Now the remainder of the people of England and of the people of America did not know that any such “Quarterly” existed. There had never risen for it any publisher who “knew the American people.”

In one of the changes of literary “property,” the dwindling “list” of the now venerable Review fell into the hands of people who had courage to give Norton and Lowell the charge of it. Soon after, Fields, Osgood & Co. bought the Review.

“Norton and I have undertaken to edit the ‘North American,’” Lowell writes. “A rather Sisyphean job, you will say. It wanted three chief elements to be successful. It wasn’t thoroughly, that is, thick and thinly, loyal; it wasn’t lively; and it had no particular opinions on any particular subject. It was an eminently safe periodical, and accordingly was in great danger of running aground.”

To this “eminently safe” journal Mr. Norton and Lowell undertook to give loyalty and life. To the little circle which followed in the steps, now faltering, of the Mutual Admiration Club, they added contributors from all latitudes and longitudes. Thus the new departure is marked by letters asking for articles,—to Motley in Vienna, Howells in Venice, Stedman, who was a new writer for them; and, as the reader has seen, Lowell’s own work was in amount what one would hardly have wished for had the Review furnished his only occupation.

CHAPTER XI
POLITICS AND THE WAR

In 1856, the year when Lowell’s name first appears as a professor in the Harvard catalogue, he is one of eleven professors. In 1891, the year of his death, there were fifty-seven professors and assistant professors. The number of “tutors” and “instructors,” to follow the college titles, increases in the same proportion. Lowell’s name does not appear on the list of the “Faculty” in 1855, I suppose because he was in Europe. The Faculty consisted of thirteen gentlemen, of whom President Eliot, then one of the junior members, and Professor James Mills Peirce are now the only survivors. Of his associates in the Faculty, Dr. Walker and Professors Felton, Peirce, Bowen, and Lovering had been his teachers when he was himself an undergraduate twenty years before. Of the others, Professor Sophocles, older than he, had been Greek professor in Amherst before Lowell was at Cambridge. Professors Child, Lane, Jennison, Cooke, Chase, Eliot, and James Peirce were his juniors. In the cordial and simple courtesies of Cambridge life, all these gentlemen are to be spoken of in any calendar of his friends. After his college work begins, his name appears on the list of the Faculty. And it remains on the catalogue during the eight years when he was in Spain and England as American minister. He went to Europe in 1855, after his appointment as professor, and remained there more than a year; he made another visit in August, 1872, and remained abroad until July, 1874. His proper duties at Cambridge, therefore, were between September, 1856, and the summer of 1872, and from October, 1874, to his appointment as minister to Spain in the spring of 1877, covering in both periods nearly nineteen years.

The earlier of these periods—that from 1856 to 1872—includes the whole civil war and the most acute of the struggles which preceded it. He watched with great interest the Kansas trials, and had at one time the idea of taking Hosea Biglow out to Kansas to send his prophecies from what was really the seat of war. He was himself learning, and the world was learning, that Minerva was not unwilling when he wrote prose; although it was as late as 1846 that he expressed himself so doubtfully in that matter. It is a pity that the best of his political essays, in the “Standard,” in the “Atlantic,” and in the “North American,” cannot be published together in a volume for popular circulation. In one volume of the Riverside edition of his collected works are four of the best. If these were in a separate volume, and a few more of the same sort were printed with them, it would be good reading for the New Stuarts, for Philistines, Pharisees, and Lynch-men. It will be many years, I fear, before we are done with them.

His cousin, Mr. Lawrence Lowell, thus characterizes these essays:—

“During the period of war and reconstruction Lowell wrote a number of political essays, but these are not as remarkable as his poetry or his criticism. Although very influential in forming public opinion, and although containing many wise sayings and many striking aphorisms on government, they are, in the main, a forcible exposition of the opinions held by intelligent Republicans. Beginning with a distrust of Lincoln’s tentative policy, they finally express unbounded admiration for the statesmanship that could wait until the times were ripe, and give the lead when the people were ready to follow. The essays show how thoroughly the writer had become estranged from the abolitionists. He regards the conflict at the outset, not as a crusade against slavery, but as a struggle to restore order and maintain the unity of the nation as a question of national existence, in which the peculiar institution of the South is not at issue; and, although before the war was over he saw that no lasting peace was possible unless slavery was forever destroyed, he held that opinion in common with men who had never harbored a thought of abolition before the secession of South Carolina. In short, he no longer writes as the prophet of 1848, but as a citizen and a statesman.”