from the wing of ‘our
country’s bird.’ He wished to have a portrait and memoir of me in his
first number. I escaped from the more immediate crucifixion, however, on
the ground that I had no sketch of myself that would answer his purpose.
As his project may fail after the first number, I may get off
altogether. I have sometimes given offence by answering such
applications with a smile, so I have changed my tactics, and give
assent.... I hope to finish the ‘Fable’ next week.”
On 24 July, Lowell wrote to Gay, who was in the secret, that he had
finished the “Fable,” and shortly after he made a visit to New York, but
it was not till near the end of August that he sent the last instalment
of copy. The proof followed, and Lowell took occasion to make at least
one omission, due apparently to better knowledge which led him to revise
his judgment. He was too late, apparently, for another correction, for
he wrote to Briggs, 4 October, asking him to strike out the four lines
relating to Miss Fuller, beginning
“There is one thing she owns in her own single right,”
which still stand. The poem was printed from type, so that as each sheet
was printed, and the type distributed, it was not possible, as in the
case of electrotype plates, to make corrections up to the last moment
before printing the entire book. In the same letter he writes:--
“I send half the proof to-day--t’ other to-morrow with Irving and Judd.
I am _druv like all possessed_. I am keeping up with the printers with
Wilbur’s Notes, Glossary, Index, and Introduction. I have two sets of
hands to satiate, one on the body of the book, one on the extremities.
“I wish to see title-page and preface. Also, be sure and have a written
acknowledgment from G. P. P. that the copyright remains with _you_. Then
send me a transfer of it for value received. I will endorse in such a
way that it shall remain to you and yours in case anything happen to me.
Don’t think my precaution indelicate. I only wish to provide against
accidents. Let Putnam take out copyright and let it stand in your name
as far as he and the rest of the world are concerned. I am anxious about
it (I need scarcely say) solely on these two accounts, that it may never
fall into strangers’ hands, and that it may never be taken from you.
More to-morrow.”
Two days later he wrote to Briggs, “I am, you see, as good as my word
and better. For, as I was copying the other verses this morning, I
thought I might as well throw you in Holmes to boot. Let the new passage
begin thus,--
“Here, ‘Forgive me, Apollo,’ I cried, ‘while I pour’ &c., &c.
Please make the alteration and put in marks of quotation at the
beginning of each new paragraph if I have omitted them. Also in this
line if it runs as I think it does,
“‘So, compared to you moderns, is old Melesigines,’
insert ‘sounds’ instead of ‘is.’
“I wish you would do up a copy with ‘author’s and so forths,’ _dated New
York_, and put it into Ticknor’s first box directed to Dr. O. W. Holmes,
Boston, and also one directed to Professor Felton, Cambridge, in
Ticknor’s or Nichols’s as it may chance....
“Print the title-page thus:--
“‘Reader, walk up’ etc., as far as ‘ruinous rate’ in large italics in
old-fashioned style in an inverted cone
[Illustration:
\ /
\ /
\ /
A
]
down to Fable for Critics in very large caps. Then the rest in small
caps properly broken up so as to conceal the fact of the rhyme.[72]
You will like the tribute to our Massachusetts. It is clearly the best
passage in the poem, and you will see how adroitly it comes back to the
_theme_, the general comic and satiric tone, of the rest.”
The date on the rhymed title-page was anticipated a little, for the
book was advertised for 20 October, and delivered on the 25th. A
thousand copies had been printed from type and were quickly disposed of.
The little book was then stereotyped and a second edition issued the
first of the New Year, with the new preface which is still attached to
the poem. In February it had gone to a third edition, but at the end of
November, 1849, it had not sold beyond three thousand copies, though a
fourth edition was then talked of. It is to be feared that Mr. Briggs’s
golden eggs were addled.
