And so the conversation goes on touching upon current topics, all having some bearing on the great underlying theme. One sees the three men moving over the ice, cautiously, and not daring to try its firmness by stamping on it, Mr. Calhoun alone maintaining a rigidity of posture as if he had satisfied himself that his theory of the probable thickness of the ice was irrefutable.

Lowell complained to Gay that their position was so purely destructive as to require them to look at everything from a point of criticism, and that this became wearisome. In saying this, he was thinking probably of the general attitude which was by necessity taken by a small knot of political and moral agitators employing their engines against a strongly intrenched evil. Criticism, however, in its more comprehensive sense, was the weapon which he most naturally used, but he turned his critical inquiry rather upon men than upon institutions, or even upon political measures. In this Imaginary Conversation, for example, the public men satirized were examined for their mental and moral characteristics. Through his studies in literature and history, with his insight as a poet and man of imagination, and his habit of holding up before his mind fundamental ideas such as truth and freedom, Lowell was chiefly interested in the characters of public men; in applying his criticism to Foote, Cass, Calhoun, Clay, Webster, and other of his contemporaries, though he was mainly testing them by their attitude toward slavery, he was constantly measuring them by great and permanent standards. The larger the man, the more thoroughly interested was he in penetrating the man’s words and deeds, and seeking to come at the bottom facts of his nature.

I have already referred to the early occasion he took, in his connection with the Standard, to try his judgment upon Webster, and it is interesting to observe that no other statesman of the time was so constantly the subject of his criticism. In common with others, he watched with eagerness the course of Webster in connection with the Whig nomination for the presidency in 1848, when the disappointment of the Massachusetts senator was so little disguised. “What Will Mr. Webster Do?” was the title of the article which he published in the Standard after General Taylor had been nominated—that nomination “not fit to be made.” Lowell never had the modern journalist’s faculty for jumping at once into the centre of his subject. Like his own “musing organist,” he is very apt to “begin doubtfully and far away,” but he is also pretty sure to strike a note at the outset which has, it turns out, a real relation to the theme he means to play. Thus in this article he begins with the reflection: “It is astonishing to see how fond men are of company. We demand a select society even upon the fence, and will not jump on this side or that till we have made as accurate a prospective census as possible;” and so on for several paragraphs of acute and amusing variations, noting especially the disposition to set expediency in the place of principle, when looking out for the majority with whom we wish to side. “After all,” he goes on, “even in estimating expediencies, we are loath to trust ourselves. We desire rather the judgment of this or that notable person, and dare not so much as write Honesty is the best policy, or any other prudent morality, till he has set us a copy at the top of the page. In Massachusetts just now there are we know not how many people waiting for Mr. Webster’s action on the recent nomination for the Presidency, and no doubt there is hardly a village in the country which has not its little coterie of self-dispossessed politicians expecting in like manner the moment when the decision of some person, whose stomach does the thinking for theirs, shall allow them to take sides.

“‘What will Mr. Webster do?’ asks Smith. ‘Greatest man of the age!’ says Brown. ‘Of any age,’ adds Jones triumphantly. Meanwhile the greatest mind of any age is sulking at Marshfield. It has had its rattle taken away from it. It has been told that nominations were not good for it. It has not been allowed to climb up the back of the Presidential chair. We have a fancy that a truly great mind can move the world as well from a three-legged stool in a garret as from the easiest cushion in the White House. Where the great mind is, there is the President’s house, whether at Wood’s Hole or Washington.

“We would not be understood as detracting in the least from Mr. Webster’s reputation as a man of great power. He has hitherto given evidence of a great force, it seems to us, rather than of a great intellect. But it is a force working without results. It is like a steam-engine[63] which is connected by no band with the machinery which it ought to turn. A great intellect leaves behind it something more than a great reputation. The earth is in some way the better for its having taken flesh upon itself. We cannot find that Mr. Webster has communicated an impulse to any of the great ideas which it is the destiny of the nineteenth century to incarnate in action. His energies have been absorbed by Tariff and Constitution and Party—dry bones into which the touch of no prophet could send life....

