but he is explicit enough regarding them in the same letter to Mr. Briggs: I had a horrible visitation the other evening from Mr. ——, of Philadelphia, accompanied by Messrs. —— and ——, of Boston. After their departure, I wrote the ‘digression on bores’ which I mentioned above. ——, I believe, likes my poetry, but likes his own too well to appreciate anybody’s else. He is about to start a magazine and has issued a prospectus of the very most prodigious description. One would think it to have been written with a quill plucked from the wing of ‘our country’s bird.’ He wished to have a portrait and memoir of me in his first number. I escaped from the more immediate crucifixion, however, on the ground that I had no sketch of myself that would answer his purpose. As his project may fail after the first number, I may get off altogether. I have sometimes given offence by answering such applications with a smile, so I have changed my tactics, and give assent.... I hope to finish the ‘Fable’ next week.”
On 24 July, Lowell wrote to Gay, who was in the secret, that he had finished the “Fable,” and shortly after he made a visit to New York, but it was not till near the end of August that he sent the last instalment of copy. The proof followed, and Lowell took occasion to make at least one omission, due apparently to better knowledge which led him to revise his judgment. He was too late, apparently, for another correction, for he wrote to Briggs, 4 October, asking him to strike out the four lines relating to Miss Fuller, beginning
which still stand. The poem was printed from type, so that as each sheet was printed, and the type distributed, it was not possible, as in the case of electrotype plates, to make corrections up to the last moment before printing the entire book. In the same letter he writes:—
“I send half the proof to-day—t’ other to-morrow with Irving and Judd. I am druv like all possessed. I am keeping up with the printers with Wilbur’s Notes, Glossary, Index, and Introduction. I have two sets of hands to satiate, one on the body of the book, one on the extremities.
“I wish to see title-page and preface. Also, be sure and have a written acknowledgment from G. P. P. that the copyright remains with you. Then send me a transfer of it for value received. I will endorse in such a way that it shall remain to you and yours in case anything happen to me. Don’t think my precaution indelicate. I only wish to provide against accidents. Let Putnam take out copyright and let it stand in your name as far as he and the rest of the world are concerned. I am anxious about it (I need scarcely say) solely on these two accounts, that it may never fall into strangers’ hands, and that it may never be taken from you. More to-morrow.”
Two days later he wrote to Briggs, “I am, you see, as good as my word and better. For, as I was copying the other verses this morning, I thought I might as well throw you in Holmes to boot. Let the new passage begin thus,—
Please make the alteration and put in marks of quotation at the beginning of each new paragraph if I have omitted them. Also in this line if it runs as I think it does,
insert ‘sounds’ instead of ‘is.’
“I wish you would do up a copy with ‘author’s and so forths,’ dated New York, and put it into Ticknor’s first box directed to Dr. O. W. Holmes, Boston, and also one directed to Professor Felton, Cambridge, in Ticknor’s or Nichols’s as it may chance....
“Print the title-page thus:—
“‘Reader, walk up’ etc., as far as ‘ruinous rate’ in large italics in old-fashioned style in an inverted cone
caps. Then the rest in small caps properly broken up so as to conceal the fact of the rhyme.[72]
You will like the tribute to our Massachusetts. It is clearly the best passage in the poem, and you will see how adroitly it comes back to the theme, the general comic and satiric tone, of the rest.”
The date on the rhymed title-page was anticipated a little, for the book was advertised for 20 October, and delivered on the 25th. A thousand copies had been printed from type and were quickly disposed of. The little book was then stereotyped and a second edition issued the first of the New Year, with the new preface which is still attached to the poem. In February it had gone to a third edition, but at the end of November, 1849, it had not sold beyond three thousand copies, though a fourth edition was then talked of. It is to be feared that Mr. Briggs’s golden eggs were addled.
It will be remembered that in December, 1846, Lowell wrote the amusing lines to James Miller McKim, editor of the Pennsylvania Freeman, which were printed in that paper, and are included among his collected poems under the heading “Letter from Boston.” In the same frolicsome temper used in “A Fable for Critics,” Lowell made rapid sketches of the conspicuous anti-slavery people as seen at the bazaar just held in Faneuil Hall. The success of the squib very likely suggested to him the fun of playing the same game with the literati of the day. Both poems, indeed, may have taken a hint from Leigh Hunt’s “The Feast of the Poets,”[73] which had been brought afresh to Lowell’s notice, if not disclosed to him for the first time, by the little volume “Rimini and other Poems by Leigh Hunt,” issued by Ticknor in 1844. The measure is the same. Phœbus Apollo also introduces the poets, though Hunt’s scheme is more deliberate than Lowell’s, and there is the same disposition to make use of unexpected rhymes. Hunt used his sauciness upon his contemporaries, Spencer, Rogers, Montgomery, Crabbe, Hayley, Gifford, Scott, Campbell, Moore, Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, and Rose. The reader can easily pick out the names here which have well outlived Hunt’s mockery, and those which were as well known to Hunt’s contemporaries as are some in the “Fable” to Lowell’s. Hunt, to be sure, confined himself to poets and poetasters, while Lowell drew his examples from the more conspicuous writers in the United States, whether of prose or of verse.