It will be remembered that in December, 1846, Lowell wrote the amusing
lines to James Miller McKim, editor of the _Pennsylvania Freeman_, which
were printed in that paper, and are included among his collected poems
under the heading “Letter from Boston.” In the same frolicsome temper
used in “A Fable for Critics,” Lowell made rapid sketches of the
conspicuous anti-slavery people as seen at the bazaar just held in
Faneuil Hall. The success of the squib very likely suggested to him the
fun of playing the same game with the literati of the day. Both poems,
indeed, may have taken a hint from Leigh Hunt’s “The Feast of the
Poets,”[73] which had been brought afresh to Lowell’s notice, if not
disclosed to him for the first time, by the little volume “Rimini and
other Poems by Leigh Hunt,” issued by Ticknor in 1844. The measure is
the same. Phœbus Apollo also introduces the poets, though Hunt’s scheme
is more deliberate than Lowell’s, and there is the same disposition to
make use of unexpected rhymes. Hunt used his sauciness upon his
contemporaries, Spencer, Rogers, Montgomery, Crabbe, Hayley, Gifford,
Scott, Campbell, Moore, Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, and
Rose. The reader can easily pick out the names here which have well
outlived Hunt’s mockery, and those which were as well known to Hunt’s
contemporaries as are some in the “Fable” to Lowell’s. Hunt, to be sure,
confined himself to poets and poetasters, while Lowell drew his examples
from the more conspicuous writers in the United States, whether of prose
or of verse.
There was little mystery about the authorship of the “Fable.” Lowell did
not put his name on the title-page, but he wrote himself all over the
book; and though the publication was anonymous, he made no objection to
the disclosure to Putnam, and apparently was careless about confining
the knowledge to Briggs, Gay, and Page. Longfellow records in his diary
under 15 June, 1848, “Passed an hour or two with Lowell, who read to me
his satire on American authors; full of fun, and with very true
portraits, as seen from that side.” It does not appear if Lowell read to
his guest what he had recently written about him in the satire. And Dr.
Holmes, to whom a copy of the book, as we have seen, was sent with the
“author’s and so forths,” acknowledged it in a letter to Lowell, in
which he characterizes it as “capital--crammed full and rammed down
hard--powder (lots of it)--shot--slugs bullets--very little wadding,
and that is gun-cotton--all crowded into a rusty looking blunderbuss
barrel as it were,--capped with a percussion preface,--and cocked with a
title-page as apropos as a wink to a joke.”[74]
Clever as are the portraits,--some of the lines are bitten in with a
little acid,--and though there are but few of the authors characterized
who have not even a more secure place to-day than then, the “Fable” can
scarcely be said ever to have had or retained much vogue as a whole. In
the excitement of writing his crackling lines Lowell believed himself to
be making a hit, but hardly had the ink dried than he saw it for what it
was, intellectual effervescence that made one hilarious for the moment.
“It seems bald and poor enough now, the Lord knows,” he wrote between
the first and second editions. Forty years afterward, however, on
recalling it, he said it was the first popular thing he had written. He
never was quite easy as to his treatment of Bryant: “I am quite sensible
now,” he wrote in 1855, “that I did not do Mr. Bryant justice in the
‘Fable.’ But there was no personal feeling in what I said, though I have
regretted what I _did_ say because it might seem personal.” And as late
as 1887 he characterized his poem written for Bryant’s birthday as a
kind of palinode to what he had said of him in the “Fable,” “which has
something of youth’s infallibility in it, or at any rate of youth’s
irresponsibility.” Aside from this slight uneasiness, Lowell does not
appear to have repented of any of his judgments, nor did he ever revise
the poem for subsequent editions. No doubt, the disregard of the poem
has been due largely to the ephemeral nature of much of the jocoseness.
The puns, good and bad, with which it is sprinkled, are so many notices
of “good for this time only,” and the petty personalities and trivial
bits of satire lower the average of the whole. The “Fable” must be taken
for just what it was to the author and his friends, a piece of high
spirits with which to make sport: the salt that savors it is to be found
in the few masterly characterizations and criticisms.