“‘What will Mr. Webster do?’ This is of more importance to him than to the great principle which is beginning to winnow the old parties. This, having God on its side, can do very well without Mr. Webster—but can he do as well without it? The truth of that principle will not be affected by his taking one side or the other. But occasio celeris, and the great man is always the man of the occasion. He mounts and guides that mad steed whose neck is clothed with thunder, and whose fierce ha! ha! at the sound of the trumpets appals weaker spirits. Two or three years ago we spoke of one occasion which Mr. Webster allowed to slip away from him. That was the annexation of Texas. Another is offered him now. We do not believe that party ever got what was meant for mankind. Mr. Webster has now once more an opportunity of showing which he was meant for. If party be large enough to hold him, then mankind can afford to let him go. Nevertheless, it is sad to imagine him still grinding for the Philistines. We cannot help thinking that his first appearance as Samson grasping the pillars of the idol temple would draw a fuller house than Mr. Van Buren in the same character....

“Let us concede to Mr. Webster’s worshippers that he has heretofore given proof enough of a great intellect, and let us demand of him now that he make use of, perhaps, his last chance to become a great Man. Of what profit are the hands of a giant in the picking up of pins? Let him leave Banks and Tariffs to more slender fingers. If ever a man was intended for a shepherd of the people, Daniel Webster is. The people are fast awakening to great principles: what they want is a great man to concentrate and intensify their diffuse enthusiasm. And it is not every sort of greatness that will serve for the occasion. Webster, if he would only let himself go, has every qualification for a popular leader. The use of such a man would be that of a conductor to gather, from every part of the cloud of popular indignation, the scattered electricity which would waste itself in heat lightnings, and grasping it into one huge thunderbolt, let it fall like the messenger of an angry god among the triflers in the Capitol.

“Let Mr. Webster give over at last the futile task of sowing the barren seashore of the present, and devote himself to the Future, the only legitimate seed-field of great minds. Slimmer and glibber men will slip through the labyrinth of politics more easily than he. He will always be outstripped and outwitted. Politics are in their nature transitory. He who writes his name on them, be the letters never so large, writes it on the sand. The next wind of shifting opinion puffs it out forever. It is never too late to do a wise or great action. We do not yet wholly despair of hearing the voice of our Daniel reading the Mene, Mene, written on the wall of our political fabric.”

The Buffalo Convention indorsed the nomination of Martin Van Buren, by the Barnburners, or anti-slavery wing of the Democratic party, with the result that the disaffected Whigs came to the support of General Taylor, and Webster rather tardily came forward and cast in his influence on that side. Lowell had been watching for his action, and at once wrote one of his bantering yet serious articles.

“Mr. Webster,” he said, “with the tan of the Richmond October sun not yet out of his face, is shocked beyond measure at Mr. Van Buren’s former pro-slavery attitude. Sitting upon the fence at Marshfield, he tells his neighbors that, should he and Mr. Van Buren meet upon the same political platform, they could not look at each other without laughing. If Mr. Webster’s face looks as black as it is said to have done just after the Philadelphia nomination, we think it the last thing in the world that any one would venture even a smile at. Mr. Webster finds fault with Mr. Van Buren because Northern Democratic Senators voted in favor of the annexation of Texas. But where was Mr. Webster himself? If he foresaw that Texas would be a Trojan horse, why did he not say so? If people would not come to hear him in Faneuil Hall, could he not have gathered his friends and neighbors together at Marshfield, as he did last week? It is perfectly clear now by actual demonstration, as it was clear then to persons who thought about the matter, that if Mr. Webster had put himself at the head of the opposers of annexation, Texas would never have been annexed, and he would have been the next President of the United States. The effect of the Free Soil movement, led by men with not a tithe of his influence, upon the Compromise Bill, puts this beyond a question. Where was the Wilmot Proviso then? At the Springfield Convention a year ago, Mr. Webster laid claim to this as ‘his thunder.’ In the Marshfield speech he dates its origin as far back as 1787. A precocious Cyclops, truly, to be forging thunderbolts in his fifth year! If Mr. Webster should live till 1852, and his retrospective anti-slavery feeling go on increasing at its present ratio, he will tell us that he established the Liberator in 1831.”

