“If Mr. Webster’s speech should not find any one to confute it in the Senate,—a hard task, for assumptions and tergiversations are not easily replied to,—it will not be without answers abundant and conclusive. It will be answered by every generous instinct of the human heart, by every principle which a New Englander has imbibed in the Church, the Schoolhouse, or the Home, but especially by those inextinguishable sentiments which move men’s hatred of treachery and contempt for the traitor.”
The agreement which Lowell had with the Standard left him at liberty to send either prose or poetry, and as his prose had not necessarily a direct reference to the anti-slavery contest, so his poetry was to be independent of any polemic consideration. It was Lowell the writer whom Gay wished most to attach to the paper for the added weight and influence he would bring, and Lowell in making and holding to his agreement was not indifferent to the gentle stimulus which a regular engagement afforded. He was to send something on Friday if possible, on Saturday at any rate, of each week, and when the end of the week came, a sudden suggestion might turn him away from a half-finished article to let loose a poem in its place. The first five “Biglow Papers” were published in the Courier, the last four in the Standard, where also appeared, early in the connection, that poem entitled “Freedom,” which holds the essence of Lowell’s thought on this large subject, and is the best expression of the attitude of his mind as he entered with a certain sense of special enlistment upon the direct business of a crusade against slavery. The suggestion came from the revolution in France which swept Louis Philippe from his throne, and from that light blaze of revolutionary fire which for a moment kindled hopes in Germany and Italy. During this time appeared also several poems which reflected with varying lights the thought that stirred in him at the new birth, as it seemed, with which humanity was travailing. Such are the apologue of “Ambrose,” that grim poem “The Sower,” “Bibliolatres,” “A Parable,” but here also were “Beaver Brook,” first called “The Mill,” occasionally a poem like “Eurydice” which had been lying unprinted in his portfolio, and a few bits of rhymed satire which were thrown off by him on the spur of the moment, and were too careless in manner to be worth his gathering later into his volumes.
The active members of the anti-slavery society who controlled the policy of the Standard were divided in their judgment of the value of Lowell’s contributions. Those who like Mr. Gay himself were thoroughly in earnest, but held their minds open on other sides than the north-north-east, regarded Lowell as an important acquisition. His fame was growing, and he could have found a ready market for his wares if he had chosen to turn them to the best commercial account, but he cheerfully gave his time and thought to a paper which was always in an impecunious condition, so that the editor found it hard enough to pay the very moderate stipend agreed upon. Lowell, as we have seen, hated to be paid for his services to the anti-slavery cause, and never complained of the inadequacy of his salary; but he took a rational view of the case, and accepted what the paper could give, not measuring his own contributions by the meagre standard of his pay. Nor did he show any sensitiveness when his work came under editorial stricture. The intensity of feeling which possessed the anti-slavery men who were in the thick of the fight made them abnormally critical of those who seemed in any way to hold back, and when Lowell wrote a long review, with hearty praise, of a new volume of Whittier’s poetry, signing it with his initials, Mr. Gay did not scruple to prefix an editorial note, in which he denounced Whittier for his course in 1840, when he refused to follow the lead of those abolitionists who insisted upon the acceptance of women delegates at the London convention. The quarrel then aroused led to a break in the unity of the anti-slavery group. “Older abolitionists,” wrote Gay, “cannot forget what Lowell cannot be aware of, that in the struggle of 1840, which was a struggle of life and death to the anti-slavery cause, Whittier the Quaker was found side by side with the men who would have sacrificed that cause to crush, according even to their own acknowledgment, the right of woman to plead publicly in behalf of the slave.” Lowell took the matter quietly enough: “I could not very well say less, and you could not say more,” was his comment.
Yet how emphatically Mr. Gay valued Lowell’s contributions appears from all the letters of that anxious and harassed editor. Near the close of the connection, he wrote to Lowell: “I expected much good for the paper when I proposed that you should lighten my editorial labor, but it has received, I know, far more benefit than I looked for, great as that was. The influence of the Standard—leaving myself out of the question—since it was established has been very great, and it would also, I am sure, have been very famous had its aim been other than it was. No small amount of energy and intellect have been bestowed upon it, and its nursing fathers and mothers have taken good care of its being. But of this I am sure, and nobody else is in a position to know it so well as I—that of all the good things ever done for it, no one so good ever was done, as making you its joint editor. Its influence through you has been felt where it never was before. Through you it has a reputation which in all its previous existence it had failed to gain. A respect and regard is accorded to it because of your efforts, which no other person ever had, and no other person probably would ever have gained for it.”
But the Standard was not Mr. Gay’s paper to do with as he would, and there was a section of the committee in control that was impatient of a contributor who was not as they were, fighting away on foot, with stout oak staves in their hands, but was flying about as a sort of light-horse contingent, and sometimes seemed out of sight and yet not in the enemy’s country. “There is a small class,” Mr. Gay wrote,—“Stephen Foster is a good representative of it,—who did not consider you worth much, and many of whom confess they do not understand what you would be at.” The portrait which Lowell had drawn of Stephen Foster in his letter to Mr. McKim is likely to help the reader understand that he might possibly even feel contempt for Lowell’s indirect method of attacking slavery.