And yet, turning away from this _jeu d’esprit_ as a piece of literature,
and looking at it as a reflection of Lowell’s mind in a very ardent
passage of his life, we may justly regard with strong interest so frank
an expression, not merely of his likes and dislikes, but of the
underlying principle of criticism which was native to him and found
abundant illustration from the days of the _Pioneer_ to the later days
of the _North American Review_. His impatience of yard-stick criticism
and of a timid waiting upon foreign judgment, so hotly uttered in his
rapid lines, sprang from the intuitive perception and the independence
of spirit which lie at the basis of all his own criticism. This
intuitive perception was indeed that of a man who often formed hasty
impressions and was not without personal prejudice, but it was at least
a first-hand judgment, and not the composite result of other men’s
opinions, and it came from a mind through which the wind of a free
nature was always blowing. The lightning flashes which disclose the
inherent and lasting qualities of Emerson, Hawthorne, Cooper, Holmes,
Whittier, Bryant, Longfellow are all witnesses to the penetration and
clear intelligence which Lowell possessed. It must not be forgotten that
Lowell, himself only just past the period of youth, was writing of men
whose reputation is secure enough now, but who were at that time not
wholly discriminated by the general public from a number of mediocrities
who crowded about them, and there is an even-handed justice in the poem
which not unfitly is put into the mouth of that court of last resort,
Phœbus Apollo himself.
The independence which goes along with the intuition is simply the
integrity of a nature which is not given to the concealment of its
judgments. As he laughingly said of himself later, he was very cock-sure
of himself at this time. In after years, when he was speaking in his
own voice from a more historic platform, he might choose his phrases
more deliberately, but none the less did he speak his mind out. There
was confidence in himself first and last, but the impetuous, almost
reckless utterance of his youth, when he saw things clearly as youth
does when it is conscious of breathing the air of freedom and bathing in
the light of truth, yielded only to the temper which maturity brings and
was more moderate and charitable in expression because it had the larger
vision. When one considers the eagerness with which Lowell vented
himself in the months of his close connection with the _Anti-Slavery
Standard_, one is not surprised that in a book which is at once a
defence of criticism and a swift survey of the whole field of American
letters as it lay under the eye of this knight-errant of freedom and
truth, Lowell should have displayed, with little reserve, the frankness
and impetuosity of his nature. It is only after a closer inspection that
one discovers also how sound and how generous is his judgment.
* * * * *
How much satire gains from moral earnestness and a righteous scorn is
easily seen in the book which followed close on the heels of “A Fable
for Critics,” and with its pungency weakened the impression which might
otherwise have been created by its companion in literature. We have
already seen that the first number of the “Biglow Papers” appeared in
the _Courier_ of Boston in June, 1846, and that Lowell reckoned on
producing a greater effect by withholding his name. He told Gay that he
might very likely continue to fire from this masked battery while he was
openly keeping up with others a fusillade in the _Standard_. In point of
fact the first five numbers were printed in the _Courier_, but when the
fifth was printed, Lowell was at the beginning of his real connection
with the _Standard_, and the remaining four were printed in that paper.
The series, thus begun in the _Courier_ in June, 1846, was closed in the
_Standard_ in September, 1848.[75] Although Lowell did not sign his name
to any of the numbers either in the _Courier_ or in the _Standard_, the
authorship was a very open secret indeed. Still, he had the pleasure
which sprang from the dramatic assumption, and he took good care not to
confuse the personalities in the little comedy, by thrusting his own
real figure on the stage. As he wrote forty years later: “I had great
fun out of it. I have often wished that I could have had a literary _nom
de plume_ and kept my own to myself. I shouldn’t have cared a doit what
happened to him.”
A dozen years later, on the eve of the war for the Union, Mr. Hughes,
who was introducing the book to the English public, wanted Lowell to
write an historical introduction. In declining to do this,[76] he gave
a brief and clear statement of his political position at the time of
writing the “Biglow Papers.” “I believed our war with Mexico (though we
had as just ground for it as a strong nation ever has against a weak
one) to be essentially a war of false pretences, and that it would
result in widening the boundaries and so prolonging the life of slavery.