Quite at the end of Lowell’s stated contributions to the Standard came the longest of his articles in the form of a running comment on Webster’s fateful seventh of March speech, and in his comment he pronounced that judgment which was inevitable from an anti-slavery prophet. “It has been characterized,” he says, “like most of Mr. Webster’s speeches, as a ‘masterly effort.’ Some of them have been masterly successes, but this we sincerely hope and believe was an effort.... It is the plea of a lawyer and an advocate, but not of a statesman. It is not even the plea of an advocate on the side which he was retained to argue. We have heard enough of Democratic defalcations: here is a great Whig defalcation which dwarfs them all, for it is not money which has disappeared in this instance, but professions, pledges, principles. Men do not defend themselves in advance against accusations of inconsistency unless they feel an uncomfortable sense that there is some justice in the charge. This feeling pervades a great part of Mr. Webster’s speech like a blush.” He uses a fine scorn in dissecting Mr. Webster’s specious plea that slavery is nowhere directly prohibited in the teachings of the New Testament, and quietly asks if incest is anywhere forbidden there. “But if,” he adds, Mr. Webster were really in search of a scriptural prohibition of slavery, we think he might find it in that commandment which forbids us to covet anything that is our neighbor’s. For if we may not do that, then a fortiori we may not covet our neighbor himself.... Mr. Webster, we have said, avoids carefully all the moral points of the argument. He falls in with the common assumption that this is a question of political preponderance between the North and the South.... It is not a question between the North and the South. It is a struggle between the South (we had almost said Calhoun) and the spirit of the nineteenth century after Christ.... Is slavery the only thing whose sensitiveness is to be respected? Freedom has been thought by some to have her finer feelings also.” And he closes the discussion of the speech in these words:—

“If Mr. Webster’s speech should not find any one to confute it in the Senate,—a hard task, for assumptions and tergiversations are not easily replied to,—it will not be without answers abundant and conclusive. It will be answered by every generous instinct of the human heart, by every principle which a New Englander has imbibed in the Church, the Schoolhouse, or the Home, but especially by those inextinguishable sentiments which move men’s hatred of treachery and contempt for the traitor.”

The agreement which Lowell had with the Standard left him at liberty to send either prose or poetry, and as his prose had not necessarily a direct reference to the anti-slavery contest, so his poetry was to be independent of any polemic consideration. It was Lowell the writer whom Gay wished most to attach to the paper for the added weight and influence he would bring, and Lowell in making and holding to his agreement was not indifferent to the gentle stimulus which a regular engagement afforded. He was to send something on Friday if possible, on Saturday at any rate, of each week, and when the end of the week came, a sudden suggestion might turn him away from a half-finished article to let loose a poem in its place. The first five “Biglow Papers” were published in the Courier, the last four in the Standard, where also appeared, early in the connection, that poem entitled “Freedom,” which holds the essence of Lowell’s thought on this large subject, and is the best expression of the attitude of his mind as he entered with a certain sense of special enlistment upon the direct business of a crusade against slavery. The suggestion came from the revolution in France which swept Louis Philippe from his throne, and from that light blaze of revolutionary fire which for a moment kindled hopes in Germany and Italy. During this time appeared also several poems which reflected with varying lights the thought that stirred in him at the new birth, as it seemed, with which humanity was travailing. Such are the apologue of “Ambrose,” that grim poem “The Sower,” “Bibliolatres,” “A Parable,” but here also were “Beaver Brook,” first called “The Mill,” occasionally a poem like “Eurydice” which had been lying unprinted in his portfolio, and a few bits of rhymed satire which were thrown off by him on the spur of the moment, and were too careless in manner to be worth his gathering later into his volumes.