“Hard by, as calm as summer even,
Smiles the reviled and pelted Stephen,
The unappeasable Boanerges
To all the Churches and the Clergies.
. . . . . . . .
A man with caoutchouc endurance,
A perfect gem for life insurance,
A kind of maddened John the Baptist,
To whom the harshest word comes aptest,
Who, struck by stone or brick ill-starred,
Hurls back an epithet as hard,
Which, deadlier than stone or brick,
Has a propensity to stick.
His oratory is like the scream
Of the iron-horse’s frenzied steam
Which warns the world to leave wide space
For the black engine’s swerveless race.”
Lowell himself was under no illusions. He was warmly attached to Gay, and he had a keen intellectual admiration for Edmund Quincy. He respected to the full his several associates, but he knew well that, though he identified himself cordially with the small knot of earnest men and women who cried aloud and spared not, his temperament, his ideals, and his humor forbade him to shut himself up within the bounds they set themselves. Despite the independence he claimed and that was granted him, he could not escape the sense of his restrictions. “I told you and the Executive Committee honestly before I began,” he wrote Gay, “that they were setting me about a business for which I was not fitted. I feel as if the whole of them were looking over my shoulder whenever I sit down to write, and it quite paralyzes me.” And yet ten days later he could send his poem, “The Mill,” better known as “Beaver Brook,” and write, “I am just in time for the mail now, and I positively admire myself that I can sit down and write a poem to the Standard’s order so resolutely.”
At the end of his first year’s engagement Lowell began to receive intimations that the paper was in a hard way financially. “I am very sorry to see,” he writes the editor, “that the Standard is raised on so insecure a staff. I did not expect, (and so told the Executive Committee) that my writing for it would increase the circulation, but, I say again, as I said before, that they ought to be entirely satisfied with you. Not only is your own editorial work dote with spirit and vigor, but your selections are such as to render the paper one of the most interesting I see. But they ought to do something themselves. Phillips and Quincy could do a great deal if they would. They can’t expect two persons to give the paper an infinite variety, nor me to devote myself wholly to it. I have continued to write after my year was up, but I have had no intimation from the Committee whether they wished my services any longer or not. I am very willing to continue, for if I were to give up this engagement, I must find some other, in order to make the two ends meet.”
It then transpired that there had been a warm discussion in the Committee over the continuance of the arrangement, and Gay and his friends had at last effected a compromise by which the salary of $500 was to be divided between Lowell and Quincy, Lowell being required to contribute every other week only. Lowell accepted the situation philosophically, and doubtless felt some relief. “All through the year,” he wrote to Gay, “I have felt that I worked under a disadvantage. I have missed that inspiration (or call it magnetism) which flows into one from a thoroughly sympathetic audience. Properly speaking, I have never had it as an author, for I have never been popular. But then I have never needed it, because I wrote to please myself and not to please the people: whereas, in writing for the Standard, I have felt that I ought in some degree to admit the whole Executive Committee into my workshop, and defer as much as possible to the opinion of persons whose opinion (however valuable on a point of morals) would not probably weigh a pin with me on an æsthetic question. I have felt that I ought to work in my own way, and yet I have also felt that I ought’ to try to work in their way, so that I have failed of working in either. Nevertheless, I think that the Executive Committee would have found it hard to get some two or three of the poems I have furnished from any other quarter.” The entire letter, which is printed by Mr. Norton,[64] is interesting as further defining Lowell’s attitude toward his associates in the anti-slavery cause, and his separation from them on some of the crucial points. But it is clear that the whole situation was complicated for him by the pecuniary embarrassment under which he labored. He was ready, if it would relieve the situation, to release the Committee altogether, but he was willing to write once a fortnight if they wished him to do so. “To tell the truth,” he says, “I need money more this year than last. My father has just resigned a quarter part of his salary,[65] and a large part of the household expenses must devolve upon me. But I have resolved to turn as much of our land as I can into money, and invest it, though I confess I should prefer to leave it as it is, and where I am sure it would be safe for Mab and the rest.”
At the end of his second year the engagement was ended, though, largely out of friendship for Gay, Lowell contributed occasionally, and his name indeed was kept at the head of the paper, bracketed with that of Mr. Quincy, for another year. He laughed, by the way, at the designation “corresponding editor.” It has always seemed to me to be nonsense. There can, in the nature of the thing, be no such person as a corresponding editor. Moreover, in this particular case, my unhappy genius will keep seeing the double sense in the word corresponding, and suggesting that E. Q. and I correspond in very few particulars,—meaning no offence to either of us. ‘Contributor’ would be the fitting word.”