There was little mystery about the authorship of the “Fable.” Lowell did not put his name on the title-page, but he wrote himself all over the book; and though the publication was anonymous, he made no objection to the disclosure to Putnam, and apparently was careless about confining the knowledge to Briggs, Gay, and Page. Longfellow records in his diary under 15 June, 1848, “Passed an hour or two with Lowell, who read to me his satire on American authors; full of fun, and with very true portraits, as seen from that side.” It does not appear if Lowell read to his guest what he had recently written about him in the satire. And Dr. Holmes, to whom a copy of the book, as we have seen, was sent with the “author’s and so forths,” acknowledged it in a letter to Lowell, in which he characterizes it as “capital—crammed full and rammed down hard—powder (lots of it)—shot—slugs bullets—very little wadding, and that is gun-cotton—all crowded into a rusty looking blunderbuss barrel as it were,—capped with a percussion preface,—and cocked with a title-page as apropos as a wink to a joke.”[74]
Clever as are the portraits,—some of the lines are bitten in with a little acid,—and though there are but few of the authors characterized who have not even a more secure place to-day than then, the “Fable” can scarcely be said ever to have had or retained much vogue as a whole. In the excitement of writing his crackling lines Lowell believed himself to be making a hit, but hardly had the ink dried than he saw it for what it was, intellectual effervescence that made one hilarious for the moment. “It seems bald and poor enough now, the Lord knows,” he wrote between the first and second editions. Forty years afterward, however, on recalling it, he said it was the first popular thing he had written. He never was quite easy as to his treatment of Bryant: “I am quite sensible now,” he wrote in 1855, “that I did not do Mr. Bryant justice in the ‘Fable.’ But there was no personal feeling in what I said, though I have regretted what I did say because it might seem personal.” And as late as 1887 he characterized his poem written for Bryant’s birthday as a kind of palinode to what he had said of him in the “Fable,” “which has something of youth’s infallibility in it, or at any rate of youth’s irresponsibility.” Aside from this slight uneasiness, Lowell does not appear to have repented of any of his judgments, nor did he ever revise the poem for subsequent editions. No doubt, the disregard of the poem has been due largely to the ephemeral nature of much of the jocoseness. The puns, good and bad, with which it is sprinkled, are so many notices of “good for this time only,” and the petty personalities and trivial bits of satire lower the average of the whole. The “Fable” must be taken for just what it was to the author and his friends, a piece of high spirits with which to make sport: the salt that savors it is to be found in the few masterly characterizations and criticisms.
And yet, turning away from this jeu d’esprit as a piece of literature, and looking at it as a reflection of Lowell’s mind in a very ardent passage of his life, we may justly regard with strong interest so frank an expression, not merely of his likes and dislikes, but of the underlying principle of criticism which was native to him and found abundant illustration from the days of the Pioneer to the later days of the North American Review. His impatience of yard-stick criticism and of a timid waiting upon foreign judgment, so hotly uttered in his rapid lines, sprang from the intuitive perception and the independence of spirit which lie at the basis of all his own criticism. This intuitive perception was indeed that of a man who often formed hasty impressions and was not without personal prejudice, but it was at least a first-hand judgment, and not the composite result of other men’s opinions, and it came from a mind through which the wind of a free nature was always blowing. The lightning flashes which disclose the inherent and lasting qualities of Emerson, Hawthorne, Cooper, Holmes, Whittier, Bryant, Longfellow are all witnesses to the penetration and clear intelligence which Lowell possessed. It must not be forgotten that Lowell, himself only just past the period of youth, was writing of men whose reputation is secure enough now, but who were at that time not wholly discriminated by the general public from a number of mediocrities who crowded about them, and there is an even-handed justice in the poem which not unfitly is put into the mouth of that court of last resort, Phœbus Apollo himself.
The independence which goes along with the intuition is simply the integrity of a nature which is not given to the concealment of its judgments. As he laughingly said of himself later, he was very cock-sure of himself at this time. In after years, when he was speaking in his own voice from a more historic platform, he might choose his phrases more deliberately, but none the less did he speak his mind out. There was confidence in himself first and last, but the impetuous, almost reckless utterance of his youth, when he saw things clearly as youth does when it is conscious of breathing the air of freedom and bathing in the light of truth, yielded only to the temper which maturity brings and was more moderate and charitable in expression because it had the larger vision. When one considers the eagerness with which Lowell vented himself in the months of his close connection with the Anti-Slavery Standard, one is not surprised that in a book which is at once a defence of criticism and a swift survey of the whole field of American letters as it lay under the eye of this knight-errant of freedom and truth, Lowell should have displayed, with little reserve, the frankness and impetuosity of his nature. It is only after a closer inspection that one discovers also how sound and how generous is his judgment.
How much satire gains from moral earnestness and a righteous scorn is easily seen in the book which followed close on the heels of “A Fable for Critics,” and with its pungency weakened the impression which might otherwise have been created by its companion in literature. We have already seen that the first number of the “Biglow Papers” appeared in the Courier of Boston in June, 1846, and that Lowell reckoned on producing a greater effect by withholding his name. He told Gay that he might very likely continue to fire from this masked battery while he was openly keeping up with others a fusillade in the Standard. In point of fact the first five numbers were printed in the Courier, but when the fifth was printed, Lowell was at the beginning of his real connection with the Standard, and the remaining four were printed in that paper.
The series, thus begun in the Courier in June, 1846, was closed in the Standard in September, 1848.[75] Although Lowell did not sign his name to any of the numbers either in the Courier or in the Standard, the authorship was a very open secret indeed. Still, he had the pleasure which sprang from the dramatic assumption, and he took good care not to confuse the personalities in the little comedy, by thrusting his own real figure on the stage. As he wrote forty years later: “I had great fun out of it. I have often wished that I could have had a literary nom de plume and kept my own to myself. I shouldn’t have cared a doit what happened to him.”
