THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
1857-1861
Lowell had not been a year in his professor’s chair when he was invited
to take another position more closely identified with literature and
having its own cares and drudgery. Under the present conditions of
magazine editorship and of college professorship as well, the union of
the two offices would be quite out of the question.[113] But the
condition in 1857 was different, and to install a professor in Harvard
College as editor of a new magazine was both natural and in a measure
traditional. I have already called attention to the effort made in 1853
to establish a literary magazine, and to Lowell’s interest in the
venture. The person most concerned in that effort did not lose sight of
his project, and now pushed the matter through to a fortunate
conclusion.
Mr. Francis Henry Underwood was in 1857 the literary adviser and reader
for the firm of Phillips & Sampson in Boston, and he was an ardent
admirer of Lowell. He was a strong advocate of anti-slavery doctrines,
and in his first proposals for a magazine in 1853 was working in
conjunction with the firm of John P. Jewett & Co., that had just sprung
into notice as publishers of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The firm with which he
was now connected was active chiefly in the publication of cheap
editions of standard works in literature. It had a large Southern
constituency, and when “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was offered to it in the form
of a scrap-book of clippings from _The National Era_, commercial
prudence dictated a polite refusal. When, however, Mrs. Stowe’s name had
become one of great value, it was easy for Phillips, Sampson & Co. to
publish, as they did, her “Sunny Memories” in 1854 and “Dred” in 1856.
Mr. Moses Dresser Phillips had been brought up in the book trade and
knew it first as a bookseller. He was a man who had large business
energy and laid his plans for wide connections and not merely a local
trade. Mr. Charles Sampson, with whom he had formed his partnership, had
died about five years before, and his only partner at this time was Mr.
William Lee, well known for many years as the senior partner in the
publishing house of Lee & Shepard. He was nearer Mr. Underwood’s age and
it was chiefly with him that Mr. Underwood talked over his cherished
plan. It was through him, indeed, that Mr. Underwood expected to gain
over Mr. Phillips, who had the practical man’s distrust of new
enterprises suggested by authors, and a temperament which was calculated
to chill enthusiasm. Mr. Underwood had already won consent to engage in
the work from Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes, and others, and he
represented strongly to Mr. Lee the possibilities of a magazine which
should have at once a staff of writers of a character so eminent. I
suspect he kept in the background any purpose he might have of making
the magazine play a part in politics. Mr. Lee in turn at his daily lunch
with Mr. Phillips kept that gentleman in mind of the project, though he
was himself neither an advocate nor an opponent. He simply used Mr.
Underwood’s arguments, the most effective of which may have been the
prospect held up before Mr. Phillips of the association he should thus
form with a distinguished group.
Mr. Phillips having been won over, the plans for the new magazine were
rapidly pushed forward. In all this Mr. Underwood was the active
manager, but Mr. Phillips as the head of the business now took the
leading place. At an early date, Tuesday, 5 May, 1857, he called
together the men on whom he most relied to give the enterprise
distinction, and gave them a dinner at the Parker House. Fortunately an
account of this meeting is in his own words in a letter to a niece:--
“I must tell you about a little dinner party I gave about two weeks ago.
It would be proper, perhaps, to state that the origin of it was a desire
to confer with my literary friends on a somewhat extensive literary
project, the particulars of which I shall reserve until you come. But to
the party: my invitations included only R. W. Emerson,[114] H. W.
Longfellow, J. R. Lowell, Mr. Motley (the ‘Dutch Republic’ man), O. W.
Holmes, Mr. Cabot,[115] and Mr. Underwood, our literary man. Imagine
your uncle as the head of such a table, with such guests. The above
named were the only ones invited, and they were all present. We sat down
at three P.M., and rose at eight. The time occupied was longer by about
four hours and thirty minutes than I am in the habit of consuming in
that kind of occupation, but it was the richest time intellectually by
all odds that I have ever had. Leaving myself and ‘literary man’ out of
the group, I think you will agree with me that it would be difficult to
duplicate that number of such conceded scholarship in the whole country
beside.
“Mr. Emerson took the first post of honor at my right, and Mr.
Longfellow the second at my left. The exact arrangement of the table was
as follows:--
Mr. Underwood
Cabot Lowell
Motley Holmes
Longfellow Emerson
Phillips
“They seemed so well pleased that they adjourned, and invited me _to
meet them_ again to-morrow (the 20th), when I shall again meet the same
persons, with one other (Whipple, the essayist) added to that brilliant
constellation of philosophical, poetic, and historical talent. Each one
is known alike on both sides of the Atlantic, and is read beyond the
limits of the English language. Though all this is known to you, you
will pardon me for intruding it upon you. But still I have the vanity to
believe that you will think them the most natural thoughts in the world
to me. Though I say it that should not, it was the proudest day of my
life.”[116]
There was another writer not at the dinner whose coöperation it was
important to secure. Mrs. Stowe returned in June to America from
England, whither she had gone to secure copyright for “Dred,” and Mr.
Phillips at once laid his plan before her. She approved it most heartily
and promised to give it her cordial support. It is not impossible that
she made a definite promise of a serial novel to begin with the first
number, but the sudden death a month later of her son Henry brought such
a mental strain upon her that it was nearly a year before she could
undertake any continued writing. The first number of the _Atlantic
Monthly_ contained a brief allegory by her, “The Minister’s Mourning
Veil,” and she contributed later an essay, but “The Minister’s Wooing”
was not begun in the magazine till December, 1858.
As a result of these preliminary plans, Mr. Underwood was dispatched in
June to England to secure the aid of English authors, and Mr. Lowell was
asked to take the position of editor. Lowell had already taken an active
part in creating an interest in the venture among writers. Underwood had
turned to him as his most important ally, and Longfellow records in his
diary, 29 April, 1857: “Lowell was here last evening to interest me in a
new Magazine to be started in Boston by Phillips and Sampson. I told him
I would write for it if I wrote for any Magazine.” Dr. Holmes christened
the magazine, and Lowell, from the first, reckoned upon him for
contributions. In 1885, when Dr. Holmes was resuming his regular prose
contributions after a long intermission, he wrote in the introductory
paper:[117] “He (Mr. Lowell) thought there might be something in my old
portfolio which would be not unacceptable in the new magazine. I ...
wondered somewhat when Mr. Lowell urged me with such earnestness to
become a contributor, and so, yielding to a pressure which I could not
understand, and yet found myself unable to resist, I promised to take a
part in the new venture, as an occasional writer in the columns of the
magazine.” Lowell, reading this number of the _Atlantic_ in London,
wrote to Dr. Holmes: “The first number of your New Portfolio whets my
appetite. Let me make one historical correction. When I accepted the
editorship of the _Atlantic_, I made it a condition precedent that you
were the first contributor to be engaged. Said I not well?”[118]
Emerson apparently had asked if the contributions were to be signed,
for Lowell wrote him, 14 September, 1857: “All the articles will be
anonymous, but you will be quite helpless, for your name is written in
all kinds of self-betraying anagrams over yours. But as far as we are
concerned there shall be as strict honor as the XIXth century allows of.
Your wishes shall govern the position of the article [‘Illusions,’ in
the first number], though I should have preferred to give it the
precedence. I am afraid that where that is will be the head of the
table, whether or no.”
In the same first number appeared four of Emerson’s poems, printed in a
group: “The Romany Girl,” “The Chartist’s Complaint,” “Days,” and
“Brahma.” Emerson seems to have raised some question about this, for in
the same letter Lowell writes: “About the poems I ought to say that when
I spoke of printing all four I was perhaps greedy, and Mr. Underwood
says we can’t afford it, reckoning each as a separate poem--which means
giving $50 apiece for them. Forgive me for coming down into the kitchen
thus, but as I got the magazine into the scrape I must get it out. My
notion was that all the poems would be published at once in a volume,
and that therefore it would be alike to you. I ought to have thought
that you sent them for selection,--and I will never be so rapacious
again till I have another so good chance. If I am to have only one, give
me ‘Days.’ That is as limpid and complete as a Greek epigram. I quarrel,
though, with one word ‘hypocritic,’ which I doubt does not give the very
shade of meaning you intended. I think you did wish to imply
_intentional_ taking-in? I will take the liberty to draw your notice to
one or two things in the proofs (of the poems), leaving them to your own
judgment entirely.... It is not often that a magazine carries such
freight as your ‘Illusions.’... How about Mr. Thoreau?”
It was not “Days” so much as “Brahma” that seized upon the imagination.
Mr. Trowbridge, in his article on “The Author of Quabbin,” says it was
“more talked about and puzzled over and parodied than any other poem of
sixteen lines published within my recollection. ‘What does it mean?’ was
the question readers everywhere asked; and if one had the reputation of
seeing a little way into the Concord philosophy, he was liable at any
time to be stopped on the street by some perplexed inquirer, who would
draw him into the nearest doorway, produce a crumpled newspaper clipping
from the recesses of a waistcoat pocket, and, with knitted brows,
exclaim, ‘Here! you think you understand Emerson; now tell me what all
this is about,--_If the red slayer think he slays_,’ and so forth.”
The magazine appeared about the first of November, and on the 19th
Lowell wrote to Emerson: “You have seen, no doubt, how the Philistines
have been parodying your ‘Brahma,’ and showing how they still believe in
their special god Baal, and are unable to arrive at a conception of an
omnipresent Deity. I have not yet met with a single clever one or I
would have sent it to you for your amusement. Meanwhile, they are
advertising the _Atlantic_ in the very best way, and Mr. Underwood tells
me that the orders for the second number are doubling on those for the
first. I think you will find the second an improvement.... Your poem
[“Two Rivers”] is to go into No. 3, simply as a matter of housewifery,
because we had already three articles at $50. I think I told you which I
chose--‘Musketaquit.’ The ‘Solitude and Society’ [published in No. 2]
has only one fault, that it is not longer, but had it been only a page,
there would have been enough in it. Did you use the word _daysman_[119]
deliberately? It has a technical meaning, and I suppose you used it in
that sense. Mr. Nichols (the vermilion pencil) was outraged, and
appealed to me. I answered that you had a right to use any word you
liked till we found some one who wrote better English to correct you. Or
did you mean the word to be merely the English of _journeyman_?
“I hope you will be able to give us something more for No. 3 before you
go off to lecture. The number promises well thus far, but I wish to make
it a decided advance. You have no notion how hard bestead we are. Out of
297 manuscripts only at most six accepted. I begin to believe in the
total depravity of contributions.
“Let me thank you in especial for one line in ‘Brahma,’ which abides
with me as an intimate--
‘When me they fly, I am the wings.’
You have crammed meaning there with an hydraulic press. Will not Thoreau
give us something from Moosehead?”
