The connection with the Standard had not altered Lowell’s position in politics. It found him independent, and left him so. He was no less a reformer at the end than he was at the beginning, but he was confirmed in his belief that the world must be healed by degrees; and as he was a disbeliever in the short cut to emancipation by way of disunion, so he was at once a firm believer in radical reform, but skeptical of ultimate success through the rooting out of individual evils. He found himself among people who were sure of their panaceas. He himself in the first flush of his restless desire for activity had been disposed, under the influence of the woman he loved, to attack the evil of intemperance by the method of total abstinence, but his zeal was short-lived. He appears never to have accepted woman suffrage as the solution of the problem of society, and it is doubtful if at any time he would have given his adhesion to the mode of immediate emancipation if he had been called on to discuss it. His imagination and his sense of humor both prevented him from being a thick and thin reformer, and he refused to allow his hatred of slavery to be complicated with practical measures for the reform of various other evils which troubled society. It was because he saw in slavery in the United States the arch foe of freedom and the insidious corrupter of national life that he concentrated his reforming energy upon this evil. He has said of Wordsworth that “fortunately he gave up politics that he might devote himself to his own noble calling, to which politics are subordinate;” but it might be said with equal truth of Lowell that he never gave up poetry, and that when he was writing every week, or every other week, for the Standard, whether in verse or in prose, he was dominated by an imagination which kept steadily before his eyes great principles and doctrines which found in the anti-slavery movement an illustration but not an exclusive end. It is not surprising, therefore, that he should have seemed to others, and sometimes to himself, not to see the enemy just in front of him.

Nevertheless, the experience was worth much to him. It resulted, as it might not except for this stimulus, in the “Biglow Papers,” and it also demonstrated more clearly than ever the supremacy of the literary function with him, since he never laid it aside under the strong provocation which his journalistic work incited, and maintained from first to last the integrity of his spirit. The conservatism which underlay and indeed supported his radicalism was confirmed by his experience, and it issued moreover in a large comprehensiveness, so that he came out of the ranks not only with a greater sympathy with his comrades,[66] but with a larger toleration for the men he attacked. “At this minute,” he writes to Gay, “the song of the bobolink comes rippling through my opening window and preaches peace. Two months ago the same missionary was in his South Carolina pulpit, and can I think that he chose another text, or delivered another sermon there? Hath not a slaveholder hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter as an abolitionist? If you pinch them, do they not bleed? If you tickle them, do they not laugh? If you poison them, do they not die? If you wrong them, shall they not revenge? Nay, I will go a step farther, and ask if all this do not apply to parsons also? Even they are human.”

CHAPTER V
A FABLE FOR CRITICS, THE BIGLOW PAPERS, AND THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL
1847-1848

It was while he was most busily engaged in contributing to the Standard his weekly poems, criticisms, and editorial articles, that Lowell wrote and published a group of books, varied in subject and treatment, dashed off each and all with an eager abandonment to the intellectual excitement which produced them, and read by a later generation as capital illustrations not only of their author’s spontaneity, but also of the permanent direction of his nature. It is not unfair to suppose that the steady application to work in connection with a cause which appealed to moral enthusiasm aroused in a mind like Lowell’s an exhilaration of temper very provocative of creation. The poems which he sent, one after the other, in a continuous flight, were witnesses to this activity of imagination, and the very tension of his mind kept him in a state of excitement, so that his diversions took the form of intellectual amusement. Two or three numbers of the “Biglow Papers” had appeared, when Lowell wrote his friend Briggs that he was at work on a satirical poem, but apparently he did not disclose its exact character, though he intimated at the beginning that he meant to give the poem to his friend. In point of fact, Lowell appears to have written at full speed five or six hundred lines of “A Fable for Critics” in October, 1847, and then to have been so busily engaged in getting ready his new volume of “Poems,” which appeared at the end of the year, that he laid it aside. “I have been waiting with a good deal of impatience,” Briggs writes, 7 November, 1847, “for the manuscript of the satirical poem which you promised to send me. As I have not seen anything advertised which sounds like you I am half afraid that you are not going to publish it. But you must be convinced from the great popularity that Hosea’s efforts have received that the sale of the poem will be large and profitable.”

In his reply, 13 November, Lowell says: “My satire remains just as it was; about six hundred lines I think are written. I left it because I wished to finish it in one mood of mind, and not to get that and my serious poems in the new volume entangled. It is a rambling, disjointed affair, and I may alter the form of it, but if I can get it read I know it will take. I intend to give it some serial title and continue it at intervals.... I shall send you my satire in manuscript when it is finished. Meanwhile, here is a taste and I want your opinion. Here is Emerson. I think it good.—There, I have given you three or four specimen bricks—what think you of the house?... Remember that my satire is a secret. Read the extract to Page.” Mr. Briggs was delighted with what was shown him, and longed for more. “The characteristics of Alcott,” he says, “I could not judge of, although they are most happily expressed, as I have known nothing about him; but the character of Emerson was the best thing of the kind I have read.” He returns to the subject on Christmas day, but is still ignorant of Lowell’s intention as to the disposition of the manuscript. “I think that the book would be a very popular one, but still, it strikes me that your subjects are too localized to be widely understood; but they would have all the merit of fictions at least, and your method would make them universally acceptable.”

But now Lowell gives his friend a more explicit statement of his intention as to the publication of his satire. The volume of poems was out of the way, and on the last day of 1847 he writes as follows: “I have not time left to say much more than happy New Year! I have been hard at work copying my satire that I might get it (what was finished of it, at least) to you by New Year’s day as a present. As it is, I can only send the first part. It was all written with one impulse, and was the work of not a great many hours; but it was written in good spirits (con amore, as Leupp said he used to smoke), and therefore seems to me to have a hearty and easy swing about it that is pleasant. But I was interrupted midway by being obliged to get ready the copy for my volume, and I have never been able to weld my present mood upon the old, without making an ugly swelling at the joint.

“I wish you to understand that I make you a New Year’s gift, not of the manuscript, but of the thing itself. I wish you to get it printed (if you think the sale will warrant it) for your own benefit. At the same time I am desirous of retaining my copyright, in order that if circumstances render it desirable, I may still possess a control over it. Therefore, if you think it would repay publishing (I have no doubt of it, or I should not offer it to you), I wish you would enter the copyright in your own name and then make a transfer to me ‘in consideration of etc.’

“Now I know that you are as proud as—you ought to be, but if the proceeds of the sale would be of service to you, you have no right to refuse them. I don’t make you a pecuniary present, though I trust you would not hesitate to accept one from me, if you needed it, and I could raise the money, but I give you something which I have made myself, and made on purpose for you.

“I know nothing about your circumstances. If beloved W. P. needs it most, let him have it, and I know that you would consider it the best gift I could make you. I will not consent to that disposal of it, however, unless he need it most. In case the proceeds amount to anything handsome (for it may be popular) and you intend them for W. P., let it be done in this way, which would please him and me too, and nobody but myself would be the gainer. Do you in that case sit to Page for your portrait—the said effigies to belong to your humble servant.

“I am making as particular directions as if I were drawing my will, but I have a sort of presentiment (which I never had in regard to anything else) that this little bit of pleasantry will take. Perhaps I have said too much of the Centurion.[67] But it was only the comicality of his character that attracted me,—for the man himself personally never entered my head. But the sketch is clever?—I want your opinion on what I have sent immediately.”[68]