A dozen years later, on the eve of the war for the Union, Mr. Hughes, who was introducing the book to the English public, wanted Lowell to write an historical introduction. In declining to do this,[76] he gave a brief and clear statement of his political position at the time of writing the “Biglow Papers.” “I believed our war with Mexico (though we had as just ground for it as a strong nation ever has against a weak one) to be essentially a war of false pretences, and that it would result in widening the boundaries and so prolonging the life of slavery. Believing that it is the manifest destiny of the English race to occupy this whole continent, and to display there that practical understanding in matters of government and colonization which no other race has given such proof of possessing since the Romans, I hated to see a noble hope evaporated into a lying phrase to sweeten the foul breath of demagogues. Leaving the sin of it to God, I believed and still believe that slavery is the Achilles heel of our polity: that it is a temporary and false supremacy of the white races, sure to destroy that supremacy at last, because an enslaved people always prove themselves of more enduring fibre than their enslavers, as not suffering from the social vices sure to be engendered by oppression in the governing class. Against these and many other things I thought all honest men should protest. I was born and bred in the country, and the dialect was homely to me. I tried my first ‘Biglow Paper’ in a newspaper and found that it had a great run. So I wrote the others from time to time during the year which followed, always very rapidly, and sometimes (as with ‘What Mr. Robinson thinks’) at one sitting.”
The cleverness of the refrain in this last named poem started it on a hilarious career, and it is perhaps only in one of Gilbert’s topical songs that we can match the success of a collocation of words, where the quaintness of turn keeps a barren phrase perennially amusing. It was with an echo of it in his mind no doubt that when he had just done reading the proofs of the entire volume, Lowell snapped his whip in like fashion in a poem for the Standard, which he never reprinted, but which is interesting from the diversity shown in the handling of a single theme.
In the fall of 1848, Harrison Gray Otis, writing in advocacy of the election of Zachary Taylor, referred to an incident in 1831, when, as Mayor of Boston, he answered an application from the Governors of Virginia and Georgia for information respecting the persons responsible for The Liberator. “Some time afterward,” he says, “it was reported to me by the city officers that they had ferreted out the paper and its editor: that his office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, and his supporters a very few insignificant persons of all colors.” Lowell saw the letter in one of the newspapers of the day, clipped out this sentence, pasted it on a sheet of paper, and wrote below it, with the title “the day of small things,” the notable lines which in his collected poems bear the heading “To W. L. Garrison.” The poem was published in the Standard, 19 October, 1848, but the incident evidently made a strong impression on him, especially when he considered what had taken place in seventeen years; for immediately afterward he wrote again, and in the number for 26 October, appeared
THE EX-MAYOR’S CRUMB OF CONSOLATION.
A PATHETIC BALLAD.[77]
Lowell himself, in the Introduction which he wrote to the Second Series, bears witness to the popularity of the “Biglow Papers” while they were still uncollected. “Very far,” he says, “from being a popular author under my own name, so far indeed as to be almost unread, I found the verses of my pseudonym copied everywhere: I saw them pinned up in workshops: I heard them quoted and their authorship debated.” It was, it may be said, no new thing to seek to arrest the public attention with the vernacular applied to public affairs. Major Jack Downing and Sam Slick had been notable exemplars, and they had many imitators; but party politics, or even local characteristics, may give rise to the merely idle jest of satire; the reader who laughed over the racy narrative of the unlettered Ezekiel, and then took up Hosea’s poem and caught the gust of Yankee wrath and humor blown fresh in his face, knew that he was in with the appearance of something new in American literature.
After the first heat, Lowell began to distrust his mode a little. “As for Hosea,” he writes to Briggs, “I am sorry that I began by making him such a detestable speller. There is no fun in bad spelling of itself, but only where the misspelling suggests something else which is droll per se. You see I am getting him out of it gradually. I mean to altogether. Parson Wilbur is about to propose a subscription for fitting him for college, and has already commenced his education.”[78] He dropped this intention, however, and the later numbers of the series show no marked departure from the general scheme of Yankee spelling. There is no doubt, though, that when it came to a revision of the papers for final book publication, Lowell did make an attempt to introduce some sort of consistency or effectiveness in the form. He groaned over the labor involved, and confessed that he made a great many alterations in spelling even after the pages had been stereotyped. “It is the hardest book to print,” he wrote Mr. Gay, “that ever I had anything to do with, and, what with corrections and Mr. Wilbur’s annotations, keeps me more employed than I care to be.”
The labor was partly of his own making, but after all was consequent chiefly upon the sense of art which led the author to do much more than simply collect and reprint what he had written currente calamo in the Courier and Standard. The great popularity attained by the successive numbers showed him that he had hit the mark, but also the conception of the whole grew in his mind, and he seized the opportunity which reprinting afforded, to shape his satire and give it a body, by filling out the characters who constituted his dramatis personæ. “When I came to collect [the papers] and publish them in a volume,” he wrote in 1859 to Mr. Hughes, in the letter already quoted, I conceived my parson-editor with his pedantry and verbosity, his amiable vanity and superiority to the verses he was editing, as a fitting artistic background and foil. It gave me the chance, too, of glancing obliquely at many things which were beyond the horizon of my other characters. I was told afterwards that my Parson Wilbur was only Jedediah Cleishbotham over again, and I dare say it may be so; but I drew him from the life as well as I could, and for the authentic reasons I have mentioned.”
There was a slight undercurrent of reference to his own father in this characterization. “My father,” he wrote Hughes, “was as proud of his pedigree as a Talbot or Stanley could be, and Parson Wilbur’s genealogical mania was a private joke between us.”[79]
So thoroughly did he think himself into the artistic conception of the book that he even proposed at one time to put Jaalam on the title-page as place of publication, and to have it “printed on brownish paper with those little head and tail pieces which used to adorn our earlier publications—such as hives, scrolls, urns, and the like.” This external fitness he did not secure, but he elaborated a system of notes, glossary, and index, letting the fun lurk in every part, and completed the effect by the notices of an independent press, which must have made the actual writers of book notices hesitate a little before they dropped into their customary machine-made manner when treating of this special work. The burlesque of Carlyle in one of these is especially clever. In supplying all this apparatus he drew a little on his prose papers in the Standard, but it is doubtful if most readers get beyond the verse, or do more than glance at the drollery which lies perdu in the prose equipment, so much swifter is the flight of the arrows of satire when they are barbed with rhyme.
