I tell this, with some venom, because I myself suffered a little from what Hamlet should have called the pangs of delay of magazine men. I had written for the Ohio canvass of September, 1863, a story called “The Man without a Country.” It was “rushed through,” that it might be in time to defeat Vallandigham in the election of October. And by such swiftness of proofs and revises, unexampled before, it got itself printed in the December number of the same year, when poor Vallandigham had been well beaten and forgotten!
Ah, youngsters of 1898, how little do you know of what you enjoy in these days of “quick proofs, no revises, fast coaches.” The true rule for an editor is to send back to each author every manuscript which he has by him, and to trust to February to fill the appetite of March. One does not care to have his eggs too old.
It is to go back a little from the birthday of the “Atlantic” to speak of the first of the “Biglow Papers” ten years before. The series ran for nearly four years.
It was in June, 1846, in face of the almost unanimous hatred of the Mexican War among Massachusetts people, that a regiment was raised in Boston and the neighborhood for that war. Lowell saw a recruiting officer in the street, and was roused to much the sort of wrath which fired the average Boston gentleman in 1773 when he saw a “lobsterback” loafing in the same street with as little reason. Lowell wrote for the “Courier” what he calls “a squib,” which was the first of the “Biglow Papers.” Mr. Lawrence Lowell reminds us that he did not follow up its success at once. The third paper was published a year and a half after the first. After this the poems of the first series appeared in rapid succession.
“A FABLE FOR CRITICS” PROOF-SHEET WITH LOWELL’S CORRECTIONS
From the original, kindly lent by Mrs. Charles F. Briggs, Brooklyn, N.Y.
In the period between the middle of 1847 and the end of 1849 he wrote most of the “Biglow Papers” of that series, he continued his regular work for the “Standard,” and wrote the “Fable for Critics” and the “Vision of Sir Launfal.” Mr. Lawrence Lowell says that the last was written in forty-eight hours, during which he scarcely slept or ate; and he considers it the most generally popular of the poet’s longer poems.
Success gave him new stimulus, and in a happy home he worked with all the help which love and true sympathy could give him. To enter into the spirit of that life, one must make real what Mr. Lawrence Lowell has so well expressed. “He was, no doubt, to some extent a martyr for his political opinions, but no martyr was ever so high-spirited, so jovial, and so charming. As he said himself, he was curiously compounded of two utterly distinct characters. One half was clear mystic and enthusiast, the other humorist; and the humor, which is the best balance-wheel vouchsafed to man, prevented his remaining narrow or fanatical.”
“On July 1, 1851, he embarked on a sailing vessel for Genoa, and passed most of the following year in Italy. A great part of the year was spent in Rome, with his lifelong friend, William Wetmore Story.” But the charm of the earlier years was broken. His little Rose died in 1850; Walter, his only son, died two years later; Mrs. Lowell’s health, always delicate, gave way, and she died in 1853, on the 27th of October, after they had returned to America.
His duty as professor at Cambridge began in September, 1856. Of some details in his discharge of this I have spoken in another chapter. He would refer, sometimes, to a certain “numbness” in literary effort which came from the monotony of a teacher’s duties. But, as Mr. Lawrence Lowell says, when we remember that most of his prose books were written in the twenty years of his professorship, that in the same time he wrote “The Cathedral,” the second series of the “Biglow Papers,” the great “Commemoration Ode,” and several of his best shorter poems, we feel that we must not take too seriously what he said of the numbing effect of the class-room.