I can safely say that few things in my life have pleased me more than
the request of Messrs. Truebner, backed by the expressed wish of the
author, that I would see the first English edition of the "Biglow
Papers" through the press. I fell in with the Papers about ten years
ago, soon after their publication; and the impression they then made on
me has been deepening and becoming more lively ever since. In fact, I do
not think that, even in his own New England, Mr. Lowell can have a more
constant or more grateful reader, though I cannot say that I go much
beyond most of my own intimate friends over here in my love for his
works. I may remark, in passing, that the impossibility of keeping a
copy of the "Biglow Papers" for more than a few weeks (of which many of
us have had repeated and sorrowful proof[1]) shows how much an English
Edition is needed.
Perhaps, strictly speaking, I should say a reprint, and not an edition.
In fact, I am not clear (in spite of the wishes of author and
publishers) that I have any right to call myself editor, for the book is
as thoroughly edited already as a book need be. What between dear old
Parson Wilbur--with his little vanities and pedantries, his "infinite
faculty of sermonizing," his simplicity and humour, and his deep and
righteous views of life, and power of hard hitting when he has anything
to say which needs driving home--and Father Ezekiel, "the brown
parchment-hided old man of the geoponic or bucolic species," "76 year
old cum next tater diggin, and thair aint nowheres a kitting" (we
readily believe) "spryer 'n he be;" and that judicious and lazy
sub-editor, "Columbus Nye, pastor of a church in Bungtown Corner,"
whose acquaintance we make so thoroughly in the ten lines which he
contributes--whatever of setting or framing was needed, or indeed
possible, for the nine gems in verse of Mr. Hosea Biglow, has been so
well done already in America by the hand best fitted for the task, that
he must be a bold man who would meddle with the book now in the editing
way. Even the humble satisfaction of adding a glossary and index has
been denied to me, as there are already very good ones. I have merely
added some half-dozen words to the glossary, at which I thought that
English readers might perhaps stumble. When the proposal was first made
to me, indeed, I thought of trying my hand at a sketch of American
politics of thirteen years ago, the date of the Mexican war and of the
first appearance of the "Biglow Papers." But I soon found out, first,
that I was not, and had no ready means of making myself, competent for
such a task; secondly, that the book did not need it. The very slight
knowledge which every educated Englishman has of Transatlantic politics
will be quite enough to make him enjoy the racy smack of the American
soil, which is one of their great charms; and, as to the particular
characters, they are most truly citizens of the world as well as
Americans. If an Englishman cannot find 'Bird-o'-freedom Sawins,' 'John
P. Robinson's,' 'pious editors,' and candidates "facin' south-by-north"
at home--ay, and if he is not conscious of his own individual propensity
to the meannesses and duplicities of such, which come under the lash of
Hosea--he knows little of the land we live in, or of his own heart, and
is not worthy to read the "Biglow Papers."
Instead, therefore, of any attempt of my own, I will give Mr. Lowell's
own account of how and why he came to write this book. "All I can say
is," he writes, "the book was _thar_. How it came is more than I can
tell. I cannot, like the great Goethe, deliberately imagine what would
have been a proper 'Entstehungsweise' for my book, and then assume it as
fact. I only know that I believed our war with Mexico (though we had as
just ground for it as a strong nation ever had against a weak one) to be
essentially a war of false pretences, and that it would result in
widening the boundaries, and so prolonging the life of slavery.
Believing that it is the manifest destiny of the English race to occupy
this whole continent, and to display there that practical understanding
in matters of government and colonization which no other race has given
such proofs of possessing since the Romans, I hated to see a noble hope
evaporated into a lying phrase to sweeten the foul breath of demagogues.
Leaving the sin of it to God, I believed, and still believe, that
slavery is the Achilles-heel of our own polity, that it is a temporary
and false supremacy of the white races, sure to destroy that supremacy
at last, because an enslaved people always prove themselves of more
enduring fibre than their enslavers, as not suffering from the social
vices sure to be engendered by oppression in the governing class.
Against these and many other things I thought all honest men should
protest. I was born and bred in the country, and the dialect was homely
to me. I tried my first Biglow paper in a newspaper, and found that it
had a great run. So I wrote the others from time to time during the
year which followed, always very rapidly, and sometimes (as with 'What
Mr. Robinson thinks') at one sitting. When I came to collect them and
publish them in a volume, I conceived my parson-editor, with his
pedantry and verbosity, his amiable vanity and superiority to the verses
he was editing, as a fitting artistic background and foil. He gave me
the chance, too, of glancing obliquely at many things which were beyond
the horizon of my other characters."