The success of the book was immediate. The first edition of 1500 was gone in a week, and the author could say with satisfaction that “the book was actually out of print before a second edition could be struck off from the plates.” In later years the book was apt to fill him with a kind of amused astonishment. The unstinted praise which Hughes gave to the “Biglow Papers,” quotations from which were always on his tongue’s end, drew from Lowell the expression: “I was astonished to find what a heap of wisdom was accumulated in those admirable volumes.” It is not strange that, in looking back from the tranquil temper of older years, Lowell should be struck with the high spirits, the tension of feeling, and the abandon of utterance which characterize this work; but when he was in the thick of the fight a second time he was more impressed by the moral earnestness which underlay all this free lancing. “The success of my experiment,” he wrote, in the Introduction to the Second Series, “soon began not only to astonish me, but to make me feel the responsibility of knowing that I held in my hand a weapon instead of the mere fencing stick I had supposed.... If I put on the cap and bells, and made myself one of the court fools of King Demos, it was less to make his Majesty laugh than to win a passage to his royal ears for certain serious things which I had deeply at heart.”
The force which Lowell displayed in this satire made his book at once a powerful ally of a sentiment which heretofore had been crassly ridiculed; it turned the tables and put Anti-slavery, which had been fighting sturdily on foot with pikes, into the saddle, and gave it a flashing sabre. For Lowell himself it won an accolade from King Demos. He rose up a knight, and thenceforth possessed a freedom which was a freedom of nature, not a simple badge of service in a single cause. His patriotism and moral fervor found other vents in later life, and he never sheathed the sword which he had drawn from the scabbard; but it is significant of the stability of his genius that he was not misled into a limitation of his powers by the sudden distinction which came to him. For, though we naturally think first of the political significance of the “Biglow Papers,” the book, in its fullest meaning, is an expression of Lowell’s personality, and has in it the essence of New England. The character of the race from which its author sprang is preserved in its vernacular and in the characters of the dramatis personæ. Not unwittingly, but in the full consciousness of his own inheritance, Lowell became the spokesman of a racy people, whose moral force had a certain acrid quality, and, when thrown to the winds, as in the person of Birdofredom Sawin, was replaced by an insolent shrewdness. Nor is the exemplification of New England less complete for that infusion of homely sentiment and genuine poetic sensibility which underlie and penetrate the sturdy moral force.
The “Biglow Papers” threw “A Fable for Critics” into the shade. It was nearly through the press when the “Fable” was published, and Briggs, who kept a close watch of his friend’s production, wrote: “I am pretty confident that the ‘Fable’ will suit the market for which it is intended, unless it should be killed by Hosea, who will help to divert public attention from his own kind.” It is to be suspected that Lowell himself felt the strong contrast which lay in the two works when he was driving them through the press side by side, and rather lost interest in the ebullition of an hour, as he threw himself with an almost exhausted energy into a book which carried at its heart a flame of passionate scorn. The only passage in “A Fable for Critics” which he dwelt upon with genuine delight was his apostrophe to Massachusetts, and that is almost out of key with the rest of the poem. But a third book was shortly to follow and to divide with the other two the popularity which fell to Lowell as a writer.
It does not appear just when “The Vision of Sir Launfal” was written, but in a letter to Briggs, dated 1 February, 1848, Lowell speaks of it as “a sort of story, and more likely to be popular than what I write generally. Maria thinks very highly of it. I shall probably publish it by itself next summer.” But it was not till the “Biglow Papers” were off his hands that Lowell took steps to print the book, which was published 17 December, 1848. It was not long after that he went to Watertown for the wedding of Mrs. Lowell’s sister with Dr. Estes Howe, and the next day he wrote to Briggs: “I walked to Watertown over the snow with the new moon before me and a sky exactly like that in Page’s evening landscape. Orion was rising behind me, and as I stood on the hill just before you enter the village, the stillness of the fields around me was delicious, broken only by the tinkle of a little brook which runs too swiftly for Frost to catch it. My picture of the brook in ‘Sir Launfal’ was drawn from it. But why do I send you this description—like the bones of a chicken I had picked? Simply because I was so happy as I stood there, and felt so sure of doing something that would justify my friends. But why do I not say that I have done something? I believe I have done better than the world knows yet, but the past seems so little compared with the future.” And then referring to a recent notice of him which intimated that he was well to do, he says: “I wish I might be for a day or two. I should like such an income as Billy Lee desired, who, when some one asked his idea of a competence, replied, ‘A million a minute, and your expenses paid!’ But I am richer than he thinks for. I am the first poet who has endeavored to express the American Idea, and I shall be popular by and by. Only I suppose I must be dead first. But I do not want anything more than I have.”
It is not very likely that Lowell was thinking specifically of “Sir Launfal” when he wrote this. It is more likely that he would have named “Prometheus,” “Columbus,” or “Freedom” if he had been asked to name names; and yet it is not straining language too far to say that when he took up an Arthurian story he had a different attitude toward the whole cycle of legends from that of Tennyson who, a half dozen years before, had begun to revive the legends for the pleasure of English-reading people. The exuberance of the poet as he carols of June in the prelude to Part First is an expression of the joyous spring which was in the veins of the young American, glad in the sense of freedom and hope. As Tennyson threw into his retelling of Arthurian romance a moral sense, so Lowell, also a moralist in his poetic apprehension, made a parable of his tale, and, in the broadest interpretation of democracy, sang of the levelling of all ranks in a common divine humanity. There is a subterranean passage connecting the “Biglow Papers” with “Sir Launfal”; it is the holy zeal which attacks slavery issuing in this fable of a beautiful charity, Christ in the guise of a beggar.
