LOWELL’S EXPERIENCE AS AN EDITOR
Lowell’s whole life was a literary life, from the days of the “Boston
Miscellany” and of the “Pioneer.” And I am well aware that these notes
will be read with a certain special interest by young people who are
asking themselves whether literature, as such, offers “a career” to
those who are entering upon life.
It required much more resolution to determine on such a career in
America in 1841 than it does now. I will attempt, therefore, in this
paper, to bring together such illustrations of Lowell’s life as a man
of letters as we may have room for, which do not specially connect
themselves with the political history of the times, or with his special
work as a professor in Harvard College.
In an earlier chapter I have already printed some of the pathetic
memoranda which show how modestly his career began. Knowing as we do
that, before he was fifty years old, this man was to rank as one of the
first poets of his time, is it not pathetic to find him writing to his
nearest friend to ask whether it is probable that three hundred copies
of his poems can be sold?
It happened, as also has appeared in that chapter, that it was the
periodical press which gave the means of physical support to the young
man who was attempting this venture. In the same chapter I cited what
is the really funny criticism of Willis, if he made it,—when he says
that a man of genius may not be a good editor. As it happened, Lowell
devoted much of his after life to the steady business of editing
periodicals. I mean by this, not simply the general oversight of the
plan of the journal for which he was responsible, but that diligent and
tedious daily work, whether of reading manuscripts, of correcting and
improving them, of correspondence with writers, and of hourly intimacy
with publishers, which makes at once the drudgery and the pleasure of
real editorial life. I observe that most young men and women who think
they want to be “connected with the press” suppose that such a
connection will simply compel them to go to the theatre every night,
and to read agreeable novels and magazines all day. I have had a good
deal to do with editorial life myself, and I have not found that this
general impression regarding it is correct. Certainly Lowell never “got
round to it.” He worked with steadfast diligence. He says in one place
that he worked more than fifteen hours, on an average, every day. This
means that he really read the manuscripts which he had in hand, that he
really looked over the range of the world’s business to see what he
wanted, and that he tried to engage such authors as were best fitted
for special work in the journal for which he was engaged. His
acquaintance with men and women became larger and larger as he did
this, and there is many a pretty story of the encouragement which he
gave to young writers at the very beginning of their career.
Thus, there was a joke afterwards between him and Mr. Aldrich. When
Aldrich, somewhat timidly, sent his first poem to the “Atlantic,”
Lowell at once recognized its worth, and sent to him the most cordial
thanks. Many years after, Aldrich found himself, in turn, editor of the
“Atlantic.” Lowell, then at the height of his reputation, sent a poem
to the magazine. Aldrich had the fun to copy, in acknowledging the
manuscript, the very note which Lowell wrote to him, most kindly,
twenty years before, in which he recognized the value of his first
contribution. Lowell came round to the office at once, and told Aldrich
that he had almost determined him “to adopt a literary career.”
As the reader knows, Lowell edited the “Pioneer” for its short
existence of three months.
In the summer of 1846 he agreed to write once a week, in prose or in
poetry, for the “Anti-Slavery Standard,” the best of the anti-slavery
journals. He was called a corresponding editor. The paper was edited by
the masterly hand of Mr. Sidney Gay, afterwards the editor of the
“Popular History.”
Mr. Lawrence Lowell, in his interesting memoir of the poet’s life,
calls the few years from 1846 to 1850 the most active and the most
happy of his life. “His happiness was, indeed, broken by the death of
little Blanche, in March, 1847; but a new joy came to him in the birth
of another daughter, Rose, toward the close of the year. Both grief and
joy, however, seem to have stimulated his poetic feeling, and poems
such as ‘The First Snowfall’ and ‘The Changeling’ show the ecstasy to
which they brought his nature. During all this period he wrote
incessantly, sometimes about public affairs, sometimes from a purely
poetic impulse, with no direct relation to the great struggle in which
he was engaged, but almost always with a stern sense of his mission as
a prophet and a seer. His character no less than his poetic feeling had
deepened and strengthened, and poems like ‘The Present Crisis’ attest
the full maturity of his powers.”