The active members of the anti-slavery society who controlled the policy of the Standard were divided in their judgment of the value of Lowell’s contributions. Those who like Mr. Gay himself were thoroughly in earnest, but held their minds open on other sides than the north-north-east, regarded Lowell as an important acquisition. His fame was growing, and he could have found a ready market for his wares if he had chosen to turn them to the best commercial account, but he cheerfully gave his time and thought to a paper which was always in an impecunious condition, so that the editor found it hard enough to pay the very moderate stipend agreed upon. Lowell, as we have seen, hated to be paid for his services to the anti-slavery cause, and never complained of the inadequacy of his salary; but he took a rational view of the case, and accepted what the paper could give, not measuring his own contributions by the meagre standard of his pay. Nor did he show any sensitiveness when his work came under editorial stricture. The intensity of feeling which possessed the anti-slavery men who were in the thick of the fight made them abnormally critical of those who seemed in any way to hold back, and when Lowell wrote a long review, with hearty praise, of a new volume of Whittier’s poetry, signing it with his initials, Mr. Gay did not scruple to prefix an editorial note, in which he denounced Whittier for his course in 1840, when he refused to follow the lead of those abolitionists who insisted upon the acceptance of women delegates at the London convention. The quarrel then aroused led to a break in the unity of the anti-slavery group. “Older abolitionists,” wrote Gay, “cannot forget what Lowell cannot be aware of, that in the struggle of 1840, which was a struggle of life and death to the anti-slavery cause, Whittier the Quaker was found side by side with the men who would have sacrificed that cause to crush, according even to their own acknowledgment, the right of woman to plead publicly in behalf of the slave.” Lowell took the matter quietly enough: “I could not very well say less, and you could not say more,” was his comment.

Yet how emphatically Mr. Gay valued Lowell’s contributions appears from all the letters of that anxious and harassed editor. Near the close of the connection, he wrote to Lowell: “I expected much good for the paper when I proposed that you should lighten my editorial labor, but it has received, I know, far more benefit than I looked for, great as that was. The influence of the Standard—leaving myself out of the question—since it was established has been very great, and it would also, I am sure, have been very famous had its aim been other than it was. No small amount of energy and intellect have been bestowed upon it, and its nursing fathers and mothers have taken good care of its being. But of this I am sure, and nobody else is in a position to know it so well as I—that of all the good things ever done for it, no one so good ever was done, as making you its joint editor. Its influence through you has been felt where it never was before. Through you it has a reputation which in all its previous existence it had failed to gain. A respect and regard is accorded to it because of your efforts, which no other person ever had, and no other person probably would ever have gained for it.”

But the Standard was not Mr. Gay’s paper to do with as he would, and there was a section of the committee in control that was impatient of a contributor who was not as they were, fighting away on foot, with stout oak staves in their hands, but was flying about as a sort of light-horse contingent, and sometimes seemed out of sight and yet not in the enemy’s country. “There is a small class,” Mr. Gay wrote,—“Stephen Foster is a good representative of it,—who did not consider you worth much, and many of whom confess they do not understand what you would be at.” The portrait which Lowell had drawn of Stephen Foster in his letter to Mr. McKim is likely to help the reader understand that he might possibly even feel contempt for Lowell’s indirect method of attacking slavery.

Lowell himself was under no illusions. He was warmly attached to Gay, and he had a keen intellectual admiration for Edmund Quincy. He respected to the full his several associates, but he knew well that, though he identified himself cordially with the small knot of earnest men and women who cried aloud and spared not, his temperament, his ideals, and his humor forbade him to shut himself up within the bounds they set themselves. Despite the independence he claimed and that was granted him, he could not escape the sense of his restrictions. “I told you and the Executive Committee honestly before I began,” he wrote Gay, “that they were setting me about a business for which I was not fitted. I feel as if the whole of them were looking over my shoulder whenever I sit down to write, and it quite paralyzes me.” And yet ten days later he could send his poem, “The Mill,” better known as “Beaver Brook,” and write, “I am just in time for the mail now, and I positively admire myself that I can sit down and write a poem to the Standard’s order so resolutely.”

