Both James and myself feel greatly interested in your journal,[40] in spite of its proposed name. James told me to express his horror to you at the cockneyism of such a title. The Broadway Chronicle chronicles the thoughts and feelings of Broadway, not those of the New England people whom you seem willing to receive somewhat from. Should not a title have truth for its first recommendation? Do you write from the meridian of Broadway? I think you write from a sturdy New England heart, that has a good strong well-spring of old Puritan blood beating therein, with all its hatred to forms and cant, to fashion and show. If ‘Pistol speaks naught but truth,’ should his name be a lie? Pistol’s is not; it expresses the man truly. I wish yours did as much to us here, though if it really gratifies your taste and judgment, if it is not a whim, but a thought, we shall all like it in time, I suppose, if we do not now. If it is good we shall of course come round to it. I always say just what I think, as you see, and I trust it will not seem harsh and unlovely to you in me as a woman. I do not wish to appear so ever, but I had rather than give up what I think is truly and undeniably one of woman’s rights in common with man.
James says he cannot say anything now with certainty in regard to his contributions to your paper, except that he will give you, of course, the best he has. Mrs. Putnam, I believe, has nothing translated at present, but James will ask her, also William Story and Nathan Hale. I have some translations I made from the German, songs, ballads, etc., which are at your service if you care to have them. I hope to write somewhat when I can have James always by my side to encourage me, and in time it may be something more than a source of pleasure to us. Carter has seen your letter, and I do not doubt will be ready to do all he can, ready and glad.
I intended to have written to you and Mrs. Briggs expressly to invite you to our wedding, but I cannot do it now with much force or grace after your paragraph on the subject.[41] To us who have been married for nearly five years, it is of course no spiritual change; but if it were merely for the fact that from that day we can always be together, it would be well worth celebrating by some rite and calling our friends about us to participate in it. What that rite is does not greatly matter, but I prefer that which time has consecrated.
“I can scorn nothing which a nation’s heart
Hath held for ages holy.”
That is, nothing in the form of rite or observance for things in themselves sacred, for you will tell me the Ages held the gibbet, the scourge and rack holy, if I let it pass without qualification. Still, I bid you to our marriage, though I trust even if you do not come you can see it whenever you see us. Some have great need to ask their friends at such a time, that they may afterwards certify such a thing has taken place because no trace of it remains. It can never be so with us, it could never be so with any who hold love sacred....
We shall be married the night after Christmas, and go on to New York after one day and night spent at home. We should love to stop there to see you” as long as you would like to have us, but our present engagements in Philadelphia will take us directly on there. We shall be in New York on Sunday, where is not decided yet. With love to your wife, yours with friendly heart,
Maria White.
The book which this letter speaks of as absorbing Lowell’s time and thought was his “Conversations on Some of the Old Poets,” for which Miss White made a cover design and which was published by John Owen early in January, 1845. It will be remembered that Lowell began in the Boston Miscellany and continued in the Pioneer some studies on the Old Dramatists. The series might have gone on at greater length, for he was working a vein which yielded him great delight, and never indeed ceased to engage his attention. He resumed the theme in the last considerable venture of his life, and gave a course of lectures at the Lowell Institute in the spring of 1887, which was in effect a series of readings from the dramatists with running comments. “When I selected my topic for this new venture,” he said to his audience at the opening of the course, “I was returning to a first love. The second volume I ever printed, in 1843 I think it was,[42]—it is now a rare book, I am not sorry to know; I have not seen it for many years,—was mainly about the Old English Dramatists, if I am not mistaken. I dare say it was crude enough, but it was spontaneous and honest.”
The suspension of the Pioneer left Lowell without any convenient vehicle for carrying further these appreciative papers, and he projected a book partly because the subject was in his mind, partly because he was anxious to turn his printed matter to fresh account, but chiefly, it must be inferred from the contents of the book, because he was eager to have freedom of speech on several matters which lay close to his mind. He resolved, therefore, to remodel his papers, so far as he used them at all, into a series of conversations. His work upon the book was hurried, as the letter last quoted from Miss White intimates. In September, 1844, he was planning a course of four or five lectures on English poetry, beginning with Chaucer, which he proposed delivering in Philadelphia in the winter immediately after his marriage; but he seems suddenly to have changed his mind, and to have tossed what he might have prepared into this new book, which opens with a long conversation on Chaucer,—a conversation split in the next edition into two. The passages from Chaucer which he quotes are drawn sometimes from the modernization by Wordsworth, but are also, in some cases, his own much closer simplification of the original. To the ear they depart very little from the original, the widest departure being in getting rid of the final e. The talk on Chaucer is followed by comments on Chapman and Ford, with reference by easy suggestion to Shakespeare, Marlowe, Fletcher, Pope, and Wordsworth.
But though the staple of the “Conversations” is poetry, and there are generous examples and much keen appreciation of the poets discussed, the book would interest a reader to-day less by its treatment of the subjects which gave it excuse for being than by its free and careless exhibition of Lowell’s mind on topics of current concern. There is very little of dramatic assumption in the interlocutors. Philip and John are simply convenient personages playing at a battledore and shuttlecock game of words. Philip is the major character, who does all of the reading and advances most of the propositions, but John, whose chief part is to start Philip by questions, and to interpose occasional jibes or independent observations, is not differentiated in manner; he is another of Lowell’s many selves, and may be taken as the critical, interrupting side of his mind.[43] But both speakers are after the same game.