The invention is a very simple one, and appears to have been suggested by Tennyson’s “Sir Galahad,” but the verses in the poem which linger longest in the mind are not those connected with the fable, but rather the full-throated burst of song in praise of June. Indeed, one might seriously maintain from Lowell’s verse that there was an especial affinity which he held with this month. Witness the joyous rush of pleasure with which “Under the Willows”[80] is begun, and the light-heartedness with which Hosea Biglow leaves the half-catalogue manner rehearsing the movement of Spring in “Sunthin’ in the Pastoral Line,” and leaps almost vociferously into the warm, generous air of June, when “all comes crowdin’ in.” The poem entitled “Al Fresco” is but a variation on the same theme; when he first published it, save the opening stanza, in the Anti-Slavery Standard, he gave it the title of “A Day in June.” And when, compelled to lie indoors, he found a compensation in Calderon singing to him like a nightingale, it was still a wistful look he cast on his catbird that joined with the oriole and the cuckoo to call him out of doors, and he sighed to think that he could not like them be a pipe for June to play on. “The Nightingale in the Study” was written when he sought in illness for something that would seclude him from himself; but the three poems of 1848 were the outcome of a nature so tingling with vitality that expression was its necessity, and spontaneity the law of its being. Literature, freedom, and nature in turn appealed to the young enthusiast; the visions he saw stirred him, in the quiet of Elmwood, to eager, impetuous delivery; and his natural voice was a singing one.
When, in the spring of 1845, the Lowells returned to Cambridge from Philadelphia, where they had spent the first four months of their married life, it was to share the family home of Elmwood for the next six years. Lowell’s father retired in the summer of 1845 from active charge of the West Parish in Boston, but retained his interest in various societies which gave him partial occupation, leaving him leisure for the indulgence of his taste for reading and for the pleasures of gardening and small farming. His mother, whose malady slowly but steadily increased, was under watchful care. She was taken to various health resorts in hopes of recovery, and spent a part of her last years under more constant treatment at an asylum for the mentally deranged. Miss Rebecca Lowell had charge of the little household, and now and then went on journeys with her father or mother or both, leaving the young couple to themselves. As one child after another came into the circle, the grandfather found a solace for the sorrow which lay heavily upon him, and his letters, when he was on one of his journeys, were filled with affectionate messages for his new daughter and her children, mingled with careful charges to his son concerning the well-being of the cattle, small and large, and the proper harvesting of the little crops.
Mrs. Lowell’s family lived near by in Watertown, and one by one her sisters married, one of them coming to Cambridge to live. The society of the college town was open, and it was in these early years that Lowell formed one of a whist club, which, with but slight variation in membership, continued its meetings to the end of his life, and the simple records of which were kept by Lowell. Its most constant members were Mr. John Holmes, a younger brother of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mr. John Bartlett, who was for a while a bookseller in Cambridge, and afterward until his retirement a member of the publishing firm of Little, Brown & Co. of Boston, and best known by his handbook of “Familiar Quotations” and his elaborate “Concordance to Shakespeare,” and finally Dr. Estes Howe, who married Mrs. Lowell’s sister.
Lowell was much given to concealing in his verse or prose little allusions which might be passed over by readers unaware of what lay beneath, but would be taken as a whispered aside by his friends. Thus in a “Preliminary Note to the Second Edition” of “A Fable for Critics,” he says: “I can walk with the Doctor, get facts from the Don, or draw out the Lambish quintessence of John, and feel nothing more than a half comic sorrow, to think that they all[81] will be lying to-morrow tossed carelessly up on the waste-paper shelves, and forgotten by all but their half dozen selves.”
In the summer of 1846 the sickness of little Blanche took the family suddenly to Stockbridge in the Berkshire Hills, whence Lowell wrote to Carter: “Stockbridge is without exception the quietest place I was ever in, and the office of postmaster here one of the most congenial to my taste and habits of any I ever saw or heard of. The postmaster has no regular hours whatever. Even if engaged in sorting the mail, he will run out and lock the door behind him, to play with his grandchildren. I do not believe that in the cabinet of any postmaster-general there is a more unique specimen. He is a gray-bearded old gentleman of between sixty and seventy, wears the loose calico gown so much in vogue among the country clergy, and feels continually that he is an important limb of the great body politic. I do not mean that he is vain. There is too profound a responsibility attached to his office to allow of so light and unworthy a passion. There is a solemn, half-melancholy grandeur about him, a foreboding, perchance, of that change of administration which may lop him from the parent tree,—a Montezuma-like dread of that mysterious stranger into whose hands his sceptre must pass. In purchasing a couple of steel pens or a few cigars of him (for he keeps a small variety store) you feel that the parcel is done up and handed over the counter by one of the potent hands of government itself.... We have found Stockbridge an exceedingly pleasant place and have made many agreeable acquaintances. Blanche is a favorite throughout the village and knows everybody.”
Longfellow, who was near by in Pittsfield at this time, notes in his Diary, 16 August: “In the afternoon Lowell came with his wife from Lenox to see us. He looks as hale as a young farmer; she very pale and fragile. They are driving about the country and go southward to Great Barrington and the region of the Bash Bish.”
The illness of Blanche which led her parents to take her into the country was slight and temporary. The child grew in beauty and winning grace, and endeared herself to her father in a manner which left its signs long afterward. Early in March, 1847, however, when she was vigorous and gave promise of a hearty life, she was seized suddenly with a malady consequent upon too rapid teething, and after a week’s sickness died. “In the fourteen months she was with us (for which God be thanked),” Lowell wrote to Briggs, “she showed no trace of any evil tendency, and it is wonderful how in so brief a space she could have twined her little life round so many hearts. Wherever she went everybody loved her. My poor father loved her so that he almost broke his heart in endeavoring to console Maria when it was at last decided the dear child was not to be spared to us.” After Blanche was buried, her father took her tiny shoes, the only ones she had ever worn, and hung them in his chamber. There they stayed till his own death. “The Changeling” preserves in poetry the experience of the father in this first great sorrow of his life, and “The First Snow-Fall” intimates the consolation which was shortly to be brought, for in September the second child, Mabel, was born.