Fourteen years earlier Lowell had welcomed Whittier as a contributor to
the _Pioneer_, and now he renewed the old relation. He printed
“Tritemius” in the first number and “Skipper Ireson’s Ride” in the
second. Indeed, the _Atlantic_ came into existence most fortunately for
Whittier, whose fortunes it helped distinctly, as it gave him a medium
for the publication of his purely literary poems, and thus not only
filled his pocket but helped materially to place him before the public
in another guise than that of an ardent reformer. Lowell’s letter upon
receipt of “Skipper Ireson’s Ride” is interesting both for its
cordiality and for the contrast in tone to his manner of addressing
Emerson. It may not unfairly be said that Emerson was the only one of
his contemporaries whom Lowell addressed as if he were profoundly
conscious of his relation to him as a pupil to his master. Lowell’s
letter to Whittier is dated 4 November, 1857.[120]
“I thank you heartily for the ballad, which will go into the next
number. I like it all the better for its provincialism,--in all fine
pears, you know, we can taste the old _puckers_. I know the story well.
I am familiar with Marblehead and its dialect, and as the burthen is
intentionally provincial I have taken the liberty to print it in such a
way as shall give the peculiar accent, thus:--
‘Cap’n Ireson for his horrd horrt
Was torred and feathered and corried in a corrt.’
That’s the way I’ve always ‘horrd it,’--only it began ‘Old Flud Ireson.’
What a good name Ireson (son of wrath) is for the hero of such a
history!
“You see that ‘Tritemius’ is going the rounds! I meant to have sent you
the proofs, and to have asked you to make a change in it where these
four rhymes come together (assonances I mean),--‘door,’ ‘poor,’ ‘store,’
‘more.’ It annoyed me, but I do not find that any one else has been
troubled by it, and everybody likes the poem. I am glad that the
Philistines have chosen some verses of mine[121] for their target, not
being able to comprehend the bearing of then. I mean I am glad that they
did it rather than pick out those of any one else for their scapegoat. I
shall not let you rest till I have got a New England pastoral out of
you. This last is cater-cousin to it, at least, being a piscatorial.
“Will you be good enough to let me know how much Mr. Underwood shall
send you? He will remit at once.
“The sale of Maga has been very good considering the times, and I think
you will find the second number better than the first. If you do not
wish the burthen so spelt, will you write me?”
The year 1857 was one of great financial distress, and the magazine felt
something of this influence even before it was published, for it was
intended to bring it out earlier than its first number actually
appeared. It was in May that the preliminary arrangements were made and
Lowell secured as editor. As late, however, as the end of that month, he
was writing to a foreign correspondent that the editorship was a dead
secret. But as we have seen he had interested himself in the venture
from the outset. From time to time after his attempt with the _Pioneer_
he had revolved in his mind plans for magazines. It is safe to say that
few prominent writers in America, Longfellow and Cooper being the chief
exceptions, failed to dream of launching some vessel of this sort that
should be freighted with the best of literature, and the initiative in
almost all the cases of important magazines has been taken by the author
rather than by the publisher. We have perhaps come to the close of the
period when a new monthly magazine seems essential for the carrying of
American thought and letters, and enterprise of this sort is more likely
to seek an outlet in weekly journalism; but the men of letters who were
at the front in the middle of the century not only had strong
intellectual sympathy with the brilliant _Blackwood_ of that
day,--Lowell in his correspondence repeatedly uses the familiar form
_Maga_ when referring to the _Atlantic_,--and had been brought up on
_Tait_, _The London Journal_, _Fraser_, and other vehicles of
contemporaneous English and Scottish letters, but they demanded some
direct, open means of reaching readers, for they had a great deal to
say, which was ill-adapted to daily journalism and for which they could
not wait till it should cool for book publication.
The conditions were favorable also from the point of view of the
publisher, and Phillips & Sampson were in a good position to know this.
They were aware that the leading writers were in their neighborhood.
Washington Irving was an old man, and Mr. Bryant by his associations was
rather of New England than of New York. Excepting these two the men of
national distinction, Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Prescott, Motley,
Lowell, were New Englanders, and men known by these to have large gifts,
Holmes, Higginson, Thoreau, Cabot, Norton, who were chiefly relied on to
make the early numbers, were their neighbors and friends, while the
commanding reputation of Mrs. Stowe could at once be counted on to give
éclat to any magazine with which she was connected. Besides, the
business of this house, which was largely that of a jobbing house, so
called, that is, a house which sold miscellaneous books from whatever
publishers all over the country, was of such a nature as to create a
confidence in the existence of a widespread audience of intelligent
readers.
Thus the publishers were prepared to undertake the venture upon a
somewhat liberal scale for those days. They chose the best printer near
by, Mr. Houghton, who had already given distinction to the name
“Riverside,” and they proposed to make a handsome magazine, not wholly
unlike in its appearance the Edinburgh _Blackwood_. They paid their
editor a salary of $2500, and they expected to pay contributors on a
scale not to be sure much in advance of what the best writers could
secure in other periodicals in Philadelphia and New York, but more
generous as regards the average contributor. I think the mean rate of
prose was six dollars a page, though it may occasionally in the case of
a tyro have dropped to five dollars, and for poems they paid usually
fifty dollars apiece. In a letter to a contributor who took exception to
the price paid him, Lowell wrote, when the magazine had been running
three or four months, “You must be content. Six dollars a page is more
than can be got elsewhere, and we only pay ten to folks whose _names_
are worth the other four dollars. _Capite?_ What we may be able to do
hereafter, I know not. _I_ shall always be for liberal pay.”
It might seem as though the distinction thus referred to would hardly
exist when all the articles were unsigned, but the authorship for the
most part was an open secret. In those days the _North American Review_,
as well as other like periodicals, used to print a little slip with the
authorship of the separate articles set against the successive numbers
of the articles, and this slip, though not inserted in all the copies
sold or sent to subscribers, was at the service of newspapers and the
inner circle of contributors and near friends. In like manner the
authorship of the principal articles and poems in the _Atlantic_ leaked
out, and for some, like Emerson’s poems and Holmes’s “Autocrat,” there
could be no concealment.
The authors themselves sometimes were glad of the privacy, as they
thought it secured them more independence and possibility of frankness.
Lowell thus wrote in September, 1859, to one of his contributors, who
complained of what he thought want of care: “I am very sorry indeed for
the mischance, but am quite sure it was no fault of mine. Where the
‘copy’ passes through four or five hands, all of whose owners know the
handwriting, the chances of leakage are great. I confess that in the
worry of the last week or two, I did not remember to give any new
caution just before the publication of the October number. I am the more
sorry if it is to deprive us of your contributions. For myself, I have
always been opposed to the publication of the authors’ names at all. I
do as well as I can with so many things to think of at once.” The
practice of withholding names publicly continued till 1862, when the
index at the end of the volume disclosed the authorship of the articles
in the body of the magazine, and in 1870, the practice was begun of
signing contributions. The anonymous character of the early volumes
served, however, to bury the authorship in some cases past resurrection,
as I found when I undertook to prepare a General Index in 1877, and
again in 1889.
The ideal which Lowell formed for the magazine may best be inferred from
the character of the numbers issued under his control, but in a few
passages in his letters to contributors and friends he gives some
glimpses of what was going on in his mind as he faced the very practical
questions which arose in the conduct of the magazine. When I became
editor of the _Atlantic_, in the spring of 1890, he contrasted my
position with his own, and remarked on the very much larger number of
writers on whom I could call for contributions, and the higher average
of training in literary work. “Your task,” he wrote me, “will be in one
respect at least easier than mine was thirty odd years ago, for there
are now twenty people who can write English where there was one then.
Indeed, there are so many, and they do it so well, that it looks as if
literature as a profession or guild were near its end, and as if every
man (and woman) would do his or her own on the principle of Every man
his own washerwoman.” I thought and said, however, that it was not
general average but distinction which gave a stamp to the magazine, and
that in that respect he certainly had the advantage. In one of his
letters to Mr. Richard Grant White, who feared a Shakespeare article he
had furnished might be the one paper too much, he wrote: “I don’t care
whether the public are tired of the Divine Villiams or not--a _part_ of
the magazine, as long as I have anything to do with it, shall be
expressly _not_ for the Mob (of well-dressed gentlemen who read with
ease).”
At the outset, before any number had been published, he wrote to a
friend from whom be solicited a contribution: “The magazine is going to
be free without being fanatical, and we hope to unite in it all
available talent of all shades of opinion. The magazine is to have
opinions of its own, and not be afraid to speak them, but I think we
shall be scholarly and gentlemanlike.” “This reading endless
manuscripts,” he wrote to the same friend, when he was in full tide of
preparation for the first number, “is hard work, and takes a great deal
of time, but I am resolved that nothing shall go in which I have not
first read. I wish to have nothing go in that will merely _do_,[122] but
I fear I can’t keep so high a standard. It is astonishing how much there
is that keeps just short of the line of good and drops into the limbo of
indifferent.”
“There is a constant pressure on me,” he writes again, “to ‘popularize’
the magazine, which I resist without clamor.” It is easy to understand
this attitude. Lowell cared greatly for the success of the _Atlantic_,
and he was governed in his conduct of it by prudential considerations.
In the letter just quoted he had occasion to refer to a controversy
which was then hot. “I am urged,” he says, “to take ground in the Albany
controversy, but do not feel that there is any _ought_ in the matter,
and am sure the Trustees will beat in the end. I think it would be
unwise to let the magazine take a losing side unless clear justice
required it. Am I not right?” But though he was not indifferent to the
commercial prosperity of the _Atlantic_, and knew well that its
opportunity for serving letters was largely conditioned on its
subscription list, he did not make the fatal mistake of subordinating
his own judgment to a supposititious judgment of the mysterious public
which buys and reads magazines. It was his business to keep his own
judgment free from the partisan bias of idiosyncrasy, but he perceived
well the more subtle danger to which he was exposed of abdicating his
authority while keeping his title in the supposed interest of the
magazine. It was just because he was Lowell, a man whom the public was
ready to follow in literary judgments, that he was in this place, and it
was in the application of a well-seasoned taste that he demonstrated his
fitness for the position. He cared greatly to be the instrument of
organizing a body of first-rate literature, and the tone which he gave
the _Atlantic_ during the few months of his editorship became a
tradition which powerfully affected its character after he retired from
it. He put his own stamp on it emphatically.
