Of “The Cathedral,” after nearly thirty years, I may perhaps mention a contemporary criticism. When it was published, I was the editor of “Old and New.” My theory was, and is, that generally a book should be reviewed by some one in sympathy with the author. So I sent “The Cathedral” to Mr. Waldo Emerson, hoping that he would write a review of it for our magazine. He returned the book the next day, saying that he could not write the article. When I met him next, I expressed my regret; and the philosopher said simply, “But, I like Lowell, I like Lowell.” To which I replied, “Yes, and you like the poem, do you not?” “I like it—yes; but I think he had to pump.” The figure is best understood by those of us who know the difference between “striking oil” and digging an artesian well for it and putting in valves and pistons with a steam-engine. Probably Lowell would have enjoyed the criticism as much as any one.
WILLIAM WETMORE STORY
Lowell’s own inside view of editing, and of the “Atlantic,” the early career of which he directed, peeps out again and again in his letters. If it were well to print here some of his private notes to contributors, they would, as I have intimated, show an almost motherly care of the new-born magazine. The first number is dated December, 1857, and in that month he writes, “Even the Magazine has its compensations.” Let the reader remember that the new duty he has undertaken, the “avocation,” is superimposed on his “vocation,”—the regular work of a full college professor. “First, it has almost got me out of debt, and, next, it compels me into morning walks to the printing-office. [This was the Riverside Press, not far from the college.] There is a little foot-path which leads along the river-bank, and it is lovely, whether in clear, cold mornings, when the fine filaments of the bare trees on the horizon seem floating up like sea-mosses in the ether sea, or when (as yesterday) a gray mist fills our Cambridge cup, and gives a doubtful loom to its snowy brim of hills, while the silent gulls wheel over the nestling cakes of ice which the Charles is whirling seaward.”
If other editors had a morning walk like this, and had the eyes to see and the ears to hear, it might be well for other readers.
When one remembers that the Autocrat’s papers were going on in the “Atlantic” at this time, that Motley and Prescott were publishing bits of their histories in it, that Longfellow wrote almost regularly in these numbers, and that younger writers, now well known, were winning their spurs in these first two volumes, it is easy to see that the work of the editor, who was easily chief among them, was interesting and inspiring to him. People were not then used to such papers as his on Choate and Cushing. He writes this scrap in October, 1858:—
“Phillips was so persuaded of the stand given to the Magazine by the Choate article that he has been at me ever since for another. So I have been writing a still longer one on Cushing. I think you will like it,—though on looking over the Choate article I am inclined to think that, on the whole, the better of the two.
“The worst [of editing] is that it leads me to bore my friends when I do get at them. To be an editor is almost as bad as being President.”
To Mr. Higginson, then forty years younger than he is now, he says, “As for your own contributions, I may say to you, as I always have to Mr. Underwood, that they are just to my liking,—scholarly, picturesque, and, above all, earnest,—I think the most telling essays we have printed.”
And when he resigns the charge to his friend Fields—his warm friend till death—in May, 1861: “I was going to say I was glad to be rid of my old man of the sea. But I don’t believe I am. A bore that is periodical gets a friendly face at last, and we miss it on the whole....