When Phillips & Sampson established the “Atlantic Monthly,” in the
autumn of 1857, he was its first regular editor; and there are some
very nice letters of his in which he speaks of the somewhat sudden
change in the methods of his daily life which come in as he walks along
the river-bank from Elmwood and takes the street-car to the office in
Boston. If there were room, I could hardly print anything more
interesting than specimens of the notes which he wrote to authors. They
give a very pretty picture of the watchful interest which he took in
each individual number of the “Atlantic.” It is as the mother of a
large family might not let her children go to a Christmas party without
seeing that the hands of each one were perfectly clean, and that the
collar of each one was prettier and neater than the others’. I think I
may say that, in a somewhat varied experience in such matters, I have
known no editor who had so close a watchful eye on the detail of the
work of his journal.
[Illustration: JAMES T. FIELDS]
This connection with the “Atlantic” lasted for four years, when James
T. Fields, the prince among editors, took his place. In the year 1863,
in company with his very dear friend Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, he
became the editor of the “North American Review.” What this meant
appears from the fact that between the years 1863 and 1877 he wrote
thirty-four “articles” for the “North American,” besides as many more
of what, in the language of that day, were called “critical notices.”
In the “Atlantic Monthly,” between the years 1857 and 1877, he wrote
one hundred and sixteen articles, prose or poetry.
There are, as I have intimated, a great many men now prominent among
our men of letters who recollect Lowell gratefully as being the
Beatrice who first welcomed them into this Paradise. Without attempting
to name half of them, I will say that Mr. Howells, whom he welcomes so
cordially in a letter which is to be found in Mr. Norton’s collection,
and Mr. Aldrich, to whom I referred just now, both afterwards became
editors of the “Atlantic” themselves. In their time they have passed on
the welcome which the prince of American poets gave to both of them.
And each of them inherited in turn the traditions of the office, as he
established them.
The establishment of the “Atlantic Monthly” in the autumn of 1857
proved so fortunate an era in the history of the native literature of
America that I may safely give to it a few sentences in these
memorials. Lowell’s connection with that magazine enlarged very widely
the circle of his friends and the range of his life.
It was, then, two or three years since the little Eden of Boston
bookselling had been disturbed in its somnolence to a sudden “new
departure,” if we may borrow an admirable phrase from the forgotten
times when we had a mercantile marine. This “new departure” was the
movement, as of a stork among a world of frogs, instituted by Phillips
& Sampson, a new-born firm among booksellers.
The publishing business in Boston felt the wave of their impetuosity.
It can hardly be said that the old houses waked from the decorous sleep
of many years. But this new publishing house, with manners and customs
wholly unknown before, suddenly appeared, to the dumb amazement of the
old standbys, and to the delight and amusement of all young America, in
the East.
Boston had never earned for itself its distinct position as one of the
publishing centres of America. It had inherited that position without
earning it. Harvard College, the Boston Athenæum, the American Academy,
the Massachusetts Historical Society, the New England system of
lectures, and the great free school system, which gave a liberal
education to any boy who would take it,—these, all together, created a
circle of authors. They created the “Monthly Anthology,” the “North
American Review,” and the “Christian Examiner.” Such men as Bancroft,
Prescott, Hildreth, Sparks, the Everetts, Hawthorne, Emerson, and now
Lowell, came forward with books which had to be published. The loyalty
of the Boston lawyers to their business, of the doctors to theirs, and
of the ministers to theirs, had made it necessary that there should be
printers and shops where books could be bought and sold. So the
importers of English books had become, in a languid way, the publishers
of books.
But they did not want to publish them. They did not expect to make
money by publishing them. They did not know anything about them.
Alexander Everett used to say that a bookseller was the only tradesman
who knew nothing about the wares he sold. Of the Boston trade in those
prehistoric days this was substantially true. But, in truth, there was
not much publishing, excepting the issue of some law books and a few
medical books. Hilliard & Gray, and Crocker & Brewster, attended to
these affairs and cared little for any others.
