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

by Horace Elisha Scudder

In one point of excellence Lowell was exceedingly particular. He told me once in later life, when we were discussing a proposed reissue of the British Poets, of which he was to be editor-in-chief, that I must not think he would accept any one’s proof-reading but his own. “I am really a very careful proof-reader,” he said, “though people fancy I am too indolent for such work.” In a letter to Mr. Norton, 18 October, 1859, presaging some changes, he writes: “As to proofs, I must read those myself, or I don’t feel safe. Yet a piece of bad grammar got into the October number in spite of Mr. Nichols and me together.” He had, indeed, a most admirable aid in Mr. George Nichols, who was a vigilant officer, carrying a search warrant for any and all literary misdemeanors. The Atlantic at this time was printed at Riverside, and there is a charming description, in a letter which Mr. Norton prints,[128] of the morning walk which Lowell was wont to take to the Press by the footpath that lay along the river bank.

The pressure upon Lowell, which his college work and his editorship brought, did, during these four years, stop, somewhat, his spontaneity. He wrote but few poems, and his letters show the effort he needed to make to force some gayety. “I am that man among mortals,” he wrote to Miss Norton, “whose friends must forgive him the most treasons against friendship,—silence, staying away, dulness when he writes or comes—and I know not what else,—yet I do believe that my heart holds fire as long as another, and that I neither grow cool nor forget sooner than most. I cannot write unless I feel as if I could give the best part of myself to those who deserve it best, and I am so forever busy that I am either employed or weary, and who can write then? I believe that none but an idle man can write a good letter. I mean by idle, a man who is not under the necessity of tapping his brain on the public side, and tapping so freely that the runnings on the other cannot be sprightly for want of head. This is why women are such good letter-writers. Their ordinary employments do not suck them dry of all communicativeness,—I can’t think of any other word,—and their writing is their play, as it should be. As for me, nowadays, taking up my pen is only the reminder of work. This that I write with is one worn to a stump with my lectures three years—four years ago. I would not write with the same one I had used for Mr. Cushing and drudgery. So the fault is not in the quill that I am stupid. If I had only been laid away in a drawer these four years, as it had been! What a fury I should be in to declare myself on all manner of topics! But this exhaustion one feels from overwork extends itself to the receptive faculties as well. A dry sponge floats and is long in saturating. The mind, I think, goes even beyond this—it must be full to take up more.”

The diversions which Lowell found in this period were not many. He made his yearly excursion to the Adirondacks, always looking forward eagerly to it, and working furiously just before home-leaving, that he might go with some serenity of mind. He saw scarcely anything of social life in Cambridge or Boston;[129] he went frequently to Shady Hill, the home of the Nortons, but nowhere else to speak of, and he found true relaxation in his whist club. Aside from all this, he derived most entertainment from the very informal clubs, with their dinners, which had sprung chiefly out of the establishment of the Atlantic. For a short time, apparently, there were two of these loose organizations, the Atlantic Club, so called, which was the gathering of the contributors at dinner, under the auspices of the publishers, during the first months of strong interest,—dinners which seem to have sprung from the little one given by Mr. Phillips at the institution of the magazine; and the Saturday Club, which still survives, a dining club, made up at first chiefly of literary men naturally connected with the Atlantic, and of congenial spirits, some of whom never and some rarely contributed. This latter club appears, after a while, to have supplanted the former. “Dined with the Atlantic Monthly people,” Longfellow writes in his diary, 21 December, 1857, and again, 14 May, 1859, “Dined with the Atlantic Club, at Fondarivés’s. The ‘Atlantic’ is not the ‘Saturday’ club, though many members belong to both;” and on 9 July, 1859, he again notes that he dined with the Atlantic Club at the Revere House, but the references cease at this point, and the club dinners which he attends afterward are Saturday Club dinners, held on the last Saturday of the month at Parker’s Hotel. Dr. Holmes also, in later years, found the flourishing Saturday Club so constant in his recollection that he was disposed to deny the existence of any Atlantic Club. Properly speaking there never was any club, but only occasional dinners to which contributors were invited by the publishers. It was of one of the Saturday Club dinners that Lowell wrote 11 October, 1858: “You were good enough to tell me I might give you an account of our dinner. There at least was a topic, but I find that when I am full of work, I do not see the men I go among, but only shadows which make no impression. It is odd that when one’s mind is excited by writing so that one cannot sleep, one should see in the same way a constant succession of figures without really seeing them. They come and change and go without any dependence on the will, without any relation to the preoccupying thought.

“I remember one good thing at our last dinner. The dinner was for Stillman, and I proposed that Judge Hoar should propose his health in a speech. ‘Sir!’ (a long pause) ‘in what I have already said, I believe I speak the sentiments of every gentleman present, and lest I should fail to do so in what I might further say’—(another pause) ‘I sit down.’ And two days before at Agassiz’—the Autocrat giving an account of his having learned the fiddle, his brother John who sat opposite, exclaimed, ‘I can testify to it; he has often fiddled me out of the house as Orpheus did Eurydice out of the infernal regions.’ Isn’t that good? It makes me laugh to look at it now that I have written it down. The Autocrat relating how Simmons the Oak Hall man had sent him the two finest pears—‘of trowsers?’ interrupted somebody. But can one send poured-out Champagne all the way to Newport, and hope that one bubble will burst after it gets there to tell what it used to be? A dinner is never a good thing the next day. For the moment, though, what is better? We dissolve our pearls and drink them nobly—if we have them—but bring none away. A good talk is almost as much out of the question among clever men as among men who think themselves clever. Creation in pairs proves the foreordained superiority of the tête-a-tête. Nevertheless, we live and dine and die.” And a few months later he recorded a bit about a dinner of the Atlantic people, which has had more than one raconteur. “Our dinner the other day was very pleasant. Only Mrs. Stowe and Miss Prescott, author of ‘In a Cellar.’ She is very nice and bright. Mrs. Stowe would not let us have any wine, and I told her that I was sorry she should deprive herself of so many pleasant dinners in England (whither she goes 3d August) by so self-denying an ordinance. She took at once, colored a little, laughed, and asked me to order some champagne.”