The public, meanwhile, began at once to exercise that censorship which
is a somewhat whimsical but very substantial witness to the value of an
enterprise which is only technically private. The Lowell Institute, for
example, is on a foundation so exclusively personal that there is not
even a nominal board of trustees to be consulted in its management: the
courses of lectures which it offers are absolutely free; yet ever since
its establishment it has been subjected to criticism, good or ill
natured, which would seem to imply some indefeasible right on the part
of the public that criticises. Really, the criticism is simply an
ingenuous expression of the profound interest which the public takes in
a noble trust. Somewhat in the same way when the _Atlantic_ was
established, the public refused to regard it as offering wares which
people might buy or not as they liked. It recognized it as a literary
organon, as a power for good or ill; it was immensely interested in it,
and showed its interest by attacking it severely on occasions.
Such an occasion, especially, was the appearance of Dr. Holmes’s
“Professor at the Breakfast-Table,” in which this writer, who had leaped
into popularity through the “Autocrat,” delivered himself of opinions
and judgments which were regarded by a good many as dangerous and
subversive, all the more dangerous by reason of their wit and
entertaining qualities. If one could believe many of the newspapers, Dr.
Holmes was a sort of reincarnation of Voltaire, who stood for the most
audacious enemy of Christianity in modern times.
Some intimation of what Lowell was to encounter as editor may be
gathered from a few words in a letter to T. W. Higginson, written at the
end of his first year, when “The Autocrat” had already drawn the fire of
one class of critic.
“I only look upon my duty,” he says, “as a vicarious one for Phillips
and Sampson, that nothing may go in (before we are firm on our feet)
that helps the ‘religious’ press in their warfare on us. Presently we
shall be even with them, and have a _free_ magazine in its true sense. I
never allow any personal notion of mine to interfere, except in cases of
obvious obscurity, bad taste, or bad grammar.” And Mr. Norton
prints[123] a letter written shortly after to Dr. Holmes, which shows
clearly the cordial support which the editor gave his contributor.
In one respect Lowell held a somewhat different position from that
occupied by later editors. The _Atlantic_ was so little troubled by
competitors, and its company of contributors was so determined by a sort
of natural selection, that Lowell’s editorial function was mainly
discharged by the exercise of discrimination in the choice of articles,
and the distribution of material through successive numbers; he had
little to do in the way of foraging for matter. It must not be supposed,
however, that there was anything perfunctory in his editorship. He was
in love with literature, and his fine taste stood him in good stead, not
only in the rejection of the commonplace, but in the perception of
qualities which might redeem an otherwise undistinguished poem or paper.
He had, too, that enthusiasm in the discovery of excellence which made
him call his friends and neighbors together when he had found some pearl
of great price; an enthusiasm which he was very sure to share with the
author. He gave thus to the magazine that character of _distinction_
which conscientiousness alone on the part of the editor, or even
careful study of conditions, cannot give.
He was, to be sure, a trifle negligent of the business of writing to his
contributors. He left as much of the correspondence as he could to Mr.
Underwood, but in his somewhat capricious fashion he might make an
article an excuse for a long and friendly letter. To one of his
contributors who pursued him for his opinion upon some accepted
manuscripts, he wrote a little testily: “You have a right to frankness
and shall have it. I _did_ like the article on ---- better than the
other, and I should like the ---- one particularly. But what of that?
other folks may have liked the other better, for aught I know. The fault
of our tastes is in our stars, not in ourselves. My wife can’t endure
‘The Biglow Papers,’ and somehow or other her dislike of them is a great
refreshment to me and makes me like her all the better. But I think it
is rather hard on an editor to expect him to give his opinion about
everything he prints--I mean as to whether it is specially to his taste
or not. How long would my contributors put up with me if I made
Archbishops of Granada of them all? I tell you again, as I have told you
before, that I am always glad of an article from you, let it be what it
will, but (don’t you see?) I am gladdest when it is such a one as only
you can write. If I could only print one number made of altogether such,
I could sing my _nunc dimittis_ with a joyful heart.” A little of the
fret of his life in this particular appears in a whimsical tirade which
he sent to Mr. Norton on the eve of a flight to the Adirondacks in the
summer of 1859:--
“To-day is Sunday; at least the bells have been shouting it, but ‘the
Sabbath dawns no Sabbath-day for me.’ I have been reading proof and
picking out manuscripts all the morning. Do you ever get desperate? I
feel so now that I have got all my manuscript-household in order. They
appal me by their mass. I look first at one box, and then at another,
and--fill my pipe. ‘It is dreadful!’ as Clough’s heroine says in the
Bothie. And 128 pages which it would take one so long to fill with his
own stuff eats up that of other folks--no, I don’t mean that and would
not allow such a metaphor to a contributor--is satiated so soon with
that of other folks--that is, uses it up so slowly. Mille-dam! Have not
two articles of ---- been on hand now for a year? He seems to spin out
his brains as tenuously and uselessly as those creatures that streak the
air with gossamer--no chance of catching even a stray fly of thought.
Nay, his object is, I fancy, precisely what that of the aforesaid
creatures may be--merely to swing himself over a gap. He is my ink--my
pen-and-ink-ubus. I could scalp him the rather as he wears a wig and is
deaf, and so would not be likely to hear of it. Then there is ---- who
can’t express himself in less than sixteen pages on any imaginable
topic. It is a terrible thing this writing for the press, by which a
man’s pen learns gradually to go by itself as those Chinese servants are
said to fan and sleep at the same time. ‘No, no, by heaven I am not
ma-a-d!’ but I expect to be. I believe I have so far settled matters
that everybody will think me a monster. But never mind, I get out of
ear-shot to-morrow.”
How fully and carefully he could and would write under special urgency
may be seen by the long letter which he addressed to Mrs. Stowe when
“The Minister’s Wooing” had been running three or four months in the
_Atlantic_. The letter was published in C. E. Stowe’s life of his
mother, and is quoted also in Mrs. Fields’s “Life and Letters of Harriet
Beecher Stowe.”
The criticism for which this letter was an excuse illustrates one very
important element in Lowell’s editorial mind. However little he might
exert himself to go afield for articles in the body of the magazine, he
did not trust to luck for the critical notices. In that department he
took great pains to secure competent workmen. To Lowell and his
contemporaries this matter of book reviews was one of great consequence.
In the evolution of literary periodical literature the article of the
old _Quarterly_ type, which was part a summary of a book, part a further
contribution to the subject, and part a judgment on the author, had shed
the first constituent, had lost much of the second, but preserved the
third in a more condensed and, to a certain degree, in a more impersonal
spirit. But criticism in its finest form was highly valued, and the form
of the book review was accepted as recognized and permanent. When the
_Atlantic_, therefore, was set up emphasis was laid on this serious
side of literary study, and the causerie, the light persiflage which
serves as a relief in most magazines of a literary type--the _Atlantic_
itself has now its Contributors’ Club--was disregarded. To be sure, in
the first number, Lowell printed what seemed to promise a gay side to
the magazine, a leaf entitled “The Round Table,” the purpose of which,
in this instance, was to introduce an occasional poem by Dr. Holmes, but
I suspect he was either a little alarmed at the prospect of setting his
table monthly with a dessert, or was satisfied that the “Autocrat” would
serve the same end. At any rate, no second number of “The Round Table”
appeared. But each month the last few pages of each number were given
up, after the well-accepted tradition, to notices of new books with
occasional surveys of current music and pictures.
Lowell’s estimate of the value of literary criticism is expressed in a
letter to Mr. Richard Grant White, 10 June, 1858, apropos of a purpose
Mr. White then had of starting a weekly literary journal in New York.
“There is no one opprobrium of American scholarship and letters so
great,” he says, “as the general laxity and debasement of criticism.
With few exceptions our criticisms are venial (whether the pay be money
or friendship) or partisan. An invitation to dinner may make a Milton
out of the sorriest Flecknoe, and a difference in politics turn a
creditable poet into a dunce.” Lowell relied on White for a certain
amount of criticism and wrote him, 8 March, 1859, “There is nothing I
so especially desire as to have ‘experts’ make the _Atlantic_ their
pulpit. As long as I continue editor, I wish you to understand that your
contributions will always be welcome, on no ground of personal
friendship, but because I know they will be of value. I particularly
wish to have the department of ‘Lit. Notices’ made more full. I find so
few people whom I can trust to write a review! Personal motives of one
kind or other are always sure to peep out. I think I have gained one
good from the fearful bore of reading manuscripts; it is gradually
making me as impartial as a chemical test--as insensible, too, perhaps?
That is the only fear.”
As a result partly of his difficulty in securing satisfactory criticism
and partly of his own aptitude for work of this kind, Lowell wrote more
than forty reviews in the department during his editorship, besides
several articles in the body of the magazine which were really reviews,
like his careful study in two numbers of White’s Shakespeare. He was in
such friendly communication with Mr. White regarding his work that it
would have been idle to wear any mask in his presence, and Mr. White
wrote him in great excitement over the first of the two articles. “I am
very much obliged to you for your kind letter,” Lowell replied; “I never
saw a man who did not think himself indifferent to praise, nor one who
did not like it. In this country, where praise (or blame) is so cheap,
one can’t think much of the old _laudari ab laudato_, for the _laudatus_
himself may be the celebrated Snooks, but I think I know how to value
it from a man of discernment. I hope you will like the last half of my
article as well as the first. It is honest, anyhow, and kindly meant,
and I endeavored to avoid all picking of flaws. Years ago I laid to
heart the saying of an old lady--‘that the eleventh commandment
was--Don’t twit.’ ...
“I don’t like reviewing, especially where the author is an acquaintance.
I find it so hard to be impartial, but in your case I think my
commendation would lose half its force were it not qualified with some
adverse criticism. Please believe that I wrote all with the kindest
feelings.”
Lowell certainly had nothing of that superficial habit of reviewing
which is at the bottom of most of the unsatisfactory work of this kind.
In reviewing White’s Shakespeare, for example, he read over twice every
word of the commentary and notes and then laid the book aside that his
impression might settle and clarify before he wrote his criticism. Swift
as he was in writing, there was, for the most part, a long period of
brooding over his creative work and in study over his criticism. He
wrote an article, for instance, on “Wedgwood’s Dictionary,” and
complained regarding it to Mr. Norton: “You know my unfortunate weakness
for doing things not quite superficially. So I have been a week about
it--press waiting--devil at my elbow (I mean the printer’s)--every
dictionary and vocabulary I own gradually gathering in a semicircle
round my chair,--and three of the days of twelve solid hours each. And
with what result? at most six pages, which not six men will care
anything about. And now it is done I feel as if I had taken hold of the
book the wrong way, and that I should have devoted myself to his theory
more and to particulars less; or, rather, that I ought to have had more
space. But I had a gap to fill up,--just so much and no more. There is
one passage[124] in it that I wager will make all of you laugh, and
heavens! what fun I could have made of the book if I had been
unscrupulous! But I soon learned to respect Wedgwood’s attainments, and
resisted all temptation.”