Any one of the old firms regarded an author with a manuscript much as a
dealer in Russian sail-cloth might regard a lady who should come into
his counting-room and ask him to make her a linen handkerchief.
All of a sudden, as a wave of water might sweep over a thick, rotten
ice-floe in one of Nansen’s summers, a marvelous inundation swept over
this decorous imbecility. That is to say, two young men formed a
“publishing firm.” They did not want to import books. They wanted to
make them and to sell them.
More simply speaking, “Phillips & Sampson” appeared about the year
1843. Charles Sampson (a young man when he died in 1858) used to say
that he had peddled molasses candy from a tin waiter on holidays, when
he was a boy. Moses Dresser Phillips had been brought up to the retail
book trade in Worcester, in the shop of Clarendon Harris, who succeeded
Isaiah Thomas, the publisher of the first American Bible. I do not know
how these young fellows first met each other. But it was they who
taught the drowsy chiefs of the little Boston book-shops the great
lesson that in a nation which had taught thirty million people how to
read, there were more than five hundred people who wanted to read
Emerson’s essays or Macaulay’s history.
Emerson, as has been said, had never received one cent from the
publication of his essays, when Phillips & Sampson, about 1850,
published “English Traits” for him. Mr. Phillips was by marriage
connected with Emerson’s family, and had persuaded him to leave James
Monroe and give the new book to the younger firm, now well established
in business.
[Illustration: MOSES DRESSER PHILLIPS]
But this new firm meant to make books which everybody must buy, and to
sell them where anybody could read. They did not pretend to retail
books, any more than the Pacific Mills pretend to sell to a good
housewife the material for a shirt or a sheet. They did mean to make
them and to sell them to the retailers. So far as the nation at large
went, or a wholesale trade with dealers anywhere, they had hardly any
rivals in Boston. Opposite them was the shop of Ticknor & Fields. The
young, wide-awake James T. Fields, now so well known by his charming
reminiscences and other essays, had entered that shop, as “youngest
boy,” in the later thirties. His broad and intelligent foresight was
beginning to bear fruit. But Allen & Ticknor can hardly be numbered
among publishers, and Ticknor & Fields did not exist as a firm until
Cummings & Hilliard had become Hilliard & Gray. This firm published law
books and medical books. Crocker & Brewster, successors to Governor
Armstrong, imported and sold theological books. I bought my Hebrew
Bible and my Gesenius’s Lexicon from them in 1839. But, if a man wanted
one of these firms to publish a book for him, why, they would have told
him that he must pay for his plates and his printing. Thus Mr.
Bancroft, fortunately for himself, owned the plates and the printed
copies of his own History from 1833 until he died.
Charles Sampson and Moses Dresser Phillips made an admirable
combination, and the early death of both of them made a break in the
book business of Boston which it did not easily recover from. These
young men were not satisfied with the gilt-edged retail “trade” of
Boston and Cambridge. They went far afield with their wares. Mr.
Phillips used to tell with glee the story of their first orders from
San Francisco in the ’49 days. “So many hundred packs of ‘Highland’
cards, so many of the ‘True Thomas’ cards, and so on till the box was
nearly full, and then ‘one dozen Bibles.’”
This was seed-corn, he said. And then, in 1852 or 1853, he would read
you their last invoices, as they answered immense orders from
California. “Four hundred Byron’s Poems, four hundred Scott’s Poems,
one hundred Cowper’s Poems,” and so on, in large shipments. And he
would say, “That is the crop that comes from the twelve Bibles. Such
editions of the poets,” he would say, “as you would not have seen in
your house,—but, after all, Cowper is Cowper, and Scott is Scott.”
Both these men were resolute to meet the people halfway. Both of them
were Democrats in partisan connection, not because they believed in the
heresies of such men as Polk and Dallas, but because they believed in
the People. There was nothing of the white-kid glove, gilt-edged paper,
“u in honour” nonsense about them. Naturally, such believers as they
were regarded as unorthodox in the trade of that day.
Their great onslaught on decorous publishing was made when they printed
and sold Macaulay’s History for fifty cents a volume at retail.