Perhaps the very necessity for constant criticism, whether unrecorded, as where he determined the grounds for acceptance and rejection of manuscripts, or in his correspondence with contributors, and his own articles in the magazine, tended to stimulate Lowell’s critical faculty. At any rate, in the midst of his busy hours he would now and then yield to the impulse, created by some current publication it may be, and give expression to judgments, either publicly or in his letters to friends. Thus his interest in “The Minister’s Wooing” led him not only into writing the letter to Mrs. Stowe, already noticed, but into a careful, unsigned analysis of Mrs. Stowe’s power in the New York Tribune.[130]

In August, 1859, Mr. Phillips, the publisher, died. Lowell characterized him as a man of great energy and pluck; but during the months previous to his death Mr. Phillips had by no means been in sound health, and had fretted much over complications in his affairs. He seems to have had reason, for a few weeks after the death of Mr. Phillips, the firm of Phillips & Sampson suspended payment, and went into the hands of an assignee, Mr. Harvey Jewell. “What is to come, or why they have done it,” Lowell wrote to Mr. Norton, “I cannot conjecture. I trust arrangements will be made to put the Atlantic in good hands. That at least is a paying thing. If it shall end in my losing the editorship, it would cause me little regret, for it would leave me more time to myself.” The assignee brought out the October number of the magazine, pending the settlement of affairs, and there was a lively competition among publishers to secure the publication. The Harpers proposed to buy it, to suppress their rival, it was said; there were offers from Philadelphia, and some of the younger men connected with the firm of Phillips & Sampson made an effort to establish a new firm which should buy the whole business of Phillips & Sampson, including the magazine. Mr. William Lee, who had left a large sum with the firm when he withdrew from it, was at the time travelling in Europe, and by a series of mischances did not even learn of the situation till it was too late for him to have a hand in any reorganization. There was even a plan mooted by which Lowell and his friends should buy the magazine, but Lowell’s own judgment was against this. “It ought,” he said, “to be in the hands of a practical publisher for we should be in danger of running aground.”

In the end, Ticknor & Fields bought the magazine. “As friend to friend,” Lowell wrote to Mr. Norton, I may say that I think it just the best arrangement possible, though I did not like to say so beforehand too plainly. I did not wish in any way to stand in ——’s light, but it is much better as it is. Whether T. will want me or not, is another question. I suppose that he will think that Fields will make a good editor, beside saving the salary, and F. may think so too. In certain respects he would, as the dining editor for example, to look after authors when they came to Boston and the like. I shall be quite satisfied, anyhow,—though the salary is a convenience, for I have done nothing to advance my own private interest in the matter.”

The break-up of the business of Phillips & Sampson naturally led to the distribution of their copyright books, and Emerson was one of the authors publishing with them, who was now considering the transfer of his books to Ticknor & Fields. “I saw Ticknor yesterday,” Lowell wrote him, 21 October, 1859, “and he says he wants the magazine to go on as it has gone. I never talked so long with him before, and the impression he gave was that of a man very shrewd in business after it is once in train, but very inert of judgment. I rather think Fields is captain when at home.[131] My opinion about your book is this. The book is a sure one at any rate, and if Little & Brown publish it, they will sell copies to all who would buy anything of yours at any rate. They are eminently respectable and trustworthy. Ticknor would have of course the same chance to start on that L. & B. would have, but I should think it natural that he would be able to sell more copies because the kind of book he publishes is rather less of the library-completing sort than those of L. & B., and because (I suppose) he has correspondents who always take a certain number of his books whether or no. In short, it seems to me that his chances in the way of distribution and putting the volume on many counters and under many eyes are the best. With an author like you this is not much, but it is something....

“I have quite a prize in the December number—the story of a real filibuster written by himself.[132] It is well done and will interest you. I wish to get together a few of our chief tritons at a dinner soon to make them acquainted with the new Poseidon. Will you come? At Porter’s or Parker’s, whichever you prefer, and as early as you like so that you may get back to Concord.”

After Mr. Fields returned from Europe the question of the editorship came up anew. The times were lowering, every one who had ventures was taking in sail, Mr. Fields had been the editorial member of the book firm, his relations with authors both at home and abroad were of the most friendly nature, and it was thus most reasonable and natural that he should take charge of the Atlantic, and Lowell resigned the editorship in a half-serious, half-whimsical letter which Mr. Norton has printed.[133] It is clear that he had a divided mind. He had become so far wonted to his work that he had less anxiety in performing it, and he had an honest pride in maintaining the high standard which his own taste and judgment had created. He was glad also of the greater ease in money matters which the salary gave; and yet, as his letters show, he welcomed the freedom from the daily exactions of the editorial life, and the return to the more self-determined occupation which he had known most of his days.