“But one man with a pen is a terrible thing,
With a head and heart behind it,
And this one man’s words had an ominous ring,
That somehow in people’s ears would cling;—
‘But the mob’s uncorrupted: they’ve eggs to fling;
So t is hardly worth while to mind it;
As for freedom,’ says Otis,
‘I’ve given her notice
To leave town, in writing, and underlined it.’
“But the one man’s helper grew into a sect,
That laughed at all efforts to check or scare it,
Old parties before it were scattered and wrecked,
And respectable folks knew not what to expect;—
‘’Tis some consolation, at least to reflect
And will help us, I think, to bear it,
That all this,’ says Otis,
‘Though by no means in votis,
Began with one man and a boy in a garret.’”
Lowell himself, in the Introduction which he wrote to the Second Series, bears witness to the popularity of the “Biglow Papers” while they were still uncollected. “Very far,” he says, “from being a popular author under my own name, so far indeed as to be almost unread, I found the verses of my pseudonym copied everywhere: I saw them pinned up in workshops: I heard them quoted and their authorship debated.” It was, it may be said, no new thing to seek to arrest the public attention with the vernacular applied to public affairs. Major Jack Downing and Sam Slick had been notable exemplars, and they had many imitators; but party politics, or even local characteristics, may give rise to the merely idle jest of satire; the reader who laughed over the racy narrative of the unlettered Ezekiel, and then took up Hosea’s poem and caught the gust of Yankee wrath and humor blown fresh in his face, knew that he was in with the appearance of something new in American literature.
After the first heat, Lowell began to distrust his mode a little. “As for Hosea,” he writes to Briggs, “I am sorry that I began by making him such a detestable speller. There is no fun in bad spelling of itself, but only where the misspelling suggests something else which is droll per se. You see I am getting him out of it gradually. I mean to altogether. Parson Wilbur is about to propose a subscription for fitting him for college, and has already commenced his education.”[78] He dropped this intention, however, and the later numbers of the series show no marked departure from the general scheme of Yankee spelling. There is no doubt, though, that when it came to a revision of the papers for final book publication, Lowell did make an attempt to introduce some sort of consistency or effectiveness in the form. He groaned over the labor involved, and confessed that he made a great many alterations in spelling even after the pages had been stereotyped. “It is the hardest book to print,” he wrote Mr. Gay, “that ever I had anything to do with, and, what with corrections and Mr. Wilbur’s annotations, keeps me more employed than I care to be.”
The labor was partly of his own making, but after all was consequent chiefly upon the sense of art which led the author to do much more than simply collect and reprint what he had written currente calamo in the Courier and Standard. The great popularity attained by the successive numbers showed him that he had hit the mark, but also the conception of the whole grew in his mind, and he seized the opportunity which reprinting afforded, to shape his satire and give it a body, by filling out the characters who constituted his dramatis personæ. “When I came to collect [the papers] and publish them in a volume,” he wrote in 1859 to Mr. Hughes, in the letter already quoted, I conceived my parson-editor with his pedantry and verbosity, his amiable vanity and superiority to the verses he was editing, as a fitting artistic background and foil. It gave me the chance, too, of glancing obliquely at many things which were beyond the horizon of my other characters. I was told afterwards that my Parson Wilbur was only Jedediah Cleishbotham over again, and I dare say it may be so; but I drew him from the life as well as I could, and for the authentic reasons I have mentioned.”
There was a slight undercurrent of reference to his own father in this characterization. “My father,” he wrote Hughes, “was as proud of his pedigree as a Talbot or Stanley could be, and Parson Wilbur’s genealogical mania was a private joke between us.”[79]
So thoroughly did he think himself into the artistic conception of the book that he even proposed at one time to put Jaalam on the title-page as place of publication, and to have it “printed on brownish paper with those little head and tail pieces which used to adorn our earlier publications—such as hives, scrolls, urns, and the like.” This external fitness he did not secure, but he elaborated a system of notes, glossary, and index, letting the fun lurk in every part, and completed the effect by the notices of an independent press, which must have made the actual writers of book notices hesitate a little before they dropped into their customary machine-made manner when treating of this special work. The burlesque of Carlyle in one of these is especially clever. In supplying all this apparatus he drew a little on his prose papers in the Standard, but it is doubtful if most readers get beyond the verse, or do more than glance at the drollery which lies perdu in the prose equipment, so much swifter is the flight of the arrows of satire when they are barbed with rhyme.
The success of the book was immediate. The first edition of 1500 was gone in a week, and the author could say with satisfaction that “the book was actually out of print before a second edition could be struck off from the plates.” In later years the book was apt to fill him with a kind of amused astonishment. The unstinted praise which Hughes gave to the “Biglow Papers,” quotations from which were always on his tongue’s end, drew from Lowell the expression: “I was astonished to find what a heap of wisdom was accumulated in those admirable volumes.” It is not strange that, in looking back from the tranquil temper of older years, Lowell should be struck with the high spirits, the tension of feeling, and the abandon of utterance which characterize this work; but when he was in the thick of the fight a second time he was more impressed by the moral earnestness which underlay all this free lancing. “The success of my experiment,” he wrote, in the Introduction to the Second Series, “soon began not only to astonish me, but to make me feel the responsibility of knowing that I held in my hand a weapon instead of the mere fencing stick I had supposed.... If I put on the cap and bells, and made myself one of the court fools of King Demos, it was less to make his Majesty laugh than to win a passage to his royal ears for certain serious things which I had deeply at heart.”
The force which Lowell displayed in this satire made his book at once a powerful ally of a sentiment which heretofore had been crassly ridiculed; it turned the tables and put Anti-slavery, which had been fighting sturdily on foot with pikes, into the saddle, and gave it a flashing sabre. For Lowell himself it won an accolade from King Demos. He rose up a knight, and thenceforth possessed a freedom which was a freedom of nature, not a simple badge of service in a single cause. His patriotism and moral fervor found other vents in later life, and he never sheathed the sword which he had drawn from the scabbard; but it is significant of the stability of his genius that he was not misled into a limitation of his powers by the sudden distinction which came to him. For, though we naturally think first of the political significance of the “Biglow Papers,” the book, in its fullest meaning, is an expression of Lowell’s personality, and has in it the essence of New England. The character of the race from which its author sprang is preserved in its vernacular and in the characters of the dramatis personæ. Not unwittingly, but in the full consciousness of his own inheritance, Lowell became the spokesman of a racy people, whose moral force had a certain acrid quality, and, when thrown to the winds, as in the person of Birdofredom Sawin, was replaced by an insolent shrewdness. Nor is the exemplification of New England less complete for that infusion of homely sentiment and genuine poetic sensibility which underlie and penetrate the sturdy moral force.
The “Biglow Papers” threw “A Fable for Critics” into the shade. It was nearly through the press when the “Fable” was published, and Briggs, who kept a close watch of his friend’s production, wrote: “I am pretty confident that the ‘Fable’ will suit the market for which it is intended, unless it should be killed by Hosea, who will help to divert public attention from his own kind.” It is to be suspected that Lowell himself felt the strong contrast which lay in the two works when he was driving them through the press side by side, and rather lost interest in the ebullition of an hour, as he threw himself with an almost exhausted energy into a book which carried at its heart a flame of passionate scorn. The only passage in “A Fable for Critics” which he dwelt upon with genuine delight was his apostrophe to Massachusetts, and that is almost out of key with the rest of the poem. But a third book was shortly to follow and to divide with the other two the popularity which fell to Lowell as a writer.