Such a firm as this won its way up from selling books at auction, at
retail, on winter evenings, to publishing large editions and placing
them everywhere in America. And when the fullness of time for such an
enterprise came, they determined to publish “The Atlantic Monthly.” The
plan was matured in the autumn of 1857. Through the kindness of a
friend, I am able to reprint here Mr. Phillips’s own description, at
the time, of a famous dinner in which the enterprise was first
announced—I ought not to say in public, for this was a private dinner.
But I may say that that dinner-party was the first of a series which
the Saturday Club of Boston has held from that day to this day. Mr.
Phillips wrote, “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 till you come. But to the party: My invitations included only
R.W. Emerson, H.W. Longfellow, J.K. Lowell, Mr. Motley (the ‘Dutch
Republic’ man), O.W. Holmes, Mr. Cabot, 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, when I shall again meet the same persons,
with one other (Whipple, the essayist) added to that brilliant
constellation of philosophical, poetical, 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.”
In this letter he does not tell of his own little speech, made at the
launch. But at the time we all knew of it. He announced the plan of the
magazine by saying, “Mr. Cabot is much wiser than I am. Dr. Holmes can
write funnier verses than I can. Mr. Motley can write history better
than I. Mr. Emerson is a philosopher and I am not. Mr. Lowell knows
more of the old poets than I.” But after this confession he said, “But
none of you knows the American people as well as I do.”
This was the truth, and they knew it was the truth. The “Atlantic,” at
that moment, asserted its true place. It was not “The _Boston_
Miscellany;” it was the journal for the nation, which at that time had
no Pacific slope which needed to be named.
[Illustration: OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (1862)]
Yet I have guessed that, in the fact that “the Atlantic States” were
then contributing the capital and the men who were forming the Pacific
States, we find the origin of the very fortunate name of the magazine.
The civilization of the smaller Atlantic basin was beginning to assert
itself in that great Pacific basin which implies, when we speak of it,
half the surface of the world. And of such an assertion the “Atlantic”
was to be the mouthpiece. But this is my guess only. I never talked
with him about the name, and I do not know who suggested it. No man
then thought of the Philippines.
I always thought that, at the beginning, Mr. Phillips meant to edit the
magazine himself. I do not believe that it occurred to him, before he
began, that a magazine office is a place to which every prophet, every
poet, and every fool in the land thinks he may send what he chooses to
write, and supposes that he is “entitled” to have it read, not to say
printed and circulated. I think he thought he was to ask John, James,
and the others, for whom he was publishing books, to send articles fit
for the magazine, as Mr. Prescott, for instance, sent a chapter of his
“Charles the Fifth.” He did not think that Tom, Dick, or Harry had any
“rights” in the business. Perhaps Mr. Underwood or some one in the
office was to read the proofs.
But very soon this simple Arcadian notion vanished. And very soon
Lowell was the working editor of the magazine.
Let me say a word about any presumption that Lowell was a mere
figurehead, and that some one else did the work. Trust me, for I know.
I have worked under many editors, good and bad. Not one of them
understood his business better than Lowell, or worked at its details
more faithfully. I think he hated to read manuscripts as much as any
man of sense does. In those days there was practically no typewriting.
I think that, like any man of sense, he would prefer to write an
article than to read the average “contribution.” But he had said he
would do it, and he did it—up to time, so far as I have seen, careful
in detail even to the least detail, and he had no reason to be ashamed
of his work when he was done.
In those days people of literary aspirations, especially young people,
read the English magazines almost religiously. Indeed, “Blackwood” and
“Frazer” and sometimes the “Dublin University Magazine” were worth
reading. I am afraid that, for all I have said or implied about the
American or Atlantic basis of the new magazine, the original cover was,
in a way, an imitation of “Blackwood.” The color was, as it is, a sort
of tawny brown. It was more tawny then than it is now. Did it just
suggest the “tawny lion pawing to be free”? I do not think Phillips
thought of this. Perhaps Holmes and Lowell did. Where “Blackwood’s
Magazine” had and has a medallion head of somebody, we put on the cover
of our “maga” the head of John Winthrop, from the old portrait said to
be by Vandyke,—I do not know why.
