James Russell Lowell, A Biography; vol. 1/2

by Horace Elisha Scudder

“Will you be good enough to let me know how much Mr. Underwood shall send you? He will remit at once.

“The sale of Maga has been very good considering the times, and I think you will find the second number better than the first. If you do not wish the burthen so spelt, will you write me?”

The year 1857 was one of great financial distress, and the magazine felt something of this influence even before it was published, for it was intended to bring it out earlier than its first number actually appeared. It was in May that the preliminary arrangements were made and Lowell secured as editor. As late, however, as the end of that month, he was writing to a foreign correspondent that the editorship was a dead secret. But as we have seen he had interested himself in the venture from the outset. From time to time after his attempt with the Pioneer he had revolved in his mind plans for magazines. It is safe to say that few prominent writers in America, Longfellow and Cooper being the chief exceptions, failed to dream of launching some vessel of this sort that should be freighted with the best of literature, and the initiative in almost all the cases of important magazines has been taken by the author rather than by the publisher. We have perhaps come to the close of the period when a new monthly magazine seems essential for the carrying of American thought and letters, and enterprise of this sort is more likely to seek an outlet in weekly journalism; but the men of letters who were at the front in the middle of the century not only had strong intellectual sympathy with the brilliant Blackwood of that day,—Lowell in his correspondence repeatedly uses the familiar form Maga when referring to the Atlantic,—and had been brought up on Tait, The London Journal, Fraser, and other vehicles of contemporaneous English and Scottish letters, but they demanded some direct, open means of reaching readers, for they had a great deal to say, which was ill-adapted to daily journalism and for which they could not wait till it should cool for book publication.

The conditions were favorable also from the point of view of the publisher, and Phillips & Sampson were in a good position to know this. They were aware that the leading writers were in their neighborhood. Washington Irving was an old man, and Mr. Bryant by his associations was rather of New England than of New York. Excepting these two the men of national distinction, Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Prescott, Motley, Lowell, were New Englanders, and men known by these to have large gifts, Holmes, Higginson, Thoreau, Cabot, Norton, who were chiefly relied on to make the early numbers, were their neighbors and friends, while the commanding reputation of Mrs. Stowe could at once be counted on to give éclat to any magazine with which she was connected. Besides, the business of this house, which was largely that of a jobbing house, so called, that is, a house which sold miscellaneous books from whatever publishers all over the country, was of such a nature as to create a confidence in the existence of a widespread audience of intelligent readers.

Thus the publishers were prepared to undertake the venture upon a somewhat liberal scale for those days. They chose the best printer near by, Mr. Houghton, who had already given distinction to the name “Riverside,” and they proposed to make a handsome magazine, not wholly unlike in its appearance the Edinburgh Blackwood. They paid their editor a salary of $2500, and they expected to pay contributors on a scale not to be sure much in advance of what the best writers could secure in other periodicals in Philadelphia and New York, but more generous as regards the average contributor. I think the mean rate of prose was six dollars a page, though it may occasionally in the case of a tyro have dropped to five dollars, and for poems they paid usually fifty dollars apiece. In a letter to a contributor who took exception to the price paid him, Lowell wrote, when the magazine had been running three or four months, “You must be content. Six dollars a page is more than can be got elsewhere, and we only pay ten to folks whose names are worth the other four dollars. Capite? What we may be able to do hereafter, I know not. I shall always be for liberal pay.”

It might seem as though the distinction thus referred to would hardly exist when all the articles were unsigned, but the authorship for the most part was an open secret. In those days the North American Review, as well as other like periodicals, used to print a little slip with the authorship of the separate articles set against the successive numbers of the articles, and this slip, though not inserted in all the copies sold or sent to subscribers, was at the service of newspapers and the inner circle of contributors and near friends. In like manner the authorship of the principal articles and poems in the Atlantic leaked out, and for some, like Emerson’s poems and Holmes’s “Autocrat,” there could be no concealment.

