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--

“These sketches I made (not to be too explicit) From two honest fellows who made me a visit,”--

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

“There is one thing she owns in her own single right,”

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,--

“Here, ‘Forgive me, Apollo,’ I cried, ‘while I pour’ &c., &c.

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,

“‘So, compared to you moderns, is old Melesigines,’

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

down to Fable for Critics in very large 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]

“Two Governors once a letter writ To the Mayor of a distant city, And told him a paper was published in it, That was telling the truth, and ’t was therefore fit That the same should be crushed as dead as a nit By an Aldermanic Committee: ‘Don’t say so?’ says Otis, ‘I’ll enquire if so ’t is: Dreadful! telling the truth? What a pity!

“‘It can’t be the Atlas, that’s perfectly clear, And of course it isn’t the Advertiser, ’T is out of the Transcript’s appropriate sphere, The Post is above suspicion: oh dear, To think of such accidents happening here! I hoped that our people were wiser. While we’re going,’ says Otis, ‘_Faustissimis votis_, How very annoying such flies are!’

“So, without more ado, he enquired all round Among people of wealth and standing; But wealth looked scornful, and standing frowned; At last in a garret with smoke imbrowned, The conspirators all together he found,-- One man with a colored boy banding; ‘’Pon my word,’ says Otis, ‘Decidedly low t is,’ As he groped for the stairs on the landing.

“So he wrote to the Governors back agen, And told them t was something unworthy of mention; That t was only a single man with a pen, And a font of type in a sort of den, A person unknown to Aldermen, And, of course, beneath attention; ‘And therefore,’ wrote Otis, _Annuentibus totis_, ‘There’s no reason for apprehension.’

“But one man with a pen is a terrible thing, With a head and heart behind it, And this one man’s words had an ominous ring, That somehow in people’s ears would cling;-- ‘But the mob’s uncorrupted: they’ve eggs to fling; So t is hardly worth while to mind it; As for freedom,’ says Otis, ‘I’ve given her notice To leave town, in writing, and underlined it.’

“But the one man’s helper grew into a sect, That laughed at all efforts to check or scare it, Old parties before it were scattered and wrecked, And respectable folks knew not what to expect;-- ‘’Tis some consolation, at least to reflect And will help us, I think, to bear it, That all this,’ says Otis, ‘Though by no means _in votis_, Began with one man and a boy in a garret.’”

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.