Now this was as bad a mistake as the New Yorkers made in calling their
magazine the “Knickerbocker.” That is, it gave a local emblem to a
national magazine. John Winthrop was a great man. But his greatness
belonged to Massachusetts, and not to the nation. West of the Hudson
River there were not a thousand men in the country who knew anything
about him.
But this mistake was not held to. After two years the “Atlantic” had
full reason to show that it stood, not for Massachusetts, but for “We,
the People of the United States.” And the national flag was substituted
for the head of a Massachusetts governor. Why it was taken off, I never
knew; I doubt if any one else does. One is pleased to see, as this
sheet passes the press, that it has appeared again.[8]
In the war the magazine was loyal from hub to tire. Some capital
contributions to history are embalmed in it. I remember the late Caleb
William Loring’s excellent paper on Antietam, a good companion to Dr.
Holmes’s “Hunt after the Captain.”
It may be amusing to preserve one or two reminiscences of the delay
with which magazines then appeared, at which writers meekly complained.
The admirable Theodore Winthrop was killed in a miserable outpost
skirmish above Hampton. Then, and, alas! not till then, the “Atlantic
people” remembered that they had some excellent manuscripts of his,
which had been seasoning in the safe, doubtless paid for when they were
accepted, but “crowded out” till then. Then they were pushed into type
as soon as might be. But death came before the “Atlantic” took the
credit, which it deserved, of discovering the author.
I tell this, with some venom, because I myself suffered a little from
what Hamlet should have called the pangs of delay of magazine men. I
had written for the Ohio canvass of September, 1863, a story called
“The Man without a Country.” It was “rushed through,” that it might be
in time to defeat Vallandigham in the election of October. And by such
swiftness of proofs and revises, unexampled before, it got itself
printed in the December number of the same year, when poor Vallandigham
had been well beaten and forgotten!
Ah, youngsters of 1898, how little do you know of what you enjoy in
these days of “quick proofs, no revises, fast coaches.” The true rule
for an editor is to send back to each author every manuscript which he
has by him, and to trust to February to fill the appetite of March. One
does not care to have his eggs too old.
It is to go back a little from the birthday of the “Atlantic” to speak
of the first of the “Biglow Papers” ten years before. The series ran
for nearly four years.
It was in June, 1846, in face of the almost unanimous hatred of the
Mexican War among Massachusetts people, that a regiment was raised in
Boston and the neighborhood for that war. Lowell saw a recruiting
officer in the street, and was roused to much the sort of wrath which
fired the average Boston gentleman in 1773 when he saw a “lobsterback”
loafing in the same street with as little reason. Lowell wrote for the
“Courier” what he calls “a squib,” which was the first of the “Biglow
Papers.” Mr. Lawrence Lowell reminds us that he did not follow up its
success at once. The third paper was published a year and a half after
the first. After this the poems of the first series appeared in rapid
succession.
[Illustration:
“A FABLE FOR CRITICS” PROOF-SHEET WITH LOWELL’S CORRECTIONS
_From the original, kindly lent by Mrs. Charles F. Briggs, Brooklyn,
N.Y._]
In the period between the middle of 1847 and the end of 1849 he wrote
most of the “Biglow Papers” of that series, he continued his regular
work for the “Standard,” and wrote the “Fable for Critics” and the
“Vision of Sir Launfal.” Mr. Lawrence Lowell says that the last was
written in forty-eight hours, during which he scarcely slept or ate;
and he considers it the most generally popular of the poet’s longer
poems.
Success gave him new stimulus, and in a happy home he worked with all
the help which love and true sympathy could give him. To enter into the
spirit of that life, one must make real what Mr. Lawrence Lowell has so
well expressed. “He was, no doubt, to some extent a martyr for his
political opinions, but no martyr was ever so high-spirited, so jovial,
and so charming. As he said himself, he was curiously compounded of two
utterly distinct characters. One half was clear mystic and enthusiast,
the other humorist; and the humor, which is the best balance-wheel
vouchsafed to man, prevented his remaining narrow or fanatical.”