There are two American books, elder brethren of "The Biglow Papers,"
which it would be unjust in an Englishman not to mention while
introducing their big younger brother to his own countrymen,--I mean, of
course, "Major Downing's Letters," and "Sam Slick;" both of which are
full of rare humour, and treat of the most exciting political questions
of their day in a method and from points of view of which we are often
reminded while reading the "Biglow Papers." In fact, Mr. Lowell borrows
his name from the Major's Letters;--"Zekel Bigelow, Broker and Banker of
Wall Street, New York," is the friend who corrects the spelling, and
certifies to the genuineness, of the honest Major's effusions,[2] and is
one of the raciest characters in the book. No one, I am sure, would be
so ready as Mr. Lowell to acknowledge whatever obligations he may have
to other men, and no one can do it more safely. For though he may owe a
name or an idea to others, he seems to me to stand quite alone amongst
Americans, and to be the only one who is beyond question entitled to
take his place in the first rank, by the side of the great political
satirists of ancient and modern Europe.
Greece had her Aristophanes; Rome her Juvenal; Spain has had her
Cervantes; France her Rabelais, her Moliere, her Voltaire; Germany her
Jean Paul, her Heine; England her Swift, her Thackeray; and America has
her Lowell. By the side of all those great masters of satire, though
kept somewhat in the rear by provincialism of style and subject, the
author of the "Biglow Papers" holds his own place distinct from each
and all. The man who reads the book for the first time, and is capable
of understanding it, has received a new sensation. In Lowell the
American mind has for the first time flowered out into thoroughly
original genius.
There is an airy grace about the best pieces of Washington Irving, which
has no parallel amongst English writers, however closely modelled may be
his style upon that of the Addisonian age. There is much original power,
which will perhaps be better appreciated at a future day, about Fenimore
Cooper's delineations of the physical and spiritual border-land, between
white and red, between civilization and savagery. There is dramatic
power of a high order about Mr. Hawthorne, though mixed with a certain
morbidness and bad taste, which debar him from ever attaining to the
first rank. There is an originality of position about Mr. Emerson, in
his resolute setting up of King Self against King Mob, which, coupled
with a singular metallic glitter of style, and plenty of shrewd New
England mother-wit, have made up together one of the best counterfeits
of genius that has been seen for many a day; so good, indeed, that most
men are taken by it for the first quarter of an hour at the least. But
for real unmistakable genius,--for that glorious fulness of power which
knocks a man down at a blow for sheer admiration, and then makes him
rush into the arms of the knocker-down, and swear eternal friendship
with him for sheer delight; the "Biglow Papers" stand alone.
If I sought to describe their characteristics, I should say, the most
exuberant and extravagant humour, coupled with strong, noble, Christian
purpose,--a thorough scorn for all that is false and base, all the more
withering because of the thorough geniality of the writer. Perhaps Jean
Paul is of all the satirists I have named the one who at bottom presents
most affinity with Lowell, but the differences are marked. The
intellectual sphere of the German is vaster, but though with certain
aims before him, he rather floats and tumbles about like a porpoise at
play than follows any direct perceptible course. With Lowell, on the
contrary, every word tells, every laugh is a blow; as if the god Momus
had turned out as Mars, and were hard at work fighting every inch of
him, grinning his broadest all the while.
Will some English readers be shocked by this combination of broad and
keen humour with high Christian purpose--the association of humour and
Christianity? I hope not. At any rate, I would remind any such of
Luther, and of our own Latimer and Rowland Hill; are they prepared to
condemn them and many more like them? Nay (though it is a question which
can only be hinted at here), does not the Bible itself sanction the
combination by its own example? Is there not humour mixed with the
tremendous sarcasm of the old prophets--dread humour no doubt, but
humour unmistakably--wherever they speak of the helplessness of idols,
as in the forty-fourth and forty-sixth chapters of Isaiah, and in
Elijah's mockery of the priests of Baal:--"Cry aloud, for he is a God;
either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is on a journey, or
peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awakened." Is not the book of
Proverbs full of grave, dry, pungent humour? Consider only the following
passage out of many of the same spirit: "As the door turneth upon his
hinges, so doth the slothful upon his bed. The slothful hideth his hand
in his bosom, it grieveth him to bring it again to his mouth. The
sluggard is wiser in his own conceit than seven men that can render a
reason. He that passeth by and meddleth with strife belonging not to
him, is like one that taketh a dog by the ears."--Prov. xxvi. 14-17.