At the end of his first year’s engagement Lowell began to receive intimations that the paper was in a hard way financially. “I am very sorry to see,” he writes the editor, “that the Standard is raised on so insecure a staff. I did not expect, (and so told the Executive Committee) that my writing for it would increase the circulation, but, I say again, as I said before, that they ought to be entirely satisfied with you. Not only is your own editorial work dote with spirit and vigor, but your selections are such as to render the paper one of the most interesting I see. But they ought to do something themselves. Phillips and Quincy could do a great deal if they would. They can’t expect two persons to give the paper an infinite variety, nor me to devote myself wholly to it. I have continued to write after my year was up, but I have had no intimation from the Committee whether they wished my services any longer or not. I am very willing to continue, for if I were to give up this engagement, I must find some other, in order to make the two ends meet.”

It then transpired that there had been a warm discussion in the Committee over the continuance of the arrangement, and Gay and his friends had at last effected a compromise by which the salary of $500 was to be divided between Lowell and Quincy, Lowell being required to contribute every other week only. Lowell accepted the situation philosophically, and doubtless felt some relief. “All through the year,” he wrote to Gay, “I have felt that I worked under a disadvantage. I have missed that inspiration (or call it magnetism) which flows into one from a thoroughly sympathetic audience. Properly speaking, I have never had it as an author, for I have never been popular. But then I have never needed it, because I wrote to please myself and not to please the people: whereas, in writing for the Standard, I have felt that I ought in some degree to admit the whole Executive Committee into my workshop, and defer as much as possible to the opinion of persons whose opinion (however valuable on a point of morals) would not probably weigh a pin with me on an æsthetic question. I have felt that I ought to work in my own way, and yet I have also felt that I ought’ to try to work in their way, so that I have failed of working in either. Nevertheless, I think that the Executive Committee would have found it hard to get some two or three of the poems I have furnished from any other quarter.” The entire letter, which is printed by Mr. Norton,[64] is interesting as further defining Lowell’s attitude toward his associates in the anti-slavery cause, and his separation from them on some of the crucial points. But it is clear that the whole situation was complicated for him by the pecuniary embarrassment under which he labored. He was ready, if it would relieve the situation, to release the Committee altogether, but he was willing to write once a fortnight if they wished him to do so. “To tell the truth,” he says, “I need money more this year than last. My father has just resigned a quarter part of his salary,[65] and a large part of the household expenses must devolve upon me. But I have resolved to turn as much of our land as I can into money, and invest it, though I confess I should prefer to leave it as it is, and where I am sure it would be safe for Mab and the rest.”

At the end of his second year the engagement was ended, though, largely out of friendship for Gay, Lowell contributed occasionally, and his name indeed was kept at the head of the paper, bracketed with that of Mr. Quincy, for another year. He laughed, by the way, at the designation “corresponding editor.” It has always seemed to me to be nonsense. There can, in the nature of the thing, be no such person as a corresponding editor. Moreover, in this particular case, my unhappy genius will keep seeing the double sense in the word corresponding, and suggesting that E. Q. and I correspond in very few particulars,—meaning no offence to either of us. ‘Contributor’ would be the fitting word.”