The literary product of 1847 was inconsiderable. A few poems appeared, and Lowell even contemplated trying his hand at a tragedy founded on the Conquest of Mexico,—the first conquest, as one of his friends slyly remarks,—suggested no doubt by Prescott’s history, which had appeared four years earlier, and had just been followed by the “Conquest of Peru.” He made some progress with the tragedy, and even purposed offering it in competition for the large prize promised by Forrest for a good acting tragedy, but no line of it appears to have been preserved. He contributed also two or three articles to the North American Review, and in the fall of the year he set about the collection of such poems as he had written since his previous volume appeared. In the midst of this work he wrote to his friend Carter, then in the little village of Pepperell, and his letter reflects pleasantly the attitude he always took toward New England country life, as well as shows the wistfulness of his regard for his lost child.
“There are pleasanter ways of looking at a country village like Pepperell,” he writes to his somewhat discontented correspondent; “there are good studies both within doors and without, and either picture will be new to you. Talk to the men about farming, and you will find yourself in good society at once. Inquire of the women about the mysteries of cheese—and butter-making, and you will be more entertained than with the Georgics. At first, you find yourself in a false relation with them. You touch at no points and bristle repellingly at all. They flounder in their conversation and seek shelter in the weather or the price of pork, because they consider themselves under a painful necessity to entertain you. They can’t converse because they try—effort being the untimely grave of all true interchange of natures. They make a well where there should be a fountain. Get them upon any common ground, and you will find there is genuine stuff in them. The essence of good society is simply a community in habits of thought and topics of interest. When we approach each other naturally, we meet easily and gracefully; if we hurry too much we are apt to come together with an unpleasant bump.
“Who knows how much domestic interest was involved in that question the goodwife asked you about Mr. Praisegod’s servant? Perhaps she has a son, or a daughter betrothed to a neighbor’s son, who thinks of beginning life (as many of the farmers’ children in our country towns do) by entering into service in the city. Perhaps she wished and yet did not dare to ask of the temptations he would be exposed to. I love our Yankees with all their sharp angles.
“Maria is and has been remarkably well ever since the birth of our little darling, if I may call her so when Blanche still holds the first place in our hearts. Little Miss Mabel thrives wonderfully. She is, I think, as good a child as her little sister—though I tremble to trace any likeness between the two. She certainly has not Blanche’s noble and thoughtful eyes, which were noticeable even when she was first born. But some of her ways are very like her sister’s. Those who have seen her say that she is a very beautiful child.”
Toward the end of the year the volume of poems pressed hard upon him. “I should have written to you,” he writes to Briggs, 13 November, 1847, “at any rate just to say that I loved you still and to ask how you did, had I not been most preposterously busy with the printers. I had calculated in a loose way that I had ‘copy’ enough prepared to make as large a volume as I intended mine should be, but about three weeks ago the printers overtook me, and since then we have been neck and neck for something like a hundred pages—thirty page heats. It was only yesterday that I won the cup. Everybody has a notion that it is of advantage to be out before Christmas; and though I feel a sort of contempt for a demand so adventitiously created, and do not wish anybody to buy my book but those who buy to read, yet it is one of these little points which we find it convenient to yield in life, and not the less readily because it will be for our advantage not to be obstinate. I have a foolish kind of pride in these particulars. I had rather, for example, that you should have copied into the Mirror a column of abuse than those exaggerated commendations of my Louisville friend. I do not know whether it is a common feeling or not, but I can never get to consider myself as anything more than a boy. My temperament is so youthful, that whenever I am addressed (I mean by mere acquaintances) as if my opinion were worth anything, I can hardly help laughing. I cannot but think to myself with an inward laugh: ‘My good friend, you would be as mad as a hornet with me, if you knew that I was only a boy of twelve behind a bearded vizor.’ This feeling is so strong that I have got into a way of looking on the Poet Lowell as an altogether different personage from myself, and feel a little offended when my friends confound the two.”
The volume of poems to which Lowell refers in this letter came out just before Christmas, 1847. It bore the words “Second Series” on the title-page, being coupled in the author’s mind with the Poems issued four years previous. It is in the main a collection of the poems which Lowell in the past four years had scattered through papers and magazines, though he omitted several which had appeared in print, one or two of which indeed he went back and picked up on issuing his next collection a score of years later. He did not draw on his Biglow poems, reserving them for a volume by themselves, and he omitted several that were in a similar vein. There was perhaps no single poem in the new series which struck a deeper note than is to be found in one or two of the poems in the earlier collection, yet the art of the second series is firmer than that of the first, and the book as a whole is distinctly more even and more free from the mere sentimentalism which marks the previous volume. Scattered through it are a few of the more serious of his anti-slavery poems, as if for a testimony; but he does not retain the violent, not to say turgid, songs which he had thrown out upon occasions of public excitement.
