With his European experience behind him Lowell was eager to plunge into literature, and his intention at first was to try his hand at fiction, possibly turning his experience to account somewhat after the manner of his neighbor’s “Hyperion.” At any rate, Longfellow notes in his diary under date of 29 November, 1852: “Met Lowell in the street and brought him home to smoke a pipe. He had been to the bookseller’s to buy a blank book to begin a Novel, on the writing of which his mind is bent. He seems rather sad and says he does not take an interest in anything. This is the reaction after the excitement of foreign travel. Lowell will write a capital novel, and when he gets warm in the harness will feel happier;” and a fortnight later he makes the entry: “Lowell came in. He has begun his novel.”
It is to be suspected that he never went far in the attempt. A dozen years later, when Mr. Fields wanted him to write a novel for the Atlantic Monthly, he made the summary answer: “I can’t write one nor conceive how any one else can.” Yet he could not have abandoned the trial immediately, for in June he was writing to Briggs: “I have got so far as to have written the first chapter of a prose book,—a sort of New England autobiography, which may turn out well.”[96]
Meanwhile, he was met on his arrival in America with a piece of literary news which was welcome for its own sake and because it promised an outlet for his productions. His friend Briggs as editor-in-chief, with G. W. Curtis and Parke Godwin for assistants, was just about launching a new magazine in New York, which was likely to come nearer fulfilling the ideal Lowell had long cherished than anything thus far issued in America. Putnam’s Monthly had behind it an active publishing house, whose head, Mr. G. P. Putnam, had that indefinable quality which makes a publisher, if not an author himself, a genuine appreciator of good literature, and a man whose friendship with authors rested on a basis which was social as well as commercial. He had shown his sagacity and business insight by taking up the writings of Washington Irving when that author was in neglect, and winning a substantial success with them. He cared for the books he published and listened willingly to Mr. Briggs when that gentleman, who had been engaged in many editorial enterprises, argued that the time was ripe for a literary monthly which should stand for American literature of the best sort, and should at the same time concern itself with public affairs and furnish also that miscellaneous entertainment of narrative and description for which the American public showed a liking. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine had been started a couple of years before, but it was almost wholly a reprint of English current literature, and even its cover was a copy of Bentley’s. It had, however, struck a popular taste, and its success made other publishers jealous, while its easy use of foreign matter made the men of letters angry.
The prospectus of Putnam’s Monthly, in which the fact that it was to be “an entirely original work” was emphasized, announced that it was “intended to combine the more various and amusing characteristics of a popular magazine with the higher and graver qualities of a quarterly review,” and that when a subject needed illustrations or pictorial examples, such illustrations would occasionally be given. The rate of payment was fair for the time: poetry had no fixed rates, but Lowell received fifty dollars for a poem of two hundred and fifty lines or so, and prose was paid at the rate of three dollars a page. Hawthorne and Emerson were among those who promised their work, though neither seems to have contributed, but Longfellow printed several poems. The articles and poems were all unsigned. The early numbers gave good promise, and Curtis, with his “Prue and I” papers gave a distinction of lightness and added the flavor which every literary magazine covets but can rarely command. The first number, Briggs declared with elation, had run up to twenty thousand copies, and the second number had one of those articles, “Have we a Bourbon among us?” which are the joy of the magazine editor for the buzz which they create in the reading community. But the high hopes with which Putnam’s started out somehow faded. There were exceptionally good poems and the general average of writing was high, but the magazine soon satisfied curiosity without creating a demand, and the financial embarrassment of the publisher after two years compelled a transfer of the publishing interest which was followed by a steady decline in quality.
Meanwhile, Mr. Briggs looked eagerly to Lowell for help, and for his first number received the poem “The Fountain of Youth,” which had been lying in the poet’s portfolio for three years. He suggested that Lowell should publish “The Nooning” as a serial. This was not to be, but whether from this suggestion or not, Lowell suddenly took it into his head to start a serio-comic poem in Alexandrines, under the heading “Our Own, his Wanderings and Personal Adventures,” in which he intended to personate a correspondent of the magazine, who should travel in Europe, and employ his nonsense and satire on men and things. He began leisurely enough, heading his page with a Greek, a Latin, and an English motto, each cleverly hinting at the plan and the name of the piece. The Latin “Quæ regio in terris Nostri non plena laboris?” was Englished in
“Full many cities he hath seen and many great men known;
What place on earth but testifies the labors of our own?”
Then he makes a doggerel verse under Digression A which slyly imitates Spenser’s verse table-of-contents, and so with Digressions, Invocation, and Progression he saunters carelessly along. “The last few days,” he writes to Briggs, 17 February, 1853, “I have worked in earnest. I wrote one hundred and fifty lines yesterday, and it is thought funny by the constituency in my little Buncombe here. I have hopes that it will be the best thing I have done in the satiric way after I once get fairly agoing. I am thus far taking the run back for the jump. I have enlarged my plan and, if you like it, can make it run through several numbers. It is cruel, impudent,—sassy, I meant to write. Some parts of it I have flavored slightly with Yankee,—but not in dialect. I wish to make it something more than ephemeral, and shall put more thinking into it as I go along. My idea for it is a glass of punch, sweetness, sourness, spirit, and a dash of that Chinese herb favorable to meditation.”
There were three numbers only published of “Our Own,” though the last carried the legend “To be continued” at its foot. The perplexed editor hardly knew how to answer Lowell’s demand for criticism. He himself was immensely entertained, he averred, but nobody else was; although he had heard of one or two, and Lowell added the names of two or three more, it was clear to Mr. Briggs that the verses did not take, and he grew petulant over the stupidity of the public. Lowell’s own ardor cooled. The style of composition was indeed to real writing what the pun is to real wit. In the heat of firing off these fire-crackers, ever so much execution seems to be done, but the laugh that follows is not repeated, and the cleverness and point seem dulled when the bristling jests crowd each other, giving no relief to each.
Lowell could not quite agree with Briggs in the deference which the latter was disposed to pay to the expressions of the public upon the contents of his magazine: “I doubt if your magazine,” he writes, “will become really popular if you edit it for the mob. Nothing is more certain than that popularity goes downward and not up (I mean permanent popularity), and it is what the few like now that the many have got to like by and by. Now don’t turn the tables on me and say that,—not the very few. I have pretty much given up the notion that I can be popular either upward or downward, and what I say has no reference to myself. I wish I could be. But it strikes me that you want as much variety as possible. It is not merely necessary that the matter should be good, but that it should be individual.”
A good many years afterward when Lowell was making up a volume of poems, he looked again at “Our Own” to see if it was worth preserving, and out of the whole six hundred lines he saved only the verses now headed “Fragments of an Unfinished Poem” and the two charming stanzas “Aladdin.”[97] The insertion of this little poem in the midst of his nonsense indicates that if Lowell had found sufficient encouragement he might, especially after reaching Europe in his plan, have worked off the surplusage of high spirits and thrown into his rambling discourse both caustic satire and genial humor.