The connection with the Standard had not altered Lowell’s position in politics. It found him independent, and left him so. He was no less a reformer at the end than he was at the beginning, but he was confirmed in his belief that the world must be healed by degrees; and as he was a disbeliever in the short cut to emancipation by way of disunion, so he was at once a firm believer in radical reform, but skeptical of ultimate success through the rooting out of individual evils. He found himself among people who were sure of their panaceas. He himself in the first flush of his restless desire for activity had been disposed, under the influence of the woman he loved, to attack the evil of intemperance by the method of total abstinence, but his zeal was short-lived. He appears never to have accepted woman suffrage as the solution of the problem of society, and it is doubtful if at any time he would have given his adhesion to the mode of immediate emancipation if he had been called on to discuss it. His imagination and his sense of humor both prevented him from being a thick and thin reformer, and he refused to allow his hatred of slavery to be complicated with practical measures for the reform of various other evils which troubled society. It was because he saw in slavery in the United States the arch foe of freedom and the insidious corrupter of national life that he concentrated his reforming energy upon this evil. He has said of Wordsworth that “fortunately he gave up politics that he might devote himself to his own noble calling, to which politics are subordinate;” but it might be said with equal truth of Lowell that he never gave up poetry, and that when he was writing every week, or every other week, for the Standard, whether in verse or in prose, he was dominated by an imagination which kept steadily before his eyes great principles and doctrines which found in the anti-slavery movement an illustration but not an exclusive end. It is not surprising, therefore, that he should have seemed to others, and sometimes to himself, not to see the enemy just in front of him.

Nevertheless, the experience was worth much to him. It resulted, as it might not except for this stimulus, in the “Biglow Papers,” and it also demonstrated more clearly than ever the supremacy of the literary function with him, since he never laid it aside under the strong provocation which his journalistic work incited, and maintained from first to last the integrity of his spirit. The conservatism which underlay and indeed supported his radicalism was confirmed by his experience, and it issued moreover in a large comprehensiveness, so that he came out of the ranks not only with a greater sympathy with his comrades,[66] but with a larger toleration for the men he attacked. “At this minute,” he writes to Gay, “the song of the bobolink comes rippling through my opening window and preaches peace. Two months ago the same missionary was in his South Carolina pulpit, and can I think that he chose another text, or delivered another sermon there? Hath not a slaveholder hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter as an abolitionist? If you pinch them, do they not bleed? If you tickle them, do they not laugh? If you poison them, do they not die? If you wrong them, shall they not revenge? Nay, I will go a step farther, and ask if all this do not apply to parsons also? Even they are human.”

CHAPTER V

A FABLE FOR CRITICS, THE BIGLOW PAPERS, AND THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL

1847-1848

It was while he was most busily engaged in contributing to the Standard his weekly poems, criticisms, and editorial articles, that Lowell wrote and published a group of books, varied in subject and treatment, dashed off each and all with an eager abandonment to the intellectual excitement which produced them, and read by a later generation as capital illustrations not only of their author’s spontaneity, but also of the permanent direction of his nature. It is not unfair to suppose that the steady application to work in connection with a cause which appealed to moral enthusiasm aroused in a mind like Lowell’s an exhilaration of temper very provocative of creation. The poems which he sent, one after the other, in a continuous flight, were witnesses to this activity of imagination, and the very tension of his mind kept him in a state of excitement, so that his diversions took the form of intellectual amusement. Two or three numbers of the “Biglow Papers” had appeared, when Lowell wrote his friend Briggs that he was at work on a satirical poem, but apparently he did not disclose its exact character, though he intimated at the beginning that he meant to give the poem to his friend. In point of fact, Lowell appears to have written at full speed five or six hundred lines of “A Fable for Critics” in October, 1847, and then to have been so busily engaged in getting ready his new volume of “Poems,” which appeared at the end of the year, that he laid it aside. “I have been waiting with a good deal of impatience,” Briggs writes, 7 November, 1847, “for the manuscript of the satirical poem which you promised to send me. As I have not seen anything advertised which sounds like you I am half afraid that you are not going to publish it. But you must be convinced from the great popularity that Hosea’s efforts have received that the sale of the poem will be large and profitable.”