“On July 1, 1851, he embarked on a sailing vessel for Genoa, and passed
most of the following year in Italy. A great part of the year was spent
in Rome, with his lifelong friend, William Wetmore Story.” But the
charm of the earlier years was broken. His little Rose died in 1850;
Walter, his only son, died two years later; Mrs. Lowell’s health,
always delicate, gave way, and she died in 1853, on the 27th of
October, after they had returned to America.
His duty as professor at Cambridge began in September, 1856. Of some
details in his discharge of this I have spoken in another chapter. He
would refer, sometimes, to a certain “numbness” in literary effort
which came from the monotony of a teacher’s duties. But, as Mr.
Lawrence Lowell says, when we remember that most of his prose books
were written in the twenty years of his professorship, that in the same
time he wrote “The Cathedral,” the second series of the “Biglow
Papers,” the great “Commemoration Ode,” and several of his best shorter
poems, we feel that we must not take too seriously what he said of the
numbing effect of the class-room.
Of “The Cathedral,” after nearly thirty years, I may perhaps mention a
contemporary criticism. When it was published, I was the editor of “Old
and New.” My theory was, and is, that generally a book should be
reviewed by some one in sympathy with the author. So I sent “The
Cathedral” to Mr. Waldo Emerson, hoping that he would write a review of
it for our magazine. He returned the book the next day, saying that he
could not write the article. When I met him next, I expressed my
regret; and the philosopher said simply, “But, I _like_ Lowell, I like
Lowell.” To which I replied, “Yes, and you like the poem, do you not?”
“I like it—yes; but I think he had to pump.” The figure is best
understood by those of us who know the difference between “striking
oil” and digging an artesian well for it and putting in valves and
pistons with a steam-engine. Probably Lowell would have enjoyed the
criticism as much as any one.
[Illustration: WILLIAM WETMORE STORY]
Lowell’s own inside view of editing, and of the “Atlantic,” the early
career of which he directed, peeps out again and again in his letters.
If it were well to print here some of his private notes to
contributors, they would, as I have intimated, show an almost motherly
care of the new-born magazine. The first number is dated December,
1857, and in that month he writes, “Even the Magazine has its
compensations.” Let the reader remember that the new duty he has
undertaken, the “avocation,” is superimposed on his “vocation,”—the
regular work of a full college professor. “First, it has almost got me
out of debt, and, next, it compels me into morning walks to the
printing-office. [This was the Riverside Press, not far from the
college.] There is a little foot-path which leads along the river-bank,
and it is lovely, whether in clear, cold mornings, when the fine
filaments of the bare trees on the horizon seem floating up like
sea-mosses in the ether sea, or when (as yesterday) a gray mist fills
our Cambridge cup, and gives a doubtful loom to its snowy brim of
hills, while the silent gulls wheel over the nestling cakes of ice
which the Charles is whirling seaward.”
If other editors had a morning walk like this, and had the eyes to see
and the ears to hear, it might be well for other readers.
When one remembers that the Autocrat’s papers were going on in the
“Atlantic” at this time, that Motley and Prescott were publishing bits
of their histories in it, that Longfellow wrote almost regularly in
these numbers, and that younger writers, now well known, were winning
their spurs in these first two volumes, it is easy to see that the work
of the editor, who was easily chief among them, was interesting and
inspiring to him. People were not then used to such papers as his on
Choate and Cushing. He writes this scrap in October, 1858:—
“Phillips was so persuaded of the stand given to the Magazine by the
Choate article that he has been at me ever since for another. So I have
been writing a still longer one on Cushing. I think you will like
it,—though on looking over the Choate article I am inclined to think
that, on the whole, the better of the two.
“The worst [of editing] is that it leads me to bore my friends when I
do get at them. To be an editor is almost as bad as being President.”
To Mr. Higginson, then forty years younger than he is now, he says, “As
for your own contributions, I may say to you, as I always have to Mr.
