I feel it and I know it,”
he wrote in that frank confidence in his future which his future wholly justified.
In the fifth volume of the present series of the “New England Magazine” Mr. Mead has given us a charming article on the three numbers of the “Pioneer.” These numbers are now among the rarities most prized by American book collectors. And there is hardly a page of the “Pioneer” which one does not read with a certain interest, in view of what has followed. At the end of three numbers the journal died, because it had not subscribers enough to pay for it. It may be observed in this history of our early magazines that all these publishers lived on what we may call placer gold-washings, for nobody here had yet discovered the quartz rock of an advertising patronage. In the “Miscellany” and the “Pioneer” no enterprising advertiser assisted in the payment of the bills. There was not one advertisement in either. The English magazines printed advertisements long before.
In Lowell’s Introductory, written, as will be observed, when he was not yet twenty-four years old, he gives what Mr. Mead well calls a characteristic expression of those views of American literature which always controlled him afterward: “Everything that tends to encourage the sentiment of caste should be steadily resisted by all good men. But we do long for a natural literature. One green leaf, though of the veriest weed, is worth all the crape and wire flowers of the daintiest Paris milliners.” The whole article is well worth study by the young critics now.
It is rather funny to see, in these days, that Nathaniel Parker Willis, who then considered himself as the leader of the young literature of America, gave this opinion of Lowell in reviewing the first number of the “Pioneer:”—
“J.R. Lowell, a man of original and decided genius, has started a monthly magazine in Boston. The first number lies before us, and it justifies our expectation,—namely, that a man of genius, who is merely a man of genius, is a very unfit editor for a periodical.”
This remark of Willis is interesting now, since Lowell has proved himself perhaps the best literary editor whom the history of American journalism has yet discovered. It is just possible, as the reader will see, that Willis did not write this himself.
Lowell’s connection with the “Pioneer” occupied him for the closing months of 1842 and the beginning of 1843. This was at a period when his eyes troubled him badly. Writing from New York, he says: “Every morning I go to Dr. Elliott’s (who, by the way, is very kind) and wait for my turn to be operated upon. This sometimes consumes a great deal of time, the Doctor being overrun with patients. After being made stone blind for the space of fifteen minutes, I have the rest of the day to myself.”
On the 17th of January he writes, “My eyes, having been operated on yesterday with the knife, must be used charily;” and again on the 22d he writes that he had had a second operation performed on the 20th.
“Handbills of the ‘Pioneer’ in red and black, with a spread eagle at the head of them, face me everywhere. I could not but laugh to see a drayman standing with his hands in his pockets diligently spelling it out, being attracted thereto doubtless by the bird of America, which probably led him to think it the Proclamation of the President, a delusion from which he probably did not awake after perusing the document.”