In his reply, 13 November, Lowell says: “My satire remains just as it was; about six hundred lines I think are written. I left it because I wished to finish it in one mood of mind, and not to get that and my serious poems in the new volume entangled. It is a rambling, disjointed affair, and I may alter the form of it, but if I can get it read I know it will take. I intend to give it some serial title and continue it at intervals.... I shall send you my satire in manuscript when it is finished. Meanwhile, here is a taste and I want your opinion. Here is Emerson. I think it good.—There, I have given you three or four specimen bricks—what think you of the house?... Remember that my satire is a secret. Read the extract to Page.” Mr. Briggs was delighted with what was shown him, and longed for more. “The characteristics of Alcott,” he says, “I could not judge of, although they are most happily expressed, as I have known nothing about him; but the character of Emerson was the best thing of the kind I have read.” He returns to the subject on Christmas day, but is still ignorant of Lowell’s intention as to the disposition of the manuscript. “I think that the book would be a very popular one, but still, it strikes me that your subjects are too localized to be widely understood; but they would have all the merit of fictions at least, and your method would make them universally acceptable.”

But now Lowell gives his friend a more explicit statement of his intention as to the publication of his satire. The volume of poems was out of the way, and on the last day of 1847 he writes as follows: “I have not time left to say much more than happy New Year! I have been hard at work copying my satire that I might get it (what was finished of it, at least) to you by New Year’s day as a present. As it is, I can only send the first part. It was all written with one impulse, and was the work of not a great many hours; but it was written in good spirits (con amore, as Leupp said he used to smoke), and therefore seems to me to have a hearty and easy swing about it that is pleasant. But I was interrupted midway by being obliged to get ready the copy for my volume, and I have never been able to weld my present mood upon the old, without making an ugly swelling at the joint.

“I wish you to understand that I make you a New Year’s gift, not of the manuscript, but of the thing itself. I wish you to get it printed (if you think the sale will warrant it) for your own benefit. At the same time I am desirous of retaining my copyright, in order that if circumstances render it desirable, I may still possess a control over it. Therefore, if you think it would repay publishing (I have no doubt of it, or I should not offer it to you), I wish you would enter the copyright in your own name and then make a transfer to me ‘in consideration of etc.’

“Now I know that you are as proud as—you ought to be, but if the proceeds of the sale would be of service to you, you have no right to refuse them. I don’t make you a pecuniary present, though I trust you would not hesitate to accept one from me, if you needed it, and I could raise the money, but I give you something which I have made myself, and made on purpose for you.

“I know nothing about your circumstances. If beloved W. P. needs it most, let him have it, and I know that you would consider it the best gift I could make you. I will not consent to that disposal of it, however, unless he need it most. In case the proceeds amount to anything handsome (for it may be popular) and you intend them for W. P., let it be done in this way, which would please him and me too, and nobody but myself would be the gainer. Do you in that case sit to Page for your portrait—the said effigies to belong to your humble servant.

“I am making as particular directions as if I were drawing my will, but I have a sort of presentiment (which I never had in regard to anything else) that this little bit of pleasantry will take. Perhaps I have said too much of the Centurion.[67] But it was only the comicality of his character that attracted me,—for the man himself personally never entered my head. But the sketch is clever?—I want your opinion on what I have sent immediately.”[68]

Mr. Briggs replied at once, accepting the gift in the spirit in which it was given, delighting in the poem, and proposing to arrange immediately for its publication by Putnam. He was confident, as was Page, that the book would be a great hit, and promptly provided for the disposition of the profits. “One third,” he wrote, “should be invested for Queen Mab, to be given her on her eighteenth birthday; one third to be disposed of in the same manner for my little angel; and the other third to be given to Page, for which he should paint your portrait for me and mine for you. This would be making the best disposition of the fund that I could devise, and I think will not be displeasing to you. If the profits should be small, I will divide them equally between the little ones. It will be something quite new for two young ladies to receive their marriage portions from the profits of an American poem.”