Or if it be objected that these things belong to an earlier covenant,
that laughter and jesting are "not convenient" under the Gospel of Him
who came not to destroy the law but to fulfil it, there is, perhaps, an
answer to this also.
For a specimen of subdued humour in narrative, adhering in the most
literal manner to facts, and yet contriving to bring them out by that
graphic literalness under their most ludicrous aspect, what can equal
St. Luke's description of the riot at Ephesus? The picture of the narrow
trade selfishness of Demetrius--of polytheism reduced into a matter of
business--of the inanity of a mob tumult in an enslaved country--of the
mixed coaxing and bullying of its officials, was surely never brought
out with a more latter vice, indeed, includes both the others, or
rather uses them as its instruments. Thus, the "pious Editor" proclaims,
as his creed,--
I du believe in Freedom's cause
Ez fur away ez Paris is;
I love to see her stick her claws
In them infarnal Pharisees;
It's wal enough agin a king
To dror resolves and triggers,
But libbaty's a kind o' thing
Thet don't agree with niggers.
No doubt they go further than this. I am quite aware that Mr. Lowell
will be claimed as a champion by the peace party in this country; and
certainly no keener things have been said against war in general than
are to be found in this book.
With our own peace-at-any-price party, no one has less sympathy than I;
and this leads me to urge on all English readers to bear in mind, that
the "Biglow Papers" were written for a New England audience, by a New
Englander, and must be judged from a New England point of view. The
citizen of a huge young mammoth country, divided by a whole ocean from
the nearest enemy that it could fear, assailable only on the vivid
sense of the absurdity of the whole. "And Gallio cared for none of these
things," is another touch of quiet humour, which at once brings out the
ludicrous aspect of the punishment of the Jewish agitators by means of
the very tumults which they raised.
I take it, therefore, that the exhibition of humour, in the pursuit, and
as an aid for the attainment of a noble Christian purpose, is a means of
action not only sanctioned by the very constitution of our natures (in
which God has implanted so deeply the sense of the ludicrous, surely not
that we might root it out) but, by the very example of Holy Writ. The
humour exhibited may be different in degree and in quality; the skies of
Syria are not those of Germany, or of Spain, of England, whether old or
new. But the gift in itself is a pure and precious one, if lawfully and
rightfully used.
Military braggadocio, political and literary humbug, and slave-holding,
are the three great butts at which Hosea Biglow and Parson Wilbur shoot,
at point-blank range, and with shafts drawn well to the ear. The fringe
of its seaboard (itself consisting chiefly of unapproachable swamp or
barren sand wastes), surrounded by weak neighbours or thin wandering
hordes, only too easy to bully, to subdue, to eat up; from which bands
of pirates, under the name of liberators, swarm forth year after year,
almost unchecked, to neighbouring lands, and to which if defeated they
only return to be caressed and applauded by their congeners; where the
getting up of war-fevers forms part of the stock in trade of too many of
the leading politicians; where in particular the grasping at new
territories for slave labour, by means however foul, has become the
special and avowed policy of the slavery party; the citizen of such a
country has a right to tell his countrymen that--
'T'aint your eppyletts an' feathers
Make the thing a grain more right;
'T'aint afollerin' your bell-wethers
Will excuse ye in His sight;
'Ef you take a sword an' dror it,
An' go stick a feller thru,
'Guv'ment aint to answer for it,
God 'll send the bill to you.
And the bravest officer in Her Majesty's service will laugh as heartily
as you will, I take it, my dear reader, if you have never heard it
before, over a picture and a contrast such as the following:--
Parson Wilbur sez, _he_ never heerd in his life
Thet th' Apostles rigged out in their swaller-tail coats,
An' marched round in front of a drum and a fife
To git, some on 'em office, an some on em votes,
But John P
Robinson he
Sez they didnt know everythin' down in Juddee.