There is one poem among the few contributed directly to the volume, which is familiar to lovers of Lowell himself rather than of Lowell the poet, if we may take his own discrimination, and it is most likely that it was written under conditions referred to in the letter just quoted. “An Indian-Summer Reverie,” which fills sixteen pages of the little volume, near its close, bears the marks of rapid writing. It is easy to believe that Lowell, coming away from the printing-office, where he had learned that the printers needed at once more copy, paused near the willows, and in the warm, hazy November afternoon let his mind drift idly over the scene and blend with it reflections on his own life. The poet, by virtue of his gift, is always young, and yet when young is the most retrospective of men. Not yet thirty, Lowell could remember his youth, and helped by the autumn that was in the air, could see nature and man and his own full life through a medium which has the mistiness and the color of the Indian Summer. There are poetic lines and phrases in the poem, and more than all the veil of the season hangs tremulously over the whole, so that one is gently stirred by the poetic feeling of the rambling verses; yet, after all, the most enduring impression is of the young man himself in that still hour of his life, when he was conscious, not so much of a reform to which he must put his hand, as of the love of beauty, and of the vague melancholy which mingles with beauty in the soul of a susceptible poet. The river winding through the marshes, the distant sound of the ploughman, the near chatter of the chipmunk, the individual trees, each living its own life, the march of the seasons flinging lights and shadows over the broad scene, the pictures of human life associated with his own experience, the hurried survey of his village years—all these pictures float before his vision; and then, with an abruptness which is like the choking of the singer’s voice with tears, there wells up the thought of the little life which held as in one precious drop the love and faith of his heart. Mr. Briggs, in a letter written upon receiving the volume, says: “I have just laid it aside with my eyes full of tears after reading ‘The Changeling,’ which appears to me the greatest poem in the collection, and I think that it will be so regarded by and by, a good many years hence, when I shall be wholly forgotten and you will only be known by the free thoughts you will leave behind you.” Mr. Briggs had himself lost a child, and his grief had been commemorated by Lowell; this same letter announces the birth of a daughter. One’s personal experience often colors if it does not obscure one’s critical judgment; but in taking account of Lowell’s life and its expression, we may not overlook the fact that up to this time certainly he was singularly ingenuous in making poetry, not simply a vehicle for the conveyance of large emotions generalized from personal experience, but a precipitation of his most intimate emotions. His love, his tender feelings for his friends, his generous and ardent hopes for humanity, his passion for freedom and truth, all lay at the depths of his being; but they rose to the surface perpetually in his poems and his letters, and he had scarcely learned to hold them in check by that hard mundane wisdom which comes to most through the attrition of daily living.
Thus far Lowell had looked out on life pretty steadily from the sheltered privacy of a happy home, and he was not immediately to change his surroundings; but a certain induration was now to be effected which can scarcely be said to have arrested his spontaneity, but may fairly be looked upon as leading him to regard himself more as others regarded him, as no longer “a boy of twelve behind a bearded vizor,” but as grown up and become a man of the world. For it was not long after this that the relation into which he had entered with the National Anti-Slavery Standard, and which had undergone a sort of suspension as we have seen, became a very close and exacting one.
The seclusion of his life satisfied Lowell; he was an infrequent visitor to Boston even, and made but few journeys. Now and then he went to New York, and, as we have seen, once to Stockbridge. To Canada also he made one journey; but it is clear from the circumstances attending these flittings that the Lowells had no money to spend on luxuries. They could live simply and without much outlay of cash at Elmwood, but travelling meant hoarding first, and in those early married years the young couple was not often out of debt. Even a trip to New York had to be postponed again and again on this account. Mr. Gay’s drafts in payment of account for contributions to the Standard were irregular and always seemed to come just in the nick of time.
“I thought to see you this week,” Lowell wrote to Gay, 8 June, 1848, when acknowledging one of these raven-flights,—“but cannot come yet. I cannot come without any money, and leave my wife with 62-1/2 cents, such being the budget brought in by my secretary of the treasury this week.... I am expecting some money daily—I always am—I always have been, and yet have never been fairly out of debt since I entered college.” And again, writing to the same, 26 February, 1849, “The truth is, that I have just been able to keep my head above water; but there is a hole in my life-preserver, and what wind I can raise from your quarter comes just in season to make up for leakage and save me from total submersion. Since the day after I received your remittance for December, I have literally not had a copper, except a small sum which I borrowed. It was all spent before I got it. So is the last one, too. As long as I have money I don’t think anything about it, except to fancy my present stock inexhaustible and capable of buying up the world.” A few days later, on receiving the draft which his half-humorous letter called for, he wrote in the same strain: “I am not very often down in the mouth: but sometimes, at the end of the year, when I have done a tolerable share of work, and have nothing to show for it, I feel as if I had rather be a spruce clerk on India wharf than a man of letters. Regularly I look forward to New Year, and think that I shall begin the next January out of debt, and as regularly I am disappointed.”
Yet all this time, with his frugal living and his vain effort to be even with the world, he could not refrain from obeying his generous impulses. His gift of “A Fable for Critics” to Briggs illustrates this spirit, and a passage in one of his letters shows the secret giver who is perhaps a little more lovable in the eyes of the Lord than the cheerful public one. Mr. Briggs had written to him 16 November, 1849: “On Monday evening Page and I were at Willis’s house, and in the course of a conversation about Poe, Willis mentioned that you had written him a very pleasant letter about Poe, and enclosed something really handsome for Mrs. Clemm. ‘I could not help thinking,’ said Willis, ‘that if Lowell had known what Poe wrote to me about him just previous to his death, he would hardly have been so liberal.” “What a contemptible idea of me Willis must have,” Lowell replied, “to think that anything Poe might say of me would make any difference in my feeling pity for his poor mother-in-law. I confess it does not raise my opinion of Willis. I knew before as well as I know now, that Poe must have been abusing me, for he knew that ever since his conduct toward you about the Broadway Journal I had thought meanly of him. I think Willis would hardly care to see some letters of Poe to me in which he is spoken of. My ‘pleasant letter’ to W. was about ten lines, rather less than more I fancy, and my ‘generous donation’ was five dollars! I particularly requested of him that it should be anonymous, which I think a good principle, as it guards us against giving from any unworthy motive. That Willis should publish it at the street corners only proves the truth of Swift’s axiom that any man may gain the reputation of generosity by £20 a year spent judiciously.”