Underwood, that they are just to my liking,—scholarly, picturesque,
and, above all, earnest,—I think the most _telling_ essays we have
printed.”
And when he resigns the charge to his friend Fields—his warm friend
till death—in May, 1861: “I was going to say I was glad to be rid of my
old man of the sea. But I don’t believe I am. A bore that is periodical
gets a friendly face at last, and we miss it on the whole....
“Well, good-by—delusive royalty! I abdicate with what grace I may. I
lay aside my paper crown and feather sceptre.”
And in the same note he says he shall always gladly do what he can for
the “Atlantic,” a promise which he well fulfilled. The second series of
the “Biglow Papers” was published there.
* * * * *
In a way, perhaps, he had a right to feel that he, earlier than any one
else, had the credit for the first fortunes of the “Atlantic,” and to
be proud of them. To become the editor of the aged “North American,”
hand in hand with his near friend Mr. Norton, was a wholly different
thing.
I am sure that there is somewhere, among his by-letters, an outburst as
to what he will do “if he shall ever edit the ‘North American.’” I
think most youngsters of his time—who were born with a pen in
hand—indulged in the same dream, if they were bred within sound of the
college bell at Cambridge.
In those prehistoric days the “North American,” to the notions of the
few hundred people who had ever heard of it, was wholly different from
what any journal is now to any reader. Four times a year
only—quarterly!—think of that, young contributors to to-day’s
“Atlantic” who can hardly live three weeks, to know if that horrid man
has refused your poem, or if that charming and sensible editor has
printed it! Read Mrs. Lyman’s Life, or any other good sketch of New
England life in the twenties of this century, and see how people wrote
or spoke of the arrival of the new “North American,” with the interest
with which the inhabitants of Saturn might speak of the regular
decennial fall of some well-timed aerolite!
The “North American” is now so different from what it was in 1864, when
Lowell took charge of it with Mr. Norton, that its accomplished editor
will pardon me if I say ten words more about its infant issues, to the
young writers of this generation. It was founded—modestly, yes, but
with determination—among a little confident circle of the well-trained
young men of Boston, at a moment when Boston counted, perhaps, fifty
thousand people. These were people who had time to read, and time to
write, and thought themselves, strange to say, the rivals and equals of
anybody in the world. The quarterly was the then regnant fashion. The
Edinburgh “Quarterly,” the London “Quarterly,” were the arrogant
dictators of English literature. “Go to, now! We will dictate also! We
will have a ‘Quarterly’ of our own!” For one, I like what the
vernacular calls the “dander” of that determination.
And some plucky and loyal bits of good American sentiment and statement
got themselves into the juvenile “North American.” But it was awfully
proper. Its editors were more anxious about making their “Quarterly”
respectable in the eyes of their ten English readers than of the
thousand American readers, more or less, who paid them five dollars a
year for their editing.
[Illustration: J.R. Lowell. Elmwood.]
Now the remainder of the people of England and of the people of America
did not know that any such “Quarterly” existed. There had never risen
for it any publisher who “knew the American people.”
In one of the changes of literary “property,” the dwindling “list” of
the now venerable Review fell into the hands of people who had courage
to give Norton and Lowell the charge of it. Soon after, Fields, Osgood
& Co. bought the Review.
“Norton and I have undertaken to edit the ‘North American,’” Lowell
writes. “A rather Sisyphean job, you will say. It wanted three chief
elements to be successful. It wasn’t thoroughly, that is, thick and
thinly, loyal; it wasn’t lively; and it had no particular opinions on
any particular subject. It was an eminently safe periodical, and
accordingly was in great danger of running aground.”
To this “eminently safe” journal Mr. Norton and Lowell undertook to
give loyalty and life. To the little circle which followed in the
steps, now faltering, of the Mutual Admiration Club, they added
contributors from all latitudes and longitudes. Thus the new departure
is marked by letters asking for articles,—to Motley in Vienna, Howells
in Venice, Stedman, who was a new writer for them; and, as the reader
has seen, Lowell’s own work was in amount what one would hardly have
wished for had the Review furnished his only occupation.
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