James Russell Lowell and His Friends

by Edward Everett Hale

Yet I have guessed that, in the fact that “the Atlantic States” were then contributing the capital and the men who were forming the Pacific States, we find the origin of the very fortunate name of the magazine. The civilization of the smaller Atlantic basin was beginning to assert itself in that great Pacific basin which implies, when we speak of it, half the surface of the world. And of such an assertion the “Atlantic” was to be the mouthpiece. But this is my guess only. I never talked with him about the name, and I do not know who suggested it. No man then thought of the Philippines.

I always thought that, at the beginning, Mr. Phillips meant to edit the magazine himself. I do not believe that it occurred to him, before he began, that a magazine office is a place to which every prophet, every poet, and every fool in the land thinks he may send what he chooses to write, and supposes that he is “entitled” to have it read, not to say printed and circulated. I think he thought he was to ask John, James, and the others, for whom he was publishing books, to send articles fit for the magazine, as Mr. Prescott, for instance, sent a chapter of his “Charles the Fifth.” He did not think that Tom, Dick, or Harry had any “rights” in the business. Perhaps Mr. Underwood or some one in the office was to read the proofs.

But very soon this simple Arcadian notion vanished. And very soon Lowell was the working editor of the magazine.

Let me say a word about any presumption that Lowell was a mere figurehead, and that some one else did the work. Trust me, for I know. I have worked under many editors, good and bad. Not one of them understood his business better than Lowell, or worked at its details more faithfully. I think he hated to read manuscripts as much as any man of sense does. In those days there was practically no typewriting. I think that, like any man of sense, he would prefer to write an article than to read the average “contribution.” But he had said he would do it, and he did it—up to time, so far as I have seen, careful in detail even to the least detail, and he had no reason to be ashamed of his work when he was done.

In those days people of literary aspirations, especially young people, read the English magazines almost religiously. Indeed, “Blackwood” and “Frazer” and sometimes the “Dublin University Magazine” were worth reading. I am afraid that, for all I have said or implied about the American or Atlantic basis of the new magazine, the original cover was, in a way, an imitation of “Blackwood.” The color was, as it is, a sort of tawny brown. It was more tawny then than it is now. Did it just suggest the “tawny lion pawing to be free”? I do not think Phillips thought of this. Perhaps Holmes and Lowell did. Where “Blackwood’s Magazine” had and has a medallion head of somebody, we put on the cover of our “maga” the head of John Winthrop, from the old portrait said to be by Vandyke,—I do not know why.

Now this was as bad a mistake as the New Yorkers made in calling their magazine the “Knickerbocker.” That is, it gave a local emblem to a national magazine. John Winthrop was a great man. But his greatness belonged to Massachusetts, and not to the nation. West of the Hudson River there were not a thousand men in the country who knew anything about him.

But this mistake was not held to. After two years the “Atlantic” had full reason to show that it stood, not for Massachusetts, but for “We, the People of the United States.” And the national flag was substituted for the head of a Massachusetts governor. Why it was taken off, I never knew; I doubt if any one else does. One is pleased to see, as this sheet passes the press, that it has appeared again.[^[8]]

In the war the magazine was loyal from hub to tire. Some capital contributions to history are embalmed in it. I remember the late Caleb William Loring’s excellent paper on Antietam, a good companion to Dr. Holmes’s “Hunt after the Captain.”

It may be amusing to preserve one or two reminiscences of the delay with which magazines then appeared, at which writers meekly complained.

The admirable Theodore Winthrop was killed in a miserable outpost skirmish above Hampton. Then, and, alas! not till then, the “Atlantic people” remembered that they had some excellent manuscripts of his, which had been seasoning in the safe, doubtless paid for when they were accepted, but “crowded out” till then. Then they were pushed into type as soon as might be. But death came before the “Atlantic” took the credit, which it deserved, of discovering the author.