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A
down to Fable for Critics in very large
caps. Then the rest in small caps properly broken up so as to conceal the fact of the rhyme.[72]
You will like the tribute to our Massachusetts. It is clearly the best passage in the poem, and you will see how adroitly it comes back to the theme, the general comic and satiric tone, of the rest.”
The date on the rhymed title-page was anticipated a little, for the book was advertised for 20 October, and delivered on the 25th. A thousand copies had been printed from type and were quickly disposed of. The little book was then stereotyped and a second edition issued the first of the New Year, with the new preface which is still attached to the poem. In February it had gone to a third edition, but at the end of November, 1849, it had not sold beyond three thousand copies, though a fourth edition was then talked of. It is to be feared that Mr. Briggs’s golden eggs were addled.
It will be remembered that in December, 1846, Lowell wrote the amusing lines to James Miller McKim, editor of the Pennsylvania Freeman, which were printed in that paper, and are included among his collected poems under the heading “Letter from Boston.” In the same frolicsome temper used in “A Fable for Critics,” Lowell made rapid sketches of the conspicuous anti-slavery people as seen at the bazaar just held in Faneuil Hall. The success of the squib very likely suggested to him the fun of playing the same game with the literati of the day. Both poems, indeed, may have taken a hint from Leigh Hunt’s “The Feast of the Poets,”[73] which had been brought afresh to Lowell’s notice, if not disclosed to him for the first time, by the little volume “Rimini and other Poems by Leigh Hunt,” issued by Ticknor in 1844. The measure is the same. Phœbus Apollo also introduces the poets, though Hunt’s scheme is more deliberate than Lowell’s, and there is the same disposition to make use of unexpected rhymes. Hunt used his sauciness upon his contemporaries, Spencer, Rogers, Montgomery, Crabbe, Hayley, Gifford, Scott, Campbell, Moore, Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, and Rose. The reader can easily pick out the names here which have well outlived Hunt’s mockery, and those which were as well known to Hunt’s contemporaries as are some in the “Fable” to Lowell’s. Hunt, to be sure, confined himself to poets and poetasters, while Lowell drew his examples from the more conspicuous writers in the United States, whether of prose or of verse.
There was little mystery about the authorship of the “Fable.” Lowell did not put his name on the title-page, but he wrote himself all over the book; and though the publication was anonymous, he made no objection to the disclosure to Putnam, and apparently was careless about confining the knowledge to Briggs, Gay, and Page. Longfellow records in his diary under 15 June, 1848, “Passed an hour or two with Lowell, who read to me his satire on American authors; full of fun, and with very true portraits, as seen from that side.” It does not appear if Lowell read to his guest what he had recently written about him in the satire. And Dr. Holmes, to whom a copy of the book, as we have seen, was sent with the “author’s and so forths,” acknowledged it in a letter to Lowell, in which he characterizes it as “capital—crammed full and rammed down hard—powder (lots of it)—shot—slugs bullets—very little wadding, and that is gun-cotton—all crowded into a rusty looking blunderbuss barrel as it were,—capped with a percussion preface,—and cocked with a title-page as apropos as a wink to a joke.”[74]
Clever as are the portraits,—some of the lines are bitten in with a little acid,—and though there are but few of the authors characterized who have not even a more secure place to-day than then, the “Fable” can scarcely be said ever to have had or retained much vogue as a whole. In the excitement of writing his crackling lines Lowell believed himself to be making a hit, but hardly had the ink dried than he saw it for what it was, intellectual effervescence that made one hilarious for the moment. “It seems bald and poor enough now, the Lord knows,” he wrote between the first and second editions. Forty years afterward, however, on recalling it, he said it was the first popular thing he had written. He never was quite easy as to his treatment of Bryant: “I am quite sensible now,” he wrote in 1855, “that I did not do Mr. Bryant justice in the ‘Fable.’ But there was no personal feeling in what I said, though I have regretted what I did say because it might seem personal.” And as late as 1887 he characterized his poem written for Bryant’s birthday as a kind of palinode to what he had said of him in the “Fable,” “which has something of youth’s infallibility in it, or at any rate of youth’s irresponsibility.” Aside from this slight uneasiness, Lowell does not appear to have repented of any of his judgments, nor did he ever revise the poem for subsequent editions. No doubt, the disregard of the poem has been due largely to the ephemeral nature of much of the jocoseness. The puns, good and bad, with which it is sprinkled, are so many notices of “good for this time only,” and the petty personalities and trivial bits of satire lower the average of the whole. The “Fable” must be taken for just what it was to the author and his friends, a piece of high spirits with which to make sport: the salt that savors it is to be found in the few masterly characterizations and criticisms.
And yet, turning away from this jeu d’esprit as a piece of literature, and looking at it as a reflection of Lowell’s mind in a very ardent passage of his life, we may justly regard with strong interest so frank an expression, not merely of his likes and dislikes, but of the underlying principle of criticism which was native to him and found abundant illustration from the days of the Pioneer to the later days of the North American Review. His impatience of yard-stick criticism and of a timid waiting upon foreign judgment, so hotly uttered in his rapid lines, sprang from the intuitive perception and the independence of spirit which lie at the basis of all his own criticism. This intuitive perception was indeed that of a man who often formed hasty impressions and was not without personal prejudice, but it was at least a first-hand judgment, and not the composite result of other men’s opinions, and it came from a mind through which the wind of a free nature was always blowing. The lightning flashes which disclose the inherent and lasting qualities of Emerson, Hawthorne, Cooper, Holmes, Whittier, Bryant, Longfellow are all witnesses to the penetration and clear intelligence which Lowell possessed. It must not be forgotten that Lowell, himself only just past the period of youth, was writing of men whose reputation is secure enough now, but who were at that time not wholly discriminated by the general public from a number of mediocrities who crowded about them, and there is an even-handed justice in the poem which not unfitly is put into the mouth of that court of last resort, Phœbus Apollo himself.
The independence which goes along with the intuition is simply the integrity of a nature which is not given to the concealment of its judgments. As he laughingly said of himself later, he was very cock-sure of himself at this time. In after years, when he was speaking in his own voice from a more historic platform, he might choose his phrases more deliberately, but none the less did he speak his mind out. There was confidence in himself first and last, but the impetuous, almost reckless utterance of his youth, when he saw things clearly as youth does when it is conscious of breathing the air of freedom and bathing in the light of truth, yielded only to the temper which maturity brings and was more moderate and charitable in expression because it had the larger vision. When one considers the eagerness with which Lowell vented himself in the months of his close connection with the Anti-Slavery Standard, one is not surprised that in a book which is at once a defence of criticism and a swift survey of the whole field of American letters as it lay under the eye of this knight-errant of freedom and truth, Lowell should have displayed, with little reserve, the frankness and impetuosity of his nature. It is only after a closer inspection that one discovers also how sound and how generous is his judgment.
How much satire gains from moral earnestness and a righteous scorn is easily seen in the book which followed close on the heels of “A Fable for Critics,” and with its pungency weakened the impression which might otherwise have been created by its companion in literature. We have already seen that the first number of the “Biglow Papers” appeared in the Courier of Boston in June, 1846, and that Lowell reckoned on producing a greater effect by withholding his name. He told Gay that he might very likely continue to fire from this masked battery while he was openly keeping up with others a fusillade in the Standard. In point of fact the first five numbers were printed in the Courier, but when the fifth was printed, Lowell was at the beginning of his real connection with the Standard, and the remaining four were printed in that paper.