Believing that it is the manifest destiny of the English race to occupy
this whole continent, and to display there that practical understanding
in matters of government and colonization which no other race has given
such proof of possessing since the Romans, I hated to see a noble hope
evaporated into a lying phrase to sweeten the foul breath of demagogues.
Leaving the sin of it to God, I believed and still believe that slavery
is the Achilles heel of our polity: that it is a temporary and false
supremacy of the white races, sure to destroy that supremacy at last,
because an enslaved people always prove themselves of more enduring
fibre than their enslavers, as not suffering from the social vices sure
to be engendered by oppression in the governing class. Against these and
many other things I thought all honest men should protest. I was born
and bred in the country, and the dialect was homely to me. I tried my
first ‘Biglow Paper’ in a newspaper and found that it had a great run.
So I wrote the others from time to time during the year which followed,
always very rapidly, and sometimes (as with ‘What Mr. Robinson thinks’)
at one sitting.”
The cleverness of the refrain in this last named poem started it on a
hilarious career, and it is perhaps only in one of Gilbert’s topical
songs that we can match the success of a collocation of words, where the
quaintness of turn keeps a barren phrase perennially amusing. It was
with an echo of it in his mind no doubt that when he had just done
reading the proofs of the entire volume, Lowell snapped his whip in like
fashion in a poem for the _Standard_, which he never reprinted, but
which is interesting from the diversity shown in the handling of a
single theme.
In the fall of 1848, Harrison Gray Otis, writing in advocacy of the
election of Zachary Taylor, referred to an incident in 1831, when, as
Mayor of Boston, he answered an application from the Governors of
Virginia and Georgia for information respecting the persons responsible
for _The Liberator_. “Some time afterward,” he says, “it was reported to
me by the city officers that they had ferreted out the paper and its
editor: that his office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary
a negro boy, and his supporters a very few insignificant persons of all
colors.” Lowell saw the letter in one of the newspapers of the day,
clipped out this sentence, pasted it on a sheet of paper, and wrote
below it, with the title “the day of small things,” the notable lines
which in his collected poems bear the heading “To W. L. Garrison.” The
poem was published in the _Standard_, 19 October, 1848, but the incident
evidently made a strong impression on him, especially when he considered
what had taken place in seventeen years; for immediately afterward he
wrote again, and in the number for 26 October, appeared
THE EX-MAYOR’S CRUMB OF CONSOLATION.
A PATHETIC BALLAD.[77]
“Two Governors once a letter writ
To the Mayor of a distant city,
And told him a paper was published in it,
That was telling the truth, and ’t was therefore fit
That the same should be crushed as dead as a nit
By an Aldermanic Committee:
‘Don’t say so?’ says Otis,
‘I’ll enquire if so ’t is:
Dreadful! telling the truth? What a pity!
“‘It can’t be the Atlas, that’s perfectly clear,
And of course it isn’t the Advertiser,
’T is out of the Transcript’s appropriate sphere,
The Post is above suspicion: oh dear,
To think of such accidents happening here!
I hoped that our people were wiser.
While we’re going,’ says Otis,
‘_Faustissimis votis_,
How very annoying such flies are!’
“So, without more ado, he enquired all round
Among people of wealth and standing;
But wealth looked scornful, and standing frowned;
At last in a garret with smoke imbrowned,
The conspirators all together he found,--
One man with a colored boy banding;
‘’Pon my word,’ says Otis,
‘Decidedly low t is,’
As he groped for the stairs on the landing.
“So he wrote to the Governors back agen,
And told them t was something unworthy of mention;
That t was only a single man with a pen,
And a font of type in a sort of den,
A person unknown to Aldermen,
And, of course, beneath attention;
‘And therefore,’ wrote Otis,
_Annuentibus totis_,
‘There’s no reason for apprehension.’