Just as Lowell’s fun could find its way even into an index, so in his
sober criticisms he would sometimes hide a jest for the delectation of
especially discerning readers, as when in his article on White’s
Shakespeare, he remarks incidentally: “To every commentator who has
wantonly tampered with the text, or obscured it with his inky cloud of
paraphrase, we feel inclined to apply the quadrisyllabic name of the
brother of Agis, king of Sparta.” Felton, Longfellow tells us in a
letter to Sumner, was the first to unearth the joke and to remember or
discover that this name was Eudamidas.
Apart from his considerable criticism Lowell contributed to the volumes
which he edited chiefly poems and political articles. He printed the
“Ode to Happiness” already referred to, the notable verses on “Italy,
1859,” and the striking poem, “The Dead House,” which has an
autobiographic interest, not from its being the record of an incident or
even from the mood which it reflects, but from the fact that Lowell
could write it at all and disclaim any personal connection with the
theme. Mr. Norton has printed an interesting comment on the poem by
Lowell,[125] and in another letter written a few days later Lowell adds:
“I have touched here and there the poem I sent, and think of putting it
in the _Atlantic_. Did you like it? It is pure fancy, though founded on
a feeling I have often had,--but for æsthetic reasons I put an
‘inexpressive she’ into it.” In how healthy a mind must he have been,
and how graciously healed in his new life to write thus without having
his own great grief thrust itself between him and his poem.
Yet there was a poem entitled “The Home,” written at the same time which
was rather a record of personal experience than a universal mood caught
in terms of common life, and he cast it aside therefore and never
printed it. It has its place in a memoir of his life.
“Here once my step was quickened,
Here beckoned the opening door,
And _welcome!_ thrilled from the threshold
To the foot it had felt before.
“A glow came forth to meet me,
The blithe flame laughed in the grate,
And shadows that danced on the ceiling
Danced faster with mine for a mate.
“‘Glad to see you, old friend,’ yawned the armchair,
‘This corner, you know, is your seat;’
‘Rest your slippers on me,’ beamed the fender,
‘I brighten at touch of your feet.’
“‘We know the practised finger,’
Said the books, ‘that seems all brain,’
And the shy page rustled the secret
It had kept till I came again.
“Hummed the pillow, ‘My down once trembled
On nightingales’ throats that flew
Through the twilight gardens of Hafix
To gather quaint dreams for you.’
“Ah me! if the Past have heartsease,
It hath also rue for men:--
I come back: those unhealed ridges
Were not in the churchyard then!
“But (I think) the house is unaltered--
I will go and ask to look
At the rooms that were once familiar
To my life as its bed to the brook.
“Unaltered! alas for the sameness
That makes the change but more!
How estranged seems the look of the windows,
How grates my foot on the floor!
“To learn this simple lesson
Need I go to Paris or Rome,
That the many make a household,
But only one the Home?
“‘Twas a smile, ’twas a garment’s rustle,
’Twas nothing that you could phrase,
But the whole dumb dwelling grew conscious
And put on her looks and ways.
“Were it mine, I would close the shutters
As you smooth the lids of the dead,
And the funeral fire should wind it,
This corpse of a Home that is dead!
“For it died that summer morning
When she, its soul, was borne
To lie all dark in the hillside
That looks over woodland and corn.”
“Is it anything?” he wrote to the friend to whom he sent it, or is it
nothing? Or is it one of those nothings that is something? I think the
last stanza should be last but one and begin ‘But it died,’ if
‘dwelling’ will do for an antecedent. Is the first half too special?”
There was indeed a gayer mood on him in the midst of his work which
could make him turn his discomforts into a jest. “I cannot learn the
knack of doing six things at once,” he wrote to a friend. “I had my
whole time to myself for too many years, and the older I grow the
unreadier writer I become. What a lucky dog Methusalem was! Nothing to
know, and nine hundred years to learn it in.” He was writing to a
somewhat dry-minded correspondent, but to a more congenial friend he
wrote at the same time: “Nothing has happened to me since I saw you
except manuscripts, and my mind is gradually becoming a blank. It is
very depleting, I find, to read stuff week in and week out (I almost
spelt week with an _a_), and does not help one to be a lively
correspondent. But I believe I could dictate five love stories at the
same time (as Napoleon the Other could despatches) without mixing them
in the least--and indeed it would make no difference if I did. ‘Julie
gazed into the eyes of her lover, which sought in vain to escape her
enquiring look, while the tears trembled on her long dark lashes, but
fell not (that ‘fell not’ is new, I think). “And is it indeed so?” she
said slowly, after a pause in which her heart leaped like an imprisoned
bird.’--‘Meanwhile, the elder of the two, a stern-featured man of some
forty winters, played with the hilt of his dagger, half drawing and then
sheathing again the Damascus blade thin as the eloquence of Everett and
elastic as the conscience of Cass. “Didst mark the old man tremble?”
“Cospetto! my uncle, a noted leech, was wont to say that iron was a good
tonic for unsteady nerves,” and still he trifled with the ominous
looking weapon, etc., etc.’ I think of taking a contract to write all
the stories myself at so much a dozen--a good murder or a happy marriage
to be paid double.”
One is reminded of Lamb’s famous letter to Manning when he reads a
letter which Lowell wrote to his brother-in-law, Captain Parker, then in
China: “A man who is eccentric enough to prefer a part of the world
where folks walk with their heads down certainly deserves the
commiseration of his friends, but as for letters--how to write and what
to write about? I can’t write upside down, and I suppose you can’t read
rightside up. So it is clearly a waste of time, but you will be able to
read this after you get home again, when old age will have given all the
news in it a kind of second-childhood, and it will have become fresh by
dint of having been forgotten.
“Of course there isn’t any news--when was there ever any? For my own
part, I don’t regret it, looking on news as generally only a short way
of saying nuisance, and believing Noah to have been the happiest man
that ever lived, for all the gossips were five thousand fathoms under
water, and he knew that he should not hear anything when he got into
port. The daughters must have been put to it, though, with nobody left
but Shem, Ham, and Japhet to work slippers and smoking caps for, and
never a new engagement to discuss.
As for news here,--there was the College Exhibition day before
yesterday, which was a good deal like other Exhibitions only that it
rained. I suppose your wife has written you of the appointment of Caihee
as professor of the Chinese language and literature with a salary of ten
piculs a year, which she is allowed to raise in the college grounds, the
Corporation finding cucumber seed and Theodore Parker the vinegar. A
compromise has been effected in theological matters, and she is to
worship Josh Bates the London banker instead of simple Josh, in
consideration of which Mr. Bates will pay half the salary of a Bonze to
be imported express. The students will be allowed to let off
fire-crackers during her lectures. She begins with an exposition of the
doctrine of the venerable confuse-us, which can hardly fail of being in
harmony with all existing systems of philosophy and theology. As all the
Professors are obliged to do something outside for a living, she will
continue to be on duty with Maggie. This is a great triumph for the
Woman’s-Rights party, who have nominated Mrs. ---- for Governess, with a
Council of old women, including, I am told, Mr. ----. You see the world
moves up here. As to other political intelligence, there is not
much--that quality is commonly wanting in such matters: but the
Charleston Convention is expected to nominate the Captain of the yacht
Wanderer[126] for President, as an exponent of the views of the more
moderate wing of the party (I mean, of course, the Southern wing) on the
subject of slavery. A Red River overseer is to adorn the ticket as
candidate for the Vice-Presidency. We shall be likely at last to get a
truly conservative administration. At home we have a rehearsal of
‘Bonnie Doon,’ Banks being the Republican man, while the _brays_ are
well performed by Mr. B. F. Butler.
“Cambridge meanwhile is all agog with a wedding to come off this
afternoon, Darley the artist and Miss Jenny (I think) Colburn. There is
to be a wonderful turn-out of handsome bridesmaids, the bride having the
good luck to be beautifully cousined. A great crush of hoops is looked
for at Christ Church, and the coopers, it is said, will take the
occasion for a strike. All the girls are crazy to go, and many who go in
with a diameter of ten feet will come out with only two. I have sent for
a new pair of lemon-colored gloves for the wedding visit. There will be
a jam, of course, but then I am one of the harder sex, and shan’t mind
it. They have my best wishes for a crop of little Darleyings.
“So you are to have another war over there. I think it a shabby piece of
business. Can you thrash a nation into friendly relations? And if a man
don’t like your society, can you change his views by giving him a black
eye? The Chinese are not a nation of savages, and with two hundred and
forty millions of people they can hold out a great while in killed,
wounded, and missing. I think John Bull and Johnny Crapaud will have
their hands full before they are done with it. What has a Bull to do in
a China-shop?”
There was an incompatibility of temper in Lowell which stood in the way
of entire pleasure in editing the _Atlantic_. He was not averse to
work--instances enough have been shown of this--but he chafed under
methodical work. He could work hours and even days with scarcely a
respite, but he could also help himself to large measures of loafing. A
magazine, with its incessant inflow of letters and manuscripts, and the
demand which it makes for periodic punctuality, ill befits such a
temper, and Lowell found a good deal of irksomeness in his daily task.
“I used to be able to answer letters in the month during which I
received them,” he wrote ruefully to Mr. White, 6 April, 1859, “but now
they pile up and make a jam behind the boom of my occupations, till they
carry everything before them, and after a little confused whirling float
placidly down to the ocean of Oblivion. I do not know if it be so with
everybody, but with me the perpetual _chance_ of interruption to which
I am liable induces a kind of stolid despair. I am afraid that at this
moment there are at least a hundred and fifty unanswered letters in and
on and round my desk, whose blank [looks] seem to say ‘how long?’ Your
letter came just in the midst of a bother in the _Atlantic_, which it
took all my diplomacy to settle so that both sides should not bite their
own noses off, to which mad meal they had violent appetites. It is all
‘fixed’ now, and things go smoothly again--but meanwhile the hiatus in
my correspondence grew daily wider.”
“I am at last even with my manuscripts,” he wrote to another friend. “It
is splendid. Such a heap as had gathered. It had snowed poems and tales
and essays, and an eddy had drifted them into my study knee-deep. But I
have shovelled myself out, and hope ’tis the last great storm of the
season. I even found time to go to Dresel’s concert last evening, where
I saw one of your cousins. The concert was nearly all Mendelssohn and
seemed to me a little vague and cloudy--beautiful clouds, rose tinted
and--indefinite. I longed for a good riving flash of Italian lightning.
Fanny liked it, however, but I was rather bored. It seemed to me like
reading manuscripts titillated with promise continually and finding no
egregious and satisfying fulfilment.”
