speaker, and before him pass in review all the main writers of the day: "There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one, Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on, Whose prose is grand verse, while his verse, the Lord knows, Is some of it pr- No, 'tis not even prose." The comparison of Emerson with Carlyle is both sane and instructive: "C. labors to get at the centre, and then Take a reckoning from there of his actions and men; Alcott, Brownson, Willis, Parker, Whittier, Dana, Neal, Hawthorne, Cooper, Halleck, Franco, Poe, Margaret Fuller, Holmes, all pass under this rollicking and spicy review. Their little peculiarities and shortcomings are so gently and amusingly indicated, that the honor of mention far outweighs the pain of criticism, and the sufferers must themselves acknowledge that faithful are the wounds of a friend." 66 Lowell's interest, however, was gradually turning from literature to politics. In public affairs he saw the greatest wrongs to be righted, and recognized his most natural field of action. His first remonstrance against slavery is found in his " Stanzas on Freedom": Men! whose boast it is that ye INDIGNATION AT POLITICAL WRONGS When it works a brother's pain, They are slaves who fear to speak For the fallen and the weak; They are slaves who will not choose Hatred, scoffing, and abuse, Rather than in silence shrink From the truth they needs must think; They are slaves who dare not be In the right with two or three. 281 "Prometheus" is a like appeal for justice to the oppressed: Tyrants are but the spawn of Ignorance, Would laugh away in scorn the sand-wove chain And his indignation culminates in "The Present Crisis," in which he urges the sons of the Pilgrims to war against the curse that then desolated our land: Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word; Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,— Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own. U Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 'tis prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified, And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied. For Humanity sweeps onward: where to-day the martyr stands, On the morrow crouches Judas with the silver in his hands; Far in front the cross stands ready and the crackling fagots burn, While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe return To glean up the scattered ashes into History's golden urn. New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth; They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth; Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be, Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea, Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key. When Wendell Phillips quoted this last stanza in his Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard, it thrilled his audience, and it has ever since been a veritable battlecry of freedom. All this leads us up to what we must consider the greatest achievement of Lowell's life-I mean the publication of "The Biglow Papers." I call these his greatest work, for several reasons: their subject was great; their occasion was great; and both subject and LOWELL AND MRS. STOWE 283 occasion engaged his greatest powers, and all his powers. Let us consider for a moment the situation of affairs a decade before our great Civil War. Slavery had ceased to be passive and remorseful, and had become aggressive and triumphant. Although Washington, in his will, had provided for the emancipation of his own slaves, and Jefferson had said, "I tremble for my country, when I reflect that God is just," the acquisition of Louisiana had opened so vast an area for slave labor, and the cotton crop had made that labor so profitable, that slavery was now justified as a divine institution, and all opposition to its extension was resented as an invasion of the rights of the South. Northern manufacturers and merchants who cultivated Southern trade were required to abstain from criticism of the peculiar institution. Even preachers in the churches saw new light with regard to God's decree of servitude for the black race, and the old freedom-loving spirit of the North was slowly but surely undermined. But there was slowly but surely rising a moral indignation before which slavery was ultimately destined to succumb, and Mrs. Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and Lowell's "Biglow Papers" were both effects and promoters of that indignation. Lowell had the advantage of Mrs. Stowe, not only in being the earlier, but also in being the more amusing writer. Mrs. Stowe drew upon men's sympathy; Lowell drew upon their conscience. Mrs. Stowe had more of humor; Lowell had more of wit. And wit played a part in this controversy that humor never could. Wit gave a sword-thrust, which showed that the author could fight, as well as write. It was 284 "THE BIGLOW PAPERS needed to convince the South that the North could not always be cajoled or intimidated. Southern leaders were sons of the early Cavaliers who settled Virginia, and whose conception of freedom was feudalistic. The king was free, they thought, and his lords were free, but not the king's subjects, or the lord's retainers. In our Southern States, the few slaveholders who managed the affairs of a whole county looked down upon the voters of a Northern town meeting very much as the Cavaliers of old England had looked down upon the Roundheads. Southern freedom was theoretical, but not real. Yet these slaveholders were convinced of their own superiority, and declared that one Southerner could whip five Yankees. Nothing but ridicule could pierce their pachydermatous sides. Lowell brought ridicule to bear upon them; but, in this very ridicule, he showed the true greatness of the Yankee stock, the thoroughness of its education, the soundness of its morality, and the fighting force of its theory of government. In this demonstration of Northern principle and efficiency, the dialect poem was a mere instrument, invented for a purpose; and that purpose, to prove that the despised Yankee, however humble he might be, towered far above the defenders of slavery, in every true attribute of manhood. While "The Biglow Papers" were Yankee in form, they were universal in spirit. They were products of the American soil, and they breathed the American independence, while at the same time they were nobly and profoundly human. They have no predecessors or rivals in literature, unless it be in the Scottish, yet human, poems of Robert Burns. They ran like wild |