“But one man with a pen is a terrible thing,
With a head and heart behind it,
And this one man’s words had an ominous ring,
That somehow in people’s ears would cling;--
‘But the mob’s uncorrupted: they’ve eggs to fling;
So t is hardly worth while to mind it;
As for freedom,’ says Otis,
‘I’ve given her notice
To leave town, in writing, and underlined it.’
“But the one man’s helper grew into a sect,
That laughed at all efforts to check or scare it,
Old parties before it were scattered and wrecked,
And respectable folks knew not what to expect;--
‘’Tis some consolation, at least to reflect
And will help us, I think, to bear it,
That all this,’ says Otis,
‘Though by no means _in votis_,
Began with one man and a boy in a garret.’”
Lowell himself, in the Introduction which he wrote to the Second Series,
bears witness to the popularity of the “Biglow Papers” while they were
still uncollected. “Very far,” he says, “from being a popular author
under my own name, so far indeed as to be almost unread, I found the
verses of my pseudonym copied everywhere: I saw them pinned up in
workshops: I heard them quoted and their authorship debated.” It was, it
may be said, no new thing to seek to arrest the public attention with
the vernacular applied to public affairs. Major Jack Downing and Sam
Slick had been notable exemplars, and they had many imitators; but party
politics, or even local characteristics, may give rise to the merely
idle jest of satire; the reader who laughed over the racy narrative of
the unlettered Ezekiel, and then took up Hosea’s poem and caught the
gust of Yankee wrath and humor blown fresh in his face, knew that he was
in with the appearance of something new in American literature.
After the first heat, Lowell began to distrust his mode a little. “As
for Hosea,” he writes to Briggs, “I am sorry that I began by making him
such a detestable speller. There is no fun in bad spelling of itself,
but only where the misspelling suggests something else which is droll
_per se_. You see I am getting him out of it gradually. I mean to
altogether. Parson Wilbur is about to propose a subscription for fitting
him for college, and has already commenced his education.”[78] He
dropped this intention, however, and the later numbers of the series
show no marked departure from the general scheme of Yankee spelling.
There is no doubt, though, that when it came to a revision of the papers
for final book publication, Lowell did make an attempt to introduce some
sort of consistency or effectiveness in the form. He groaned over the
labor involved, and confessed that he made a great many alterations in
spelling even after the pages had been stereotyped. “It is the hardest
book to print,” he wrote Mr. Gay, “that ever I had anything to do with,
and, what with corrections and Mr. Wilbur’s annotations, keeps me more
employed than I care to be.”
The labor was partly of his own making, but after all was consequent
chiefly upon the sense of art which led the author to do much more than
simply collect and reprint what he had written _currente calamo_ in the
_Courier_ and _Standard_. The great popularity attained by the
successive numbers showed him that he had hit the mark, but also the
conception of the whole grew in his mind, and he seized the opportunity
which reprinting afforded, to shape his satire and give it a body, by
filling out the characters who constituted his _dramatis personæ_. “When
I came to collect [the papers] and publish them in a volume,” he wrote
in 1859 to Mr. Hughes, in the letter already quoted, I conceived my
parson-editor with his pedantry and verbosity, his amiable vanity and
superiority to the verses he was editing, as a fitting artistic
background and foil. It gave me the chance, too, of glancing obliquely
at many things which were beyond the horizon of my other characters. I
was told afterwards that my Parson Wilbur was only Jedediah Cleishbotham
over again, and I dare say it may be so; but I drew him from the life as
well as I could, and for the authentic reasons I have mentioned.”
There was a slight undercurrent of reference to his own father in this
characterization. “My father,” he wrote Hughes, “was as proud of his
pedigree as a Talbot or Stanley could be, and Parson Wilbur’s
genealogical mania was a private joke between us.”[79]
So thoroughly did he think himself into the artistic conception of the
book that he even proposed at one time to put Jaalam on the title-page
as place of publication, and to have it “printed on brownish paper with
those little head and tail pieces which used to adorn our earlier
publications--such as hives, scrolls, urns, and the like.” This external
fitness he did not secure, but he elaborated a system of notes,
glossary, and index, letting the fun lurk in every part, and completed
the effect by the notices of an independent press, which must have made
the actual writers of book notices hesitate a little before they dropped
into their customary machine-made manner when treating of this special
work. The burlesque of Carlyle in one of these is especially clever. In
supplying all this apparatus he drew a little on his prose papers in
the _Standard_, but it is doubtful if most readers get beyond the verse,
or do more than glance at the drollery which lies _perdu_ in the prose
equipment, so much swifter is the flight of the arrows of satire when
they are barbed with rhyme.