“Don’t come this way again,” he writes to Mr. White, “without letting me
know you are coming. I want a talk with you, and I can’t talk by
letter, for I can’t write them when I am tired, and I am tired all the
time. If there be any truth in the doctrine of compensations, the
bobolinks in some other stage of existence will all be caged in Grub
Street and made editors. They are altogether too happy here. Well, maybe
we shall be bobolinks. If ever we should be, I can show you a fine
meadow for building in, a kind of grassy Venice with good tussock
foundations jutting everywhere from the water.”
After something more than a year’s experience, he wrote to Mr. Norton:
“I am resolved that no motive of my own comfort or advantage shall
influence me, but I hate the turmoil of such affairs, despise the
notoriety they give one, and long for the day when I can be vacant to
the Muses and to my books for their own sakes. I cannot stand the worry
of it much longer without a lieutenant. To have questions of style,
grammar, and punctuation in other people’s articles to decide, while I
want all my concentration for what I am writing myself--to have added to
this personal appeals, from ill-mannered correspondents whose articles
have been declined, to attend to--to sit at work sometimes fifteen hours
a day, as I have done lately--makes me nervous, takes away my pluck,
compels my neglecting my friends, and induces the old fits of the
blues.”[127]
“If my letters seem dry,” he wrote again to Mr. White, “it is no fault
of mine. I am overworked and overworried and overinterrupted. I _can’t_
write a genial letter, but I want you and like you all the same. If
ever I get back to my old nest among the trees at Elmwood, and I am no
longer professor or editor, with time enough to follow up a doubtful
passage in Shakespeare or a bit of dilettante philology,--then what
pleasure I should have in corresponding with you and exchanging thoughts
and suggestions. But now, if anything occurs to me, I feel too tired to
communicate it to anybody, for my days are so broken that I am forced
sometimes to sit up till the birds sing to get any time for my own
studies.”
In one point of excellence Lowell was exceedingly particular. He told me
once in later life, when we were discussing a proposed reissue of the
British Poets, of which he was to be editor-in-chief, that I must not
think he would accept any one’s proof-reading but his own. “I am really
a very careful proof-reader,” he said, “though people fancy I am too
indolent for such work.” In a letter to Mr. Norton, 18 October, 1859,
presaging some changes, he writes: “As to proofs, I _must_ read those
myself, or I don’t feel safe. Yet a piece of bad grammar got into the
October number in spite of Mr. Nichols and me together.” He had, indeed,
a most admirable aid in Mr. George Nichols, who was a vigilant officer,
carrying a search warrant for any and all literary misdemeanors. The
_Atlantic_ at this time was printed at Riverside, and there is a
charming description, in a letter which Mr. Norton prints,[128] of the
morning walk which Lowell was wont to take to the Press by the footpath
that lay along the river bank.
The pressure upon Lowell, which his college work and his editorship
brought, did, during these four years, stop, somewhat, his spontaneity.
He wrote but few poems, and his letters show the effort he needed to
make to force some gayety. “I am that man among mortals,” he wrote to
Miss Norton, “whose friends must forgive him the most treasons against
friendship,--silence, staying away, dulness when he writes or comes--and
I know not what else,--yet I do believe that my heart holds fire as long
as another, and that I neither grow cool nor forget sooner than most. I
cannot write unless I feel as if I could give the best part of myself to
those who deserve it best, and I am so forever busy that I am either
employed or weary, and who can write then? I believe that none but an
idle man can write a good letter. I mean by idle, a man who is not under
the necessity of tapping his brain on the public side, and tapping so
freely that the runnings on the other cannot be sprightly for want of
_head_. This is why women are such good letter-writers. Their ordinary
employments do not suck them dry of all communicativeness,--I can’t
think of any other word,--and their writing is their play, as it should
be. As for me, nowadays, taking up my pen is only the reminder of work.
This that I write with is one worn to a stump with my lectures three
years--four years ago. I would not write with the same one I had used
for Mr. Cushing and drudgery. So the fault is not in the quill that I
am stupid. If I had only been laid away in a drawer these four years, as
it had been! What a fury I should be in to declare myself on all manner
of topics! But this exhaustion one feels from overwork extends itself to
the receptive faculties as well. A dry sponge floats and is long in
saturating. The mind, I think, goes even beyond this--it must be _full_
to take up more.”
The diversions which Lowell found in this period were not many. He made
his yearly excursion to the Adirondacks, always looking forward eagerly
to it, and working furiously just before home-leaving, that he might go
with some serenity of mind. He saw scarcely anything of social life in
Cambridge or Boston;[129] he went frequently to Shady Hill, the home of
the Nortons, but nowhere else to speak of, and he found true relaxation
in his whist club. Aside from all this, he derived most entertainment
from the very informal clubs, with their dinners, which had sprung
chiefly out of the establishment of the _Atlantic_. For a short time,
apparently, there were two of these loose organizations, the Atlantic
Club, so called, which was the gathering of the contributors at dinner,
under the auspices of the publishers, during the first months of strong
interest,--dinners which seem to have sprung from the little one given
by Mr. Phillips at the institution of the magazine; and the Saturday
Club, which still survives, a dining club, made up at first chiefly of
literary men naturally connected with the _Atlantic_, and of congenial
spirits, some of whom never and some rarely contributed. This latter
club appears, after a while, to have supplanted the former. “Dined with
the _Atlantic Monthly_ people,” Longfellow writes in his diary, 21
December, 1857, and again, 14 May, 1859, “Dined with the Atlantic Club,
at Fondarivés’s. The ‘Atlantic’ is not the ‘Saturday’ club, though many
members belong to both;” and on 9 July, 1859, he again notes that he
dined with the Atlantic Club at the Revere House, but the references
cease at this point, and the club dinners which he attends afterward are
Saturday Club dinners, held on the last Saturday of the month at
Parker’s Hotel. Dr. Holmes also, in later years, found the flourishing
Saturday Club so constant in his recollection that he was disposed to
deny the existence of any Atlantic Club. Properly speaking there never
was any club, but only occasional dinners to which contributors were
invited by the publishers. It was of one of the Saturday Club dinners
that Lowell wrote 11 October, 1858: “You were good enough to tell me I
might give you an account of our dinner. There at least was a topic, but
I find that when I am full of work, I do not see the men I go among, but
only shadows which make no impression. It is odd that when one’s mind is
excited by writing so that one cannot sleep, one should see in the same
way a constant succession of figures without really seeing them. They
come and change and go without any dependence on the will, without any
relation to the preoccupying thought.
“I remember one good thing at our last dinner. The dinner was for
Stillman, and I proposed that Judge Hoar should propose his health in a
speech. ‘_Sir!_’ (a long pause) ‘in what I have already said, I believe
I speak the sentiments of every gentleman present, and lest I should
fail to do so in what I might further say’--(another pause) ‘I sit
down.’ And two days before at Agassiz’--the Autocrat giving an account
of his having learned the fiddle, his brother John who sat opposite,
exclaimed, ‘I can testify to it; he has often fiddled me out of the
house as Orpheus did Eurydice out of the infernal regions.’ Isn’t that
good? It makes me laugh to look at it now that I have written it down.
The Autocrat relating how Simmons the Oak Hall man had sent him the two
finest pears--‘of trowsers?’ interrupted somebody. But can one send
poured-out Champagne all the way to Newport, and hope that one bubble
will burst after it gets there to tell what it used to be? A dinner is
never a good thing the next day. For the moment, though, what is better?
We dissolve our pearls and drink them nobly--if we have them--but bring
none away. A good talk is almost as much out of the question among
clever men as among men who think themselves clever. Creation in pairs
proves the foreordained superiority of the _tête-a-tête_. Nevertheless,
we live and dine and die.” And a few months later he recorded a bit
about a dinner of the Atlantic people, which has had more than one
raconteur. “Our dinner the other day was very pleasant. Only Mrs. Stowe
and Miss Prescott, author of ‘In a Cellar.’ She is very nice and bright.
Mrs. Stowe would not let us have any wine, and I told her that I was
sorry she should deprive herself of so many pleasant dinners in England
(whither she goes 3d August) by so self-denying an ordinance. She _took_
at once, colored a little, laughed, and asked me to order some
champagne.”
Perhaps the very necessity for constant criticism, whether unrecorded,
as where he determined the grounds for acceptance and rejection of
manuscripts, or in his correspondence with contributors, and his own
articles in the magazine, tended to stimulate Lowell’s critical faculty.
At any rate, in the midst of his busy hours he would now and then yield
to the impulse, created by some current publication it may be, and give
expression to judgments, either publicly or in his letters to friends.
Thus his interest in “The Minister’s Wooing” led him not only into
writing the letter to Mrs. Stowe, already noticed, but into a careful,
unsigned analysis of Mrs. Stowe’s power in the _New York Tribune_.[130]
In August, 1859, Mr. Phillips, the publisher, died. Lowell characterized
him as a man of great energy and pluck; but during the months previous
to his death Mr. Phillips had by no means been in sound health, and had
fretted much over complications in his affairs. He seems to have had
reason, for a few weeks after the death of Mr. Phillips, the firm of
Phillips & Sampson suspended payment, and went into the hands of an
assignee, Mr. Harvey Jewell. “What is to come, or why they have done
it,” Lowell wrote to Mr. Norton, “I cannot conjecture. I trust
arrangements will be made to put the _Atlantic_ in good hands. _That_ at
least is a paying thing. If it shall end in my losing the editorship, it
would cause me little regret, for it would leave me more time to
myself.” The assignee brought out the October number of the magazine,
pending the settlement of affairs, and there was a lively competition
among publishers to secure the publication. The Harpers proposed to buy
it, to suppress their rival, it was said; there were offers from
Philadelphia, and some of the younger men connected with the firm of
Phillips & Sampson made an effort to establish a new firm which should
buy the whole business of Phillips & Sampson, including the magazine.
Mr. William Lee, who had left a large sum with the firm when he withdrew
from it, was at the time travelling in Europe, and by a series of
mischances did not even learn of the situation till it was too late for
him to have a hand in any reorganization. There was even a plan mooted
by which Lowell and his friends should buy the magazine, but Lowell’s
own judgment was against this. “It ought,” he said, “to be in the hands
of a practical publisher for we should be in danger of running
aground.”
In the end, Ticknor & Fields bought the magazine. “As friend to friend,”
Lowell wrote to Mr. Norton, I may say that I think it just the best
arrangement possible, though I did not like to say so beforehand too
plainly. I did not wish in any way to stand in ----’s light, but it is
much better as it is. Whether T. will want _me_ or not, is another
question. I suppose that he will think that Fields will make a good
editor, beside saving the salary, and F. may think so too. In certain
respects he would, as the dining editor for example, to look after
authors when they came to Boston and the like. I shall be quite
satisfied, anyhow,--though the salary is a convenience, for I have done
nothing to advance my own private interest in the matter.”