But England is a small and wealthy country, whose best defence against a
neighbour, always likely to become a foe, consists in a mere ocean
canal; where the question, I will not say of war, but of readiness for
war, is one of life or death--in which the temptation, always so strong,
to subordinate national honour to what is supposed to be policy, is in
our day for most statesmen almost irresistible, because political
influence is so evenly balanced, that a peace party of perhaps twenty
votes has often the destinies of a ministry in its hands. Had Mr. Lowell
been an Englishman, no one who knows his writings can believe for a
moment that he would have swelled the cry or strengthened the hands of
the vain and mischievous clique, who amongst us have of late years
raised the cry of peace when there is no peace.
The same caution will apply to our marked peculiarity of style in the
book, which may offend at first many persons otherwise most capable of
entering into its spirit. I mean the constant, and so to speak,
pervading use of Scripture language and incidents, not only side by side
with the most grotesque effusions of humour, but as one main element of
the ludicrous effects produced. This undoubtedly would be as really
offensive as it would be untrue, from any other point of view perhaps
than that of a New Englander bred in the country. The rural population
of New England is still, happily for itself, tinctured in all its
language, habits, modes of feeling and thought, by a strict Scriptural
training--"Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh." Look
below the surface and you will see that there is no irreverence whatever
beneath Hosea Biglow's daring use of Scripture; only that "perfect love
which casteth out fear;" that the very purpose of the whole book is to
set up Christ's Gospel as _the_ standard by which alone all men are to
be judged in all their acts. We may disagree from him in the
conclusions which he draws from Scripture; of his earnest sincerity in
enforcing those conclusions we cannot doubt.
It is satisfactory, indeed, to think that Mr. Lowell's shafts have
already, in a great measure, ceased to be required, or would have to be
aimed now at other bull's eyes. The servility of the Northern States to
the South, which twelve years ago so raised his indignation, has well
nigh ceased to be. The vital importance of the slavery question is now
thoroughly recognized by the great republican party, which I trust is
year by year advancing towards an assured victory.
For that victory Mr. Lowell has done knight's-service by his other
works, as well as by the "Biglow Papers." I need not do more than refer
to these, however, as they have been published in a cheap form over
here, and I believe have circulated largely. In his other poems he is by
no means so equal as in the "Biglow Papers;" but I cannot help thinking
that (leaving out of sight altogether his satirical works) fifty years
hence he will be recognized as the greatest American poet of our day,
notwithstanding the contemporary judgment which has in England, and I
believe in America, assigned that proud place to his friend and
predecessor at Harvard College, H. W. Longfellow. To any reader who has
not met with Lowell's Poems, and who may be induced to read them after a
perusal of the present volume, I should recommend "The Vision of Sir
Launfal," "A Parable," "Stanzas on Freedom," "The Present Crisis," and
"Hunger and Cold," as specially fit to be read in connexion with the
"Biglow Papers." It is only by looking at all sides of a man of this
mould that you can get a notion of his size and power. Readers,
therefore, should search out for themselves the exquisite little gems of
a lighter kind, which lie about in the other poems comprised in the
volume. I am only indicating those which, as it seems to me, when taken
with the "Biglow Papers," give the best idea of the man, and what his
purpose in life has been, and is.
I will not think so badly of my countrymen as to suppose for a moment
that "The Biglow Papers" will not become the intimate friends of all
good fellows in England; and when we have really made friends with a
book, we like to know something about our friend's father; so I shall
add the little I know of the history of James Russell Lowell.
He was born in 1819, at Cambridge, Massachusetts, so that he is some
years younger than our own laureate, and we may hope to get out of him
many another noble work, though we shall get no more "Biglow Papers"--at
least I fear not; for the sort of inspiration which finds voice in this
way comes, I take it, only once in a man's life. And moreover, this is
his own conviction. In a letter which I received from him as to the
present publication, he writes: "Friendly people say to me sometimes,
'Write us more "Biglow Papers;"' and I have even been simple enough to
try, only to find that I could not. This has helped to persuade me that
the book was a genuine growth, and not a manufacture, and that therefore
I had an honest right to be pleased without blushing, if people liked
it." He was educated at Harvard College, Cambridge; and, in fact, has
never lived away from his native place. He read law, but never
practised; and in 1855 was chosen to succeed Longfellow as Professor of
Modern Literature in Harvard College. He has visited Europe twice; and I
am sure that every one who knows his works must join with me in the
hearty wish that he may come among us again as soon as possible.