The success of the book was immediate. The first edition of 1500 was
gone in a week, and the author could say with satisfaction that “the
book was actually out of print before a second edition could be struck
off from the plates.” In later years the book was apt to fill him with a
kind of amused astonishment. The unstinted praise which Hughes gave to
the “Biglow Papers,” quotations from which were always on his tongue’s
end, drew from Lowell the expression: “I was astonished to find what a
heap of wisdom was accumulated in those admirable volumes.” It is not
strange that, in looking back from the tranquil temper of older years,
Lowell should be struck with the high spirits, the tension of feeling,
and the abandon of utterance which characterize this work; but when he
was in the thick of the fight a second time he was more impressed by the
moral earnestness which underlay all this free lancing. “The success of
my experiment,” he wrote, in the Introduction to the Second Series,
“soon began not only to astonish me, but to make me feel the
responsibility of knowing that I held in my hand a weapon instead of the
mere fencing stick I had supposed.... If I put on the cap and bells, and
made myself one of the court fools of King Demos, it was less to make
his Majesty laugh than to win a passage to his royal ears for certain
serious things which I had deeply at heart.”
The force which Lowell displayed in this satire made his book at once a
powerful ally of a sentiment which heretofore had been crassly
ridiculed; it turned the tables and put Anti-slavery, which had been
fighting sturdily on foot with pikes, into the saddle, and gave it a
flashing sabre. For Lowell himself it won an accolade from King Demos.
He rose up a knight, and thenceforth possessed a freedom which was a
freedom of nature, not a simple badge of service in a single cause. His
patriotism and moral fervor found other vents in later life, and he
never sheathed the sword which he had drawn from the scabbard; but it is
significant of the stability of his genius that he was not misled into a
limitation of his powers by the sudden distinction which came to him.
For, though we naturally think first of the political significance of
the “Biglow Papers,” the book, in its fullest meaning, is an expression
of Lowell’s personality, and has in it the essence of New England. The
character of the race from which its author sprang is preserved in its
vernacular and in the characters of the _dramatis personæ_. Not
unwittingly, but in the full consciousness of his own inheritance,
Lowell became the spokesman of a racy people, whose moral force had a
certain acrid quality, and, when thrown to the winds, as in the person
of Birdofredom Sawin, was replaced by an insolent shrewdness. Nor is the
exemplification of New England less complete for that infusion of homely
sentiment and genuine poetic sensibility which underlie and penetrate
the sturdy moral force.
The “Biglow Papers” threw “A Fable for Critics” into the shade. It was
nearly through the press when the “Fable” was published, and Briggs, who
kept a close watch of his friend’s production, wrote: “I am pretty
confident that the ‘Fable’ will suit the market for which it is
intended, unless it should be killed by Hosea, who will help to divert
public attention from his own kind.” It is to be suspected that Lowell
himself felt the strong contrast which lay in the two works when he was
driving them through the press side by side, and rather lost interest in
the ebullition of an hour, as he threw himself with an almost exhausted
energy into a book which carried at its heart a flame of passionate
scorn. The only passage in “A Fable for Critics” which he dwelt upon
with genuine delight was his apostrophe to Massachusetts, and that is
almost out of key with the rest of the poem. But a third book was
shortly to follow and to divide with the other two the popularity which
fell to Lowell as a writer.