The break-up of the business of Phillips & Sampson naturally led to the
distribution of their copyright books, and Emerson was one of the
authors publishing with them, who was now considering the transfer of
his books to Ticknor & Fields. “I saw Ticknor yesterday,” Lowell wrote
him, 21 October, 1859, “and he says he wants the magazine to go on as it
has gone. I never talked so long with him before, and the impression he
gave was that of a man very shrewd in business after it is once in
train, but very inert of judgment. I rather think Fields is captain when
at home.[131] My opinion about your book is this. The book is a sure
one at any rate, and if Little & Brown publish it, they will sell copies
to all who would buy anything of yours at any rate. They are eminently
respectable and trustworthy. Ticknor would have of course the same
chance to start on that L. & B. would have, but I should think it
natural that he would be able to sell more copies because the _kind_ of
book he publishes is rather less of the library-completing sort than
those of L. & B., and because (I suppose) he has correspondents who
always take a certain number of his books whether or no. In short, it
seems to me that his chances in the way of distribution and putting the
volume on many counters and under many eyes are the best. With an author
like you this is not much, but it is something....
“I have quite a prize in the December number--the story of a real
filibuster written by himself.[132] It is well done and will interest
you. I wish to get together a few of our chief tritons at a dinner soon
to make them acquainted with the new Poseidon. Will you come? At
Porter’s or Parker’s, whichever you prefer, and as early as you like so
that you may get back to Concord.”
After Mr. Fields returned from Europe the question of the editorship
came up anew. The times were lowering, every one who had ventures was
taking in sail, Mr. Fields had been the editorial member of the book
firm, his relations with authors both at home and abroad were of the
most friendly nature, and it was thus most reasonable and natural that
he should take charge of the _Atlantic_, and Lowell resigned the
editorship in a half-serious, half-whimsical letter which Mr. Norton has
printed.[133] It is clear that he had a divided mind. He had become so
far wonted to his work that he had less anxiety in performing it, and he
had an honest pride in maintaining the high standard which his own taste
and judgment had created. He was glad also of the greater ease in money
matters which the salary gave; and yet, as his letters show, he welcomed
the freedom from the daily exactions of the editorial life, and the
return to the more self-determined occupation which he had known most of
his days.
Yet in editing the _Atlantic_, Lowell was more or less consciously
reënforcing the love of literature which commanded him, and the combined
labor of academic study and teaching and the organization of literature
undoubtedly enriched his life, and made him more ready for the large
enterprises which lay before him.
It was a great reënforcement of contentment that he had returned to his
old home at Elmwood. There had been some talk of his taking the house
which Professor Felton was to give up on getting a new one, but
arrangement was made, finally, to go back to Elmwood, and there the new
establishment was set up with Dr. Lowell and Miss Rebecca Lowell as
joint occupants. This was a few months before Lowell retired from the
editorship of the _Atlantic_, and his content appears in a letter which
he was writing to Mr. Richard Grant White, 15 March, 1861: “We are
having,” he says, “the finest snowstorm of the winter. And what a
delight to me to be here in my old garret at Elmwood, no college to go
to (it is Saturday), sheltered by the very wings of the storm, and shut
in from all the world by this white cloud of peace let down from heaven!
The great chimney stacks roar a deep bass like Harlaem organ pipes. The
old lightning rod thumps and rattles with every gust, as I used to hear
it so long ago when there were no colleges nor magazines, nor any world
outside our belt of pines. I am at _home_ again. I like everything and
everybody. Presently I shall draw on my Canada leggings and wade down to
the post with this. I shall come back full of snow and northwest wind
and appetite. I shall sit down at my own table in the old familiar room
where I hope to welcome you one of these days.”[134]
In his L’Envoi, “To the Muse,” which appears to have been written not
far from this time, he has some bright reflections on the elusiveness of
the spirit of poetry which beckoned him. In point of fact there was very
little poetry written by him while he was at once professor and editor.
His “Biglow Papers” had been republished in England, with an
Introduction by T. Hughes. His old friend, Mr. Gay, was in England at
the time and had a hand in the business. The publication naturally drew
fresh attention to Lowell’s satiric verse, and he wrote, a trifle
piqued: “I confess I am a little jealous of people who like my humorous
poems best. I guess they are right ‘up to date,’ but I feel also as if
it were a little unfair to t’other half of me, which has not fairly
worked itself free so as to combine--here I was interrupted day before
yesterday, and I believe I was going to say--so as to combine the
results of life with those of study. However, I grow more and more
persuaded that what a man is is of greater consequence than what he
_does_, especially than what he writes. The secret is, I suppose, to
work oneself out clear so that what he is may be one with what he
writes.”
END OF VOLUME I
The Riverside Press
_Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton & Co._
_Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._
FOOTNOTES:
[1] See Appendix A, The Lowell Ancestry.
[2] In 1853 Dr. Lowell contemplated the publication of a volume of
sermons, and his then associate, Dr. Bartol, wrote privately to the
son, discouraging the venture. He had not the heart openly to oppose
Dr. Lowell. “I know,” he writes, “I can trust you to understand me
fully when I say it is my persuasion and that of true and strong
friends of your father in the parish, that a volume could never
overtake his actual reputation, that what is best in him, his voice,
his look, his manner, _himself_, cannot be printed, and that his
peculiar glory is one that should scarcely be touched with ink.” There
did appear, however, in 1855 a volume by Dr. Lowell, entitled _Sermons;
chiefly Occasional_.
[3] _Alongside_, by Mrs. Caroline H. Dall. Privately printed.
[4] “My grandmother,” Lowell once said, “was a loyalist to her death,
and whenever Independence Day came round, instead of joining in the
general rejoicing, she would dress in deep black, fast all day, and
loudly lament ‘our late unhappy differences with his most gracious
Majesty.’”
[5] In a review of _the Book of British Ballads_ in _The Pioneer_,
Lowell says: “And the dear ‘Annie of Lochroyan,’ too, made thrice dear
to us by the often hearing it from lips that gave an original beauty of
their own to whatever they recited.”
[6] He was named after his father’s maternal grandfather, Judge James
Russell, of Charlestown.
[7] Robert Traill Spence Lowell was graduated at Harvard College in
1833. He became an Episcopal clergyman in 1842, went shortly after as
a missionary to Newfoundland, had a parish later in New Jersey, then
took the headmastership of S. Mark’s School, Southborough, Mass., and
finally was called to the chair of Latin language and literature in
Union College. He remained in Schenectady till his death, 12 September,
1891, just a month after the death of his younger brother. He had a
distinct literary gift, and published several books, which were the
outcome of his life in its varied scenes. _The New Priest in Conception
Bay_ has vivid pictures of Newfoundland, and contains one character,
Elnathan Bangs, who is as racy a Yankee in his own way as Hosea Biglow
himself. The book unfortunately was published by Philips & Sampson just
as Mr. Phillips died and the firm went into bankruptcy, and lost thus
the advantage of a good start. It was revived a good many years later,
but never enjoyed the vogue it might have had. Mr. Lowell’s experiences
at S. Mark’s lay behind a story for schoolboys, _Antony Brade_, and
his life in Schenectady suggested _A Story or Two from an Old Dutch
Town._ He published also _Fresh Hearts that Failed Three Thousand
Years Ago, and Other Poems_, a book which his brother had the pleasure
of reviewing in the _Atlantic_. His best known poem, “The Relief
of Lucknow,” appeared also in the _Atlantic_, under his brother’s
editorship.
[8] Mary Traill Spence Lowell was born 3 December, 1810, was married
to Samuel Raymond Putnam, 25 April, 1832, and died in Boston, 1
June, 1898. She was a woman of intellectual power and literary
accomplishment. She chose to write anonymously, but the books she
wrote, _Records of an Obscure Man_, _The Tragedy of Errors_, _Fifteen
Days_, and _The Tragedy of Success_, though remote from the current
of popular taste in her day, not only disclose a most thoughtful
nature, and one profoundly interested in great subjects of racial and
philosophical moment, but not infrequently are exceedingly felicitous
in expression.
[9] In a lecture on Spenser, given in 1856, Lowell said, “_The Faery
Queene_ was the first poem I ever read, and I had no suspicion of any
double meaning in it.”
[10] “An Epistle to George William Curtis,” 1874.
[11] _Conversations on Some of the Old Poets_, pp. 170, 171.
[12] Said at the commemoration of the one hundred and fiftieth
anniversary of the foundation of the West Church, Boston, 1887.
[13] _The Power of Sound: a rhymed lecture_, pp. 22, 23.
[14] “‘Tis near midnight, and I hear a bass-drum, kettle-drum and fife
in the distance, playing the dear old _boongalang_ tune of my earliest
days, the very one to which General Gage marched out of Boston. It is
delightful. I think it is the noise Wagner is always trying to make and
failing.”--J. R. L. to C. E. Norton, 16 April, 1889.
[15] “Books and Libraries” in _Literary and Political Addresses,
Works_, vi. 83.
[16] _Latest Literary Essays and Addresses_, p. 43.
[17] _Literary and Political Addresses_, pp. 69, 70.
[18] Mr. Shackford did not live to continue his friendship with Lowell.
He died in 1842.
[19] The Hasty Pudding Club, a Harvard students’ club, which has always
made much of literature of the lighter sort, its specialty now being
amateur theatricals.
[20] “Thoreau,” in _Literary Essays_, i. 366.
[21] There is a letter from Mrs. Anna Cabot Lowell, 3 July, 1838, to
her brother-in-law, which throws a little light on the way in which his
friends regarded Lowell at this time: “Aunt S. was here last evening
and depicted in a lively manner the grief of Scates for your idle
courses. She says he went to you with tears in his eyes to implore you
to persevere, and that he told his friends in faltering accents that
you had but this one fault in the world. Being desirous to know the
exact nature of that fault, that you might apply the specific remedy, I
asked her what the fault was. She said ‘indolence to be sure: indolence
and the Spence negligence.’ I quote her very words. My opinion of the
case is that it proceeds more from negligence than indolence, and more
from a blind confidence in your powers and your destiny than either.”
[22] _Letters_, ii. 302.
[23] It was not uncommon in those days and long after for a student to
take his degree at the Law School after a year or two only of study and
then to continue to hear lectures. Lowell’s name is on the catalogue of
the school for the year following his degree.
[24] William Page, the artist, whom Lowell first knew through the
Whites.
[25] “Goethe’s poetic sense was the Minotaur to which he sacrificed
everything. To make a study he would soil the maiden petals of a
woman’s soul.”--“Lessing,” in _Literary Essays_, ii. 195.
[26] It is very likely under the impetus given by Maria White that
Lowell took a place as delegate to the Anti-Slavery Convention held in
Boston, 17 November, 1840.
[27] _Letters_, i. 67-69.