Lowell was highly entertained by this proposal. “I could not help laughing,” he wrote, “as I read your proposed disposition of the expected finances. To look at you in the character of Alnaschar was something so novel as to be quite captivating to my imagination. Not that I have any fear that you will kick over the basket, but I am afraid the contents will hardly be so attractive to the public as to allow the proceeds of the sale to be divided into three. It is really quite a triumph to be able to laugh at my practical friend. However, I will not impoverish your future, but will let you enjoy it as long as it lasts.... I have now, in addition to what I sent you, and exclusive of Emerson, etc., about a hundred lines written, chiefly about Willis and Longfellow. But in your arrangements with the printer, you must reckon on allowing me at least a month. I cannot write unless in the mood.”

It was when about half the poem had been written that Lowell began his constant work for the Standard, and he was impatient to finish the poem, yet found it hard to get into the right mood. “I want to get my windows open,” he wrote to Briggs, 26 March, 1848, “and to write in the fresh air. I ought not to have sent you any part of it till I had finished it entirely. I feel a sense of responsibility which hinders my pen from running along as it ought in such a theme. I wish the last half to be as jolly and unconstrained as the first. If you had not praised what I sent you, I dare say you would have had the whole of it ere this. Praise is the only thing that can make me feel any doubt of myself.” And then, recurring to Briggs’s air castle to be built with the proceeds: “As to your plan for dividing the profits I will have nothing to do with it. I wish they might be a thousand dollars with all my heart, but I do not see that they will be more than enough to buy something for my little niece there in New York. If I had not thought it the only poem I ever wrote on which there was like to be some immediate profit, I should never have given it to you at all. In making it a present to you, I was giving myself a douceur, and the greater the sale the larger the bribe to myself. A part of the condition is that if it make a loss—I pay it. If this be not agreed to, the bargain is null, and I never will finish it.... Now that I have let you into the secret of the ‘Fable’ before it was finished, I hope you will write and give me a spur. I suppose you did not wish to say anything about it till after it became yours. But I wish to be dunned. Tell me whether its being published at any particular time will make any difference, etc., etc., and make any suggestions. I think I shall say nothing about Margaret Fuller (though she offer so fair a target), because she has done me an ill-natured turn.[69] I shall revenge myself amply upon her by writing better. She is a very foolish, conceited woman, who has got together a great deal of information, but not enough knowledge to save her from being ill-tempered. However, the temptation may be too strong for me. It certainly would have been if she had never said anything about me. Even Maria thinks I ought to give her a line or two.” Briggs begged him not to leave out Miss Fuller, “she will accuse you of doing it to spite her.”

The spring months went by with occasional dashes at the “Fable” and on 12 May, Lowell wrote to his friend: “I have begun upon the ‘Fable’ again fairly, and am making some headway. I think with what I sent you (which I believe was about 500 lines) it will make something over a thousand. I have done since I sent the first half, Willis, Longfellow, Bryant, Miss Fuller, and Mrs. Child. In Longfellow’s case I have attempted no characterization. The same (in a degree) may be said of S. M. F. With her I have been perfectly good humored, but I have a fancy that what I say will stick uncomfortably. It will make you laugh. So will L. M. C. After S. M. F. I make a short digression on bores in general which has some drollery in it. Willis I think good. Bryant is funny, and as far as I could make it immitigably just. Indeed I have endeavored to be so in all. I am glad I did B. before I got your letter.[70] The only verses I shall add regarding him are some complimentary ones which I left for a happier mood after I had written the comic part. I steal from him, indeed! If he knew me he would not say so. When I steal I shall go to a specie vault, not to a till. Does he think that he invented the past, and has a prescriptive title to it? Do not think I am provoked. I am simply amused. If he had riled me, I might have knocked him into a cocked hat in my satire. But that, on second thoughts, would be no revenge, for it might make him President, a cocked hat being now the chief qualification.[71] It would be more severe to knock him into the middle of next week, as that is in the future, and he has such a partiality toward the past.”

In the passage on bores, which follows the lines on Margaret Fuller, Lowell explains that—