* * * * *
It does not appear just when “The Vision of Sir Launfal” was written,
but in a letter to Briggs, dated 1 February, 1848, Lowell speaks of it
as “a sort of story, and more likely to be popular than what I write
generally. Maria thinks very highly of it. I shall probably publish it
by itself next summer.” But it was not till the “Biglow Papers” were off
his hands that Lowell took steps to print the book, which was published
17 December, 1848. It was not long after that he went to Watertown for
the wedding of Mrs. Lowell’s sister with Dr. Estes Howe, and the next
day he wrote to Briggs: “I walked to Watertown over the snow with the
new moon before me and a sky exactly like that in Page’s evening
landscape. Orion was rising behind me, and as I stood on the hill just
before you enter the village, the stillness of the fields around me was
delicious, broken only by the tinkle of a little brook which runs too
swiftly for Frost to catch it. My picture of the brook in ‘Sir Launfal’
was drawn from it. But why do I send you this description--like the
bones of a chicken I had picked? Simply because I was so happy as I
stood there, and felt so sure of doing something that would justify my
friends. But why do I not say that I _have_ done something? I believe I
have done better than the world knows yet, but the past seems so little
compared with the future.” And then referring to a recent notice of him
which intimated that he was well to do, he says: “I wish I might be for
a day or two. I should like such an income as Billy Lee desired, who,
when some one asked his idea of a competence, replied, ‘A million a
minute, and your expenses paid!’ But I am richer than he thinks for. I
am the first poet who has endeavored to express the American Idea, and I
shall be popular by and by. Only I suppose I must be dead first. But I
do not want anything more than I have.”
It is not very likely that Lowell was thinking specifically of “Sir
Launfal” when he wrote this. It is more likely that he would have named
“Prometheus,” “Columbus,” or “Freedom” if he had been asked to name
names; and yet it is not straining language too far to say that when he
took up an Arthurian story he had a different attitude toward the whole
cycle of legends from that of Tennyson who, a half dozen years before,
had begun to revive the legends for the pleasure of English-reading
people. The exuberance of the poet as he carols of June in the prelude
to Part First is an expression of the joyous spring which was in the
veins of the young American, glad in the sense of freedom and hope. As
Tennyson threw into his retelling of Arthurian romance a moral sense, so
Lowell, also a moralist in his poetic apprehension, made a parable of
his tale, and, in the broadest interpretation of democracy, sang of the
levelling of all ranks in a common divine humanity. There is a
subterranean passage connecting the “Biglow Papers” with “Sir Launfal”;
it is the holy zeal which attacks slavery issuing in this fable of a
beautiful charity, Christ in the guise of a beggar.
The invention is a very simple one, and appears to have been suggested
by Tennyson’s “Sir Galahad,” but the verses in the poem which linger
longest in the mind are not those connected with the fable, but rather
the full-throated burst of song in praise of June. Indeed, one might
seriously maintain from Lowell’s verse that there was an especial
affinity which he held with this month. Witness the joyous rush of
pleasure with which “Under the Willows”[80] is begun, and the
light-heartedness with which Hosea Biglow leaves the half-catalogue
manner rehearsing the movement of Spring in “Sunthin’ in the Pastoral
Line,” and leaps almost vociferously into the warm, generous air of
June, when “all comes crowdin’ in.” The poem entitled “Al Fresco” is but
a variation on the same theme; when he first published it, save the
opening stanza, in the _Anti-Slavery Standard_, he gave it the title of
“A Day in June.” And when, compelled to lie indoors, he found a
compensation in Calderon singing to him like a nightingale, it was still
a wistful look he cast on his catbird that joined with the oriole and
the cuckoo to call him out of doors, and he sighed to think that he
could not like them be a pipe for June to play on. “The Nightingale in
the Study” was written when he sought in illness for something that
would seclude him from himself; but the three poems of 1848 were the
outcome of a nature so tingling with vitality that expression was its
necessity, and spontaneity the law of its being. Literature, freedom,
and nature in turn appealed to the young enthusiast; the visions he saw
stirred him, in the quiet of Elmwood, to eager, impetuous delivery; and
his natural voice was a singing one.