[28] _James Russell Lowell and His Friends_, pp. 72-76.
[29] “I have enjoyed the society of my fair cousin Maria very much.
She has shown me several of James’s letters, and I think I never saw
such perfect specimens of _love-letters_,--those in any novel you ever
read are perfectly indifferent compared to them. Without being silly
in the least, they are full of all the fervor and extatification which
you would expect from the most ardent lover.”--L. L. Thaxter to T. W.
Higginson, 19 January, 1842.
[30] “I am obliged to stay at home whenever Father goes to Boston, and
as he usually goes thither on the four first days of the week, I am
rather closely prisoned.”--J. R. L. to R. Carter, 31 December, 1843.
[31] Thomas W. White, the editor.
[32] The sonnet, “To the Spirit of Keats,” was the first of the two;
the other was “Sunset and Moonshine,” not retained by the poet in his
final collection.
[33] “[Mrs. Longfellow] was the first stranger that ever said a kind
word to me about my poems. She spoke to me of my _Year’s Life_, then
just published. I had then just emerged from the darkest and unhappiest
period of my life, and was peculiarly sensitive to sympathy. My volume,
I knew, was crude and immature, and did not do me justice; but I
knew also that there was a _heart_ in it, and I was grateful for her
commendation.”--J. R. L. to H. W. Longfellow, 13 August, 1845.
[34] “Especially grateful is the praise of one in whose conversation
I have marked a hearty appreciation of those greatest reformers, our
glorious old English Poets.”--J. R. L. to Robert Carter, 2 September,
1842.
[35] Mr. Woodberry, in editing “Lowell’s Letters to Poe,” in
_Scribner’s Monthly_ for August, 1894, explains the situation thus:
“The contract bound Lowell and Carter to furnish the publishers five
thousand copies on the twentieth of each month under a penalty of
five hundred dollars in case of failure and the publishers to take
that number at a certain price. The March number was eight days late,
and the publishers, in the face of what was probably seen to be an
unfortunate speculation, claimed the forfeit but offered to waive it
if the contract should be altered so as to require them to take only
so many copies as they could sell. The result was that the editors
were obliged to stop printing from a lack of credit, and were left
with a large indebtedness for manufacture as well as to contributors.
It appears from Poe’s letters that he was paid his small claim a year
later.”
[36] Carter had just been to see Maria White.
[37] “The Maiden’s Death.”
[38] In a letter written after he had at last seen Miss White, Mr.
Briggs writes: “I hardly know what I could say to M. W. unless what I
felt inclined to when I saw her, ‘_Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis_.’”
[39] “L’Envoi,” beginning
“whether my heart hath wiser grown or not.”
[40] _The Broadway Journal_, which Mr. Briggs was just projecting.
[41] Mr. Briggs had written to Lowell: “I suppose that you are going to
impose upon yourselves the heathenish ceremonies of a wedding, and in
the most solemn period of your lives, give yourselves up to the most
foolish of all the world’s follies. Tut! you will be sick of white
satins and raisins for the next century. Is’t the first of the month
that you are to be married? I would like to know the day that I may
keep you in remembrance. Page will be here and I will have him down to
Bishop’s Terrace, and we will keep it up with becoming solemnity. One
of my darling fowls shall be sacrificed.”
[42] The exact succession of his books was _A Year’s Life_, 1841;
_Poems_, 1843 (dated 1844); _Conversations on Some of the Old Poets_,
1845.
[43] Mr. Evert A. Duyckinck, in March, 1846, replying to a suggestion
by Lowell of “specimens of old translators” for Wiley & Putnam’s
Library, doubts the practicability, but adds, “You will, I hope, not
lose sight of so good a topic which might provoke a new conversation
between yourself and your Mrs. Harris (Philip and John) very
profitably.”
[44] _Letters_, i. 69.
[45] See Appendix B.
[46] Editor of _Graham’s Magazine_.
[47] _Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife_, i. 283.
[48] The circumstances pertaining to the close of Mr. Briggs’s
connection with _The Broadway Journal_ are detailed with some
particularity in letters from Mr. Briggs to Lowell, printed in Mr.
G. E. Woodberry’s _Edgar Allan Poe_ in the _American Men of Letters_
series. See pp. 234-239.
[49] Lowell’s letters to Poe may be found in an article with that
title, edited by Mr. Woodberry, and printed in _Scribner’s Magazine_,
August, 1894. Those of Poe to Lowell appear in Mr. Woodberry’s volume
on Poe in the _American Men of Letters_ series. Lowell’s letters,
which run from 19 November, 1842, when he was beginning his _Pioneer_
venture, to 12 December, 1844, just before his marriage, are occupied
mainly with solicitation of contributions, interest in Poe’s work,
and efforts at obtaining opportunities for Poe to lecture in Boston.
They have slight value as illustrations of Lowell’s life, save as they
show his eagerness to help a brother author, and his keen interest in
letters.
[50] It may be noted that at the New England Anti-Slavery Convention
held in Boston, 28 May, 1844, the issue of disunion was plainly
presented in a set of resolutions. The vote stood 250 in favor to 24 in
dissent. Among the number who voted “nay” were James Russell Lowell and
Maria White. See _William Lloyd Garrison_, iii. 111, 112.
[51] For a striking use of the poem, see _infra_, vol. ii. p. 137.
[52] But his talk went on as unrestrictedly as ever. Longfellow records
in his diary under date of 23 October, 1845: “Lowell passed the morning
with me. Amiable enthusiast! He proposes to write a book in favor of
fanaticism.”
[53] It is a comment on Lowell’s indifference to wealth that his
imagination did not take fire at the announcement of the discovery of
gold in California. It may be said that his mind was directed toward
the immediate political consequences, but he had occasion to write upon
the subject of the discovery, when this alone engaged his attention. He
was struck with some of the picturesque situations, but his reflections
were mainly summed up in these words: “We have never seen anything like
the accounts from California since we read that chapter of _Candide_,
in which Voltaire carries his hero to El Dorado. Supposing all we
hear to be true, it is hardly probable that gold will continue to be
found there in such large quantities for any great length of time.
It will doubtless become more and more scarce, and the difficulty of
obtaining it greater. After all, the gold mines which give the surest
and richest yield are the brain and the common earth. The discovery
of a new fertilizer is of more practical benefit than that of the
philosopher’s stone would be; the invention of the steam-engine has
created more wealth than the richest gold mines; and wise men are not
wanting who believe that Fourier has given us something better than
a California. And why travel fifteen thousand miles around Cape Horn
for a place to dig in? Heaven knows the earth wants more washing here
than at Sacramento River. Moreover, every one of us has a vein more or
less profitable, if it were only diligently worked.”--“Eldorado,” in
_National Anti-Slavery Standard_, 21 December, 1848.
[54] Mr. Briggs was highly entertained by the French exercise, and
asked: “Who is your master? But never mind. Let me recommend you to
an incomparable one who had the honor of teaching Talleyrand a new
language (English) to help him conceal his thoughts. I mean Cobbett. If
you have never seen his French grammar, get it by all means and read
it, if you do not study it; and then read his English grammar, which
you will find more amusing than the Comic Latin Grammar.” Lowell does
not seem to have followed his advice immediately. At least he wrote
to me three or four years before his death: “I never read any English
grammar in my life, thank God, except Cobbett’s a few years ago, and in
that I found errors of ignorance,--as was to be expected.”
[55] At the close of 1866 a testimonial was presented to Mr. Garrison
when he retired from active service, and Lowell was the medium of
certain English subscriptions, among them that of John Bright. In
sending this Lowell writes to Mr. Garrison: “Nothing could have been
more in keeping with the uniform wisdom of your anti-slavery leadership
than the time you chose for resigning it.”
[56] It is greatly to be regretted that the important correspondence
of Quincy and Lowell does not exist. By agreement each destroyed the
letters of the other.
[57] The curious reader may see here one of the little idiosyncrasies
in which Lowell indulged throughout his life, though this is one of the
first instances I have noted.
[58] Mr. Gay had written: “I do not know how you feel about the
Imprint, but my own opinion is that there had better be either no name,
or only one there. Every one will know that yourself, Mrs. Chapman and
Quincy and Briggs and others contribute to its columns. The more we
can make believe contribute to it the better, and to put three or four
names in the Imprint will seem to limit the number. I wish that all its
readers shall believe that a variety of people have had a hand in the
making up of every number, and not only those whose names are before
them. For the same reason I wish that the initial system shall be done
with. The readers will be prone to believe the best if they are not
certain, and if there are none of these ‘small caps,’ as the printers
say, to guide, they may sometimes be humbugged into eating my chaff for
your and others’ wheat.” Mr. Gay had his way at first, but before long
his readers’ curiosity drove him into the use of initials as signatures.
[59] See _Letters of James Russell Lowell_, i. 111-116. Copyright,
1893, by Harper & Brothers.
[60] A little of this jest is preserved in Parson Wilbur’s note to the
second _Biglow paper_, as published in book form.
[61] In his address on “The Place of the Independent in Politics,”
delivered forty years later, Lowell pithily says: “A moral purpose
multiplies us (Independents) by ten, as it multiplied the early
Abolitionists. They emancipated the negro; and we mean to emancipate
the respectable white man.”
[62] There is a reference to Jefferson in a letter written ten years
later, which is interesting as one of the rare apprizements by Lowell
of American public men. “I have run through Randall’s _Jefferson_ with
the ends of my fingers--a perfect chaos of biography--but enough to
confirm me in the belief that Jefferson was the first _American_ man.
I doubt if we have produced a better thinker or writer. His style is
admirable in general, warmed with just enough enthusiasm for eloquence,
not too much for conviction.”--J. R. L. to C. E. Norton, 11 October,
1858.
[63] “A steam-engine in breeches,” was Sydney Smith’s characterization.
[64] _Letters_, i. 157, 21 May, 1849.
[65] Dr. Lowell’s course in this matter was characteristic of his
fine sense of honor. Previous to the ordination of his colleague, Dr.
Bartol, 1 March, 1837, he received from the West Church Society a
salary of $2000 a year. At a meeting of the proprietors held 22 April,
1849, a letter was read from Dr. Lowell, in which he says: “It was
always a favorite object with me, in the event of the settlement of
a colleague pastor, to resign the whole of my salary, or at most, to
retain only a small portion of it, that you might have less hesitation
in calling upon me for the services I might be able to render you.”
It was with great reluctance, he added, that he then came to the
conclusion it was his duty to accede to the request of the proprietors
and retain all the salary he had been accustomed to receive; now he
could do so no longer, and he insisted respectfully on an arrangement
by which he should resign a quarter of his salary, “with the purpose
at no distant day, if Providence permit, of resigning a further sum.”