When Hawthorne lost his place in the Salem Custom House, Lowell with other of his friends made active effort to set him on his feet. He wrote to Mr. Duyckinck, 13 January, 1850: “Perhaps you know that Hawthorne was last spring turned out of an office which he held in the Salem Custom House, and which was his sole support. He is now, I learn, very poor, and some money has just been raised for him by his friends in this neighborhood. Could not something be also done in New York? I know that you appreciate him, and that you will be glad to do anything in your power. I take it for granted that you know personally all those who would be most likely to give. I write also to Mr. O’Sullivan, who is a friend of Hawthorne’s, but am ignorant whether he is now in New York. Of course Hawthorne is entirely ignorant that anything of the kind is going on, and it would be better that ‘a bird in the air’ should seem to have carried the news to New York, and that if anything be raised, it should go thence, directly, as a spontaneous gift.”
The money which Lowell and others collected for Hawthorne was sent in the most anonymous fashion through Mr. George S. Hillard, and Hawthorne acknowledged the gift in a letter which moves one by its mingling of gratitude and humiliation. “I read your letter,” he writes to Hillard, “in the vestibule of the post office [at Salem]; and it drew—what my troubles never have—the water to my eyes; so that I was glad of the sharply cold west wind that blew into them as I came homeward, and gave them an excuse for being red and bleared.
“There was much that was very sweet—and something too that was very bitter—mingled with that same moisture. It is sweet to be remembered and cared for by one’s friends—some of whom know me for what I am, while others, perhaps, know me only through a generous faith—sweet to think that they deem me worth upholding in my poor work through life. And it is bitter, nevertheless, to need their support. It is something else besides pride that teaches me that ill-success in life is really and justly a matter of shame. I am ashamed of it, and I ought to be. The fault of a failure is attributable—in a great degree at least—to the man who fails. I should apply this truth in judging of other men; and it behooves me not to shun its point or edge in taking it home to my own heart. Nobody has a right to live in the world, unless he be strong and able, and applies his ability to good purpose.
“The money, dear Hillard, will smooth my path for a long time to come. The only way in which a man can retain his self-respect, while availing himself of the generosity of his friends, is by making it an incitement to his utmost exertions, so that he may not need their help again. I shall look upon it so—nor will shun any drudgery that my hand shall find to do, if thereby I may win bread.”
Nearly four years later, when Hawthorne had leapt into fame and prosperity after the publication of “The Scarlet Letter,” he wrote again to Hillard from Liverpool: “I herewith send you a draft on Ticknor for the sum (with interest included) which was so kindly given me by unknown friends, through you, about four years ago. I have always hoped and intended to do this, from the first moment when I made up my mind to accept the money. It would not have been right to speak of this purpose, before it was in my power to accomplish it; but it has never been out of my mind for a single day, nor hardly, I think, for a single working hour. I am most happy that this loan (as I may fairly call it, at this moment) can now be repaid without the risk on my part of leaving my wife and children utterly destitute. I should have done it sooner; but I felt that it would be selfish to purchase the great satisfaction for myself, at any fresh risk to them. We are not rich, nor are we ever likely to be; but the miserable pinch is over.
“The friends who were so generous to me must not suppose that I have not felt deeply grateful, nor that my delight at relieving myself from this pecuniary obligation is of any ungracious kind. I have been grateful all along, and am more so now than ever. This act of kindness did me an unspeakable amount of good; for it came when I most needed to be assured that anybody thought it worth while to keep me from sinking. And it did me even greater good than this, in making me sensible of the need of sterner efforts than my former ones, in order to establish a right for myself to live and be comfortable. For it is my creed (and was so even at that wretched time) that a man has no claim upon his fellow creatures, beyond bread and water, and a grave, unless he can win it by his own strength or skill. But so much the kinder were those unknown friends whom I thank again with all my heart.”[82]
Aside from his modest salary from the Standard, Lowell’s income from his writings was meagre enough. In publishing his volumes of poetry, he appears to have been largely if not entirely at the expense of manufacture, and in the imperfectly organized condition of the book market at that time, he had himself to supervise arrangements for selling his volume of poems in New York. There are one or two hints that, after his release from contributing to the Standard, he contemplated some new editorial position, perhaps even meditated a fresh periodical venture. At any rate, his friend Briggs remonstrated with him, in a letter written 15 March, 1849: “Don’t, my dear friend, think of selling yourself to a weekly or monthly periodical of any kind, except as a contributor deo volente. The drudgery of editorship would destroy you, and bring you no profit. Make up your mind resolutely to refuse any offers, let them be never so tempting. In a mere pecuniary point of view, it would be more profitable for you to sell your writings where you could procure the best pay for them; they will be worth more and more as your wants grow.” And in December, 1850, Emerson, who was enlisting Hawthorne’s interest in a new magazine projected by Mr. George Bradburn, “that impossible problem of a New England magazine,” as he calls it, writes: “I told him to go to Lowell, who had been for a year meditating the like project.”
It is possible that there was some plan for turning the Massachusetts Quarterly Review into a brisker and more distinctly literary journal. At any rate, Lowell, writing to Emerson 19 February, 1850, says: “The plan seems a little more forward. I have seen Parker, who is as placable as the raven down of darkness, and not unwilling to shift his Old Man of the sea to other shoulders. Longfellow also is toward, and talks in a quite Californian manner of raising funds by voluntary subscription.”
The Massachusetts Quarterly, which had been started in 1847 as an organ of more progressive thought than the North American Review, was under the management of Theodore Parker, and Lowell was evidently a welcome though not constant contributor, as this letter to the editor intimates:—