The authors themselves sometimes were glad of the privacy, as they thought it secured them more independence and possibility of frankness. Lowell thus wrote in September, 1859, to one of his contributors, who complained of what he thought want of care: “I am very sorry indeed for the mischance, but am quite sure it was no fault of mine. Where the ‘copy’ passes through four or five hands, all of whose owners know the handwriting, the chances of leakage are great. I confess that in the worry of the last week or two, I did not remember to give any new caution just before the publication of the October number. I am the more sorry if it is to deprive us of your contributions. For myself, I have always been opposed to the publication of the authors’ names at all. I do as well as I can with so many things to think of at once.” The practice of withholding names publicly continued till 1862, when the index at the end of the volume disclosed the authorship of the articles in the body of the magazine, and in 1870, the practice was begun of signing contributions. The anonymous character of the early volumes served, however, to bury the authorship in some cases past resurrection, as I found when I undertook to prepare a General Index in 1877, and again in 1889.

The ideal which Lowell formed for the magazine may best be inferred from the character of the numbers issued under his control, but in a few passages in his letters to contributors and friends he gives some glimpses of what was going on in his mind as he faced the very practical questions which arose in the conduct of the magazine. When I became editor of the Atlantic, in the spring of 1890, he contrasted my position with his own, and remarked on the very much larger number of writers on whom I could call for contributions, and the higher average of training in literary work. “Your task,” he wrote me, “will be in one respect at least easier than mine was thirty odd years ago, for there are now twenty people who can write English where there was one then. Indeed, there are so many, and they do it so well, that it looks as if literature as a profession or guild were near its end, and as if every man (and woman) would do his or her own on the principle of Every man his own washerwoman.” I thought and said, however, that it was not general average but distinction which gave a stamp to the magazine, and that in that respect he certainly had the advantage. In one of his letters to Mr. Richard Grant White, who feared a Shakespeare article he had furnished might be the one paper too much, he wrote: “I don’t care whether the public are tired of the Divine Villiams or not—a part of the magazine, as long as I have anything to do with it, shall be expressly not for the Mob (of well-dressed gentlemen who read with ease).”

At the outset, before any number had been published, he wrote to a friend from whom be solicited a contribution: “The magazine is going to be free without being fanatical, and we hope to unite in it all available talent of all shades of opinion. The magazine is to have opinions of its own, and not be afraid to speak them, but I think we shall be scholarly and gentlemanlike.” “This reading endless manuscripts,” he wrote to the same friend, when he was in full tide of preparation for the first number, “is hard work, and takes a great deal of time, but I am resolved that nothing shall go in which I have not first read. I wish to have nothing go in that will merely do,[122] but I fear I can’t keep so high a standard. It is astonishing how much there is that keeps just short of the line of good and drops into the limbo of indifferent.”

“There is a constant pressure on me,” he writes again, “to ‘popularize’ the magazine, which I resist without clamor.” It is easy to understand this attitude. Lowell cared greatly for the success of the Atlantic, and he was governed in his conduct of it by prudential considerations. In the letter just quoted he had occasion to refer to a controversy which was then hot. “I am urged,” he says, “to take ground in the Albany controversy, but do not feel that there is any ought in the matter, and am sure the Trustees will beat in the end. I think it would be unwise to let the magazine take a losing side unless clear justice required it. Am I not right?” But though he was not indifferent to the commercial prosperity of the Atlantic, and knew well that its opportunity for serving letters was largely conditioned on its subscription list, he did not make the fatal mistake of subordinating his own judgment to a supposititious judgment of the mysterious public which buys and reads magazines. It was his business to keep his own judgment free from the partisan bias of idiosyncrasy, but he perceived well the more subtle danger to which he was exposed of abdicating his authority while keeping his title in the supposed interest of the magazine. It was just because he was Lowell, a man whom the public was ready to follow in literary judgments, that he was in this place, and it was in the application of a well-seasoned taste that he demonstrated his fitness for the position. He cared greatly to be the instrument of organizing a body of first-rate literature, and the tone which he gave the Atlantic during the few months of his editorship became a tradition which powerfully affected its character after he retired from it. He put his own stamp on it emphatically.