In 1854 Dr. Lowell resigned the whole of his salary, but the Society
declined to accept the proposal.
[66] “I do not blame Foster or Philbrick or Jackson for not being
satisfied with me; but, on the other hand, I thank God that he has
gradually taught me to be quite satisfied with _them_.”--_Letters_, i.
157.
[67] Cornelius Matthews.
[68] The greater part of this letter will be found in _Letters of James
Russell Lowell_, i. 120. Copyright by Harper & Brothers, 1893.
[69] The reference apparently is to Miss Fuller’s criticism of Lowell
three years previously, in which she said: “His interest in the moral
questions of the day has supplied the want of vitality in himself; his
great facility at versification has enabled him to fill the ear with
a copious stream of pleasant sound. But his verse is stereotyped: his
thoughts sound no depth, and posterity will not remember him.”--_Papers
on Literature and Art_, p. 308.
[70] Briggs did not like Bryant, and in this he was abetted by Page,
to whom Bryant at this time was sitting. Page was angry because, in
the brief notice of Lowell’s _Poems_ which Bryant wrote, he commended
only the “Morning Glory,” which was Mrs. Lowell’s, and because Bryant
intimated that Lowell’s “To the Past” was suggested by a poem of his
own with the same title.
[71] This was the year of General Taylor’s nomination.
[72] In a letter to me about the _Fable_ written in 1890, Lowell says:
“Mr. Putnam, I believe, never discovered that the title-page was in
metre, nor that it was in rhyme either. Mr. Norton told me the other
day that he had a copy of some later edition (after Putnam had changed
his place of business), in which the imprint was ‘G. P. Putnam, Astor
(or something) Place.’ I don’t remember whether I knew of it at the
time, but had I known, I should have let it pass as adding to the humor
of the book.” The first title-page ended
SET FORTH IN
_October, the 31st day, in the year ’48_
G. P. PUTNAM, BROADWAY.
[73] Hunt’s poem again doubtless owed its being to Lord Byron’s
_English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_.
[74] Morse’s _Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes_, ii. 107.
In an unfinished letter to Dr. Holmes written from Madrid in 1878,
Lowell refers to a recent criticism of Holmes’s poems, in which the
characterization in the _Fable_ was quoted. “I thought the young fellow
who wrote it had some sense, especially as he quoted something I said
of you in my impudence thirty years ago. It is an awful thought, but
these who then were passing out of the baldness of infancy are now
entering upon that of middle age, and here we both are as if nothing
had happened. And probably precious little has happened,--I mean of any
great account. The more one reads of history the more one sees mankind
doing the same foolish things over again with admirable gravity and
then contemplating themselves with the satisfaction of Jack Horner. I
remember when I was writing the _Fable for Critics_ and used to walk up
and down the front walk at Elmwood, I paused to watch the ant-hills,
and in the seemingly aimless and yet ceaseless activity of their
citizens thought I saw a very close paraphrase of the life of men.”
[75] The Bibliographical Note in the Appendix gives the dates of the
successive numbers. See Appendix C.
[76] When he was supervising the final _Riverside_ edition of his
writings, he gladly accepted the services of a graduate student at
Harvard, now Professor of Law in Western Reserve University, Mr. Frank
Beverly Williams, who prepared a series of notes.
[77] Mr. Otis died October 28. “Only think of H. G. O!” wrote Lowell to
Gay early in November; “I would not have squibbed him if I had known he
was sick, but I never hear anything.”
[78] Writing forty years later in excuse of a petty solecism, he said:
“I think it must have been written when I was fresh from the last
_Biglow Papers_. When my soul enters Mr. Biglow’s person, she divests
herself for the time of all conventional speech, and for some time
after she leaves it is apt to forget herself.”
[79] He had the ill luck which not infrequently attends the writers of
fiction, to make use of an actual name in one of his inventions, and
received this protest from the Rev. H. Wilbur:--
“Unknown Sir, I believe there is no other clergyman in New England
besides myself of the same name you sometimes associate with your
writings. Perhaps with the scintillations of your genius my name would
be more likely to descend to posterity than from writings or labours
of my own. But if your edification could be as well promoted under the
ministry of Parson Smith or some _fictitious_ name not likely to be
associated with individuality as with the _old Parson_ you will much
oblige yours very respectfully.”
[80] He intended first to call this “A June Idyll.”
[81] That is, the hostile criticisms of his book.
[82] These letters from Hawthorne were first printed in the London
_Athenæum_, 10, 17 August, 1889, and have since been included in vol.
xvii. of the _Old Manse Edition_ of Hawthorne’s writings.
[83] An article on Landor.
[84] In a note to T. W. Higginson, who proposed an article in the
_Atlantic_ on Parker, Lowell wrote 28 June, 1860: “I think that
folks have confounded (as they commonly do) _force_ with _power_ in
estimating him, and so have overrated him.”
[85] _The Liberty Bell._
[86] _The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America._ By Fredrika
Bremer. New York: Harper & Bros. 1853. Vol. i. pp. 130, 131.
[87] See _Boston Courier_, 3 January, 1850.
[88] “The Darkened Mind.”
[89] Whether or no this started Mr. Gay on an historical investigation,
he did inquire into the matter; for thirty years later he published in
the _Atlantic_ for November, 1881, an article entitled, “When did the
Pilgrim Fathers land at Plymouth?” in which he established to his own
satisfaction that the first landing was neither on the 21st or 22d, but
on the 4th of January, 1621.
[90] In another letter written on shipboard, Lowell refers to the gift
thus: “I held it in especial esteem because it was given in a way so
characteristic of John, who sidled up to me as if he were asking a
favor instead of doing one, and having slipped it into my hand in a
particularly let-not-your-right-hand-know-what-your-left-hand-doeth
kind of manner, instantly vanished and remained absconded for half an
hour.”
[91] _Leaves from my Journal, Works_, i. 213.
[92] It was more than thirty years later that Lowell wrote the
significant poem suggested by this picture.
[93] Mr. Black’s daughter, Mrs. Hayllar, kindly sends the two
prologues, which are in a way wholly from memory. Lowell afterwards,
she writes, “tore up his notes, saying the lines were too insignificant
for preservation, when to his astonishment, my father, who had a quite
remarkable memory, repeated them both to him.” From her own memory Mrs.
Hayllar recalled the bits of the first prologue, and afterward found
amongst her father’s papers the whole of the second.
[94] See “Walter Savage Landor,” in _Latest Literary Essays and
Addresses_, p. 51.
[95] _The Poems and Prose Remains of Arthur Hugh Clough_, i. 188.
[96] Perhaps his partial friend Briggs was referring to this when he
wrote, 18 March, 1860: “If you bring out that long promised volume of
fireside travels, I hope you will not omit that racy chapter of the
novel you read to me, but which you will never write. I think it was
much better than anything of the Autocrat’s that I have read.”
[97] The lines on pp. 80, 81, of “Cambridge Thirty Years Ago” are also
saved from the same poem, but from the unprinted portion.
[98] See his two letters to T. W. Higginson, outlining his plan, and
published by the latter in his _Old Cambridge_.
[99] See letter to Mr. Norton, 13 April, 1884, _Letters_, ii. 279.
[100] “A Few of Lowell’s Letters” in _The Old Rome and the New and
other Studies_, p. 134.
[101] The poem was not printed till April, 1858, when it appeared in
_The Atlantic Monthly_.
[102] It was the custom when there was an unusual demand for tickets,
for the lecturer, besides his Tuesday and Friday evening discourses, to
repeat them on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons. In those days also,
applicants for tickets registered their names during a certain number
of days in advance, and at the close of the registry notification was
made that persons holding numbers divisible by two, three, four, or
five, as the case might be (in the ratio of applicants to the number of
seats in the hall), might call and receive tickets.
[103] Probably the verses beginning,--
“Farewell, for the bark has her breast to the tide.”
[104] “A Good Word for Winter,” in _Literary Essays_, iii. 267.
[105] “Mr. Lowell as a Teacher:” _Scribner’s Magazine_, November, 1891.
Included in his volume _Stelligeri_: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
[106] “Address before the Modern Language Association of America.”
[107] 21 August, 1857.
[108] 31 August, 1857.
[109] 31 December, 1857.
[110] “A Few of Lowell’s Letters,” in _The Old Rome and the New, and
Other Studies_, by W. J. Stillman.
[111] _Literary Friends and Acquaintance_, p. 242.
[112] See especially “The Subjective of It,” first printed in the
_Atlantic Monthly_, and “The Philosophers’ Camp,” printed in _The
Century_, and both included in _The Old Rome and the New, and
Other Studies_. And more particularly see the first volume of _The
Autobiography of a Journalist_.
[113] It is worth noting that the year in which this sentence was
written, the _Atlantic Monthly_ was, in a special contingency, edited
by the Professor of English Literature at Princeton.
[114] Mr. Phillips was by marriage connected with Mr. Emerson’s family.
[115] Mr. J. Elliot Cabot.
[116] E. E. Hale’s _James Russell Lowell and his Friends_.
[117] “The New Portfolio,” January, 1885.
[118] In publishing in book form _The Mortal Antipathy_, of which the
first paper of “The New Portfolio” was made the Introduction, Dr.
Holmes so far corrected his statement as to make it read: “I wondered
somewhat when Mr. Lowell insisted upon my becoming a contributor.”
[119] “He envied every daysman and drover in the tavern their manly
speech.” In reprinting the paper in his volume _Society and Solitude_,
Emerson corrected to “He envied every drover and lumberman.”
[120] Most of this letter is given in Mr. Pickard’s _Life and Letters
of John Greenleaf Whittier_.
[121] “The Origin of Didactic Poetry.”
[122] I recall the sententious principle which another editor announced
to me as the rule by which he was governed. “The only question I ask
myself is, _must_ I take this?”
[123] _Letters_, i. 288, 289.
[124] There are three or four witty passages, to which this is
applicable.
[125] See _Letters_, i. 283, 284.
[126] The Wanderer was a slave-ship seized in New York harbor. A
Charleston jury refused to convict the captain.
[127] _Letters_, i. 286.
[128] _Letters_, i. 281.
[129] He was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 14
November, 1855, and into the Massachusetts Historical Society, 14 May,
1863, but he does not appear to have been a frequent attendant at the
meetings of either of these bodies.
[130] This criticism also is given in C. E. Stowe’s _The Life of
Harriet Beecher Stowe_.
[131] Mr. Fields was in Europe when the transaction occurred.
[132] “Experience of Samuel Absalom, Filibuster,” by D. Deaderick.
[133] _Letters_, i. 310. May 23, 1861.
[134] The household at Elmwood was broken in upon apparently not long
after the return of the Lowells, by the death of Dr. Charles Lowell, 20
January, 1861.