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The ATLANTIC MONTHLY
AND ITS MAKKKS
M. A. De WOLFE HOWE
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CORNELL
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LIBRARY
Cornell University Library
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Atlantic monthly and its makers
3 1924 027 501 349
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THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
AND ITS MAKERS
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
First Editor of the Atlantic Monthly
1857-1801
THE
ATLANTIC MONTHLY
AND ITS MAKERS
^
^
BY
M. A. De WOLFE HOWE
W
^ BOSTON
^ The ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS, Inc.
i,»J MDCCCCXIX
Copyright 1919
The Atlaotic Monthly Press, Inc.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
MANY of the following pages are derived freely from existing records
of the Atlantic Monthly and the men who have made it. The
files of the magazine itself have yielded much. Books of biography
and reminiscence have also been drawn upon. For permission to do so
acknowledgment is made to Messrs. Houghton Mifflin Co., by whom
the following volumes have been published or acquired after publication:
Edward Everett Hale's "James Russell Lowell and His Friends," Bliss
Perry's "Park Street Papers," Thomas Wentworth Higginson's "Cheer-
ful Yesterdays," Francis H. Underwood's biographies of Longfellow,
Whittier, and Lowell; Horace E. Scudder's "James Russell Lowell,"
James T. Field's "Yesterdays with Authors," Ferris Greenslet's "Life of
Thomas Bailey Aldrich," and Merwin's "Life of Bret Harte,"; and to
Messrs. Harper and Brothers, publishers of Charles Eliot Norton's
"Letters of James Russell Lowell," and William Dean Howells's "Lit-
erary Friends and Acquaintance" and "My Mark Twain." Messrs.
Harper and Brothers have also kindly permitted the reproduction of
contemporaneous wood cuts from Harpers' Magazine.
Boston, Massachusetts
November, Nineteen Eighteen
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
James RtrssELL Lowell ...
. Frontispiece
Ralph Waldo Emebson ...
. . . 14
Radical Club Meeting ... . . .
. . . . 22
Chables Elioi Norton .... . .
. . . . 32
James T. Fields
. . . 38
Old Corner Book Store . ...
. . 40
Edward Everett TTaTjE . .
44
Julia Ward Howe . ...
. . . . 48
Tremont Street Office .
. . S3
Library of James T. Fields
. . 56
Wn.LTAM Dean Howells .
. . 60
TicKNOR Mansion .... . .
... 71
Thomas Bajlet Aldbich
78
Stitdt op Thomas Bailet Aldbich at Ponkapog
81
Horace Elisha Scudder ...
. . 90
Walter Hines Page
94
Bliss Perry
96
41 Mt. Vernon Street
102
EDITORS AND PUBLISHERS
Editors
/
I
James Russell Lowell
. 1857-1861
n
James Thomas Fields
1861-1871
III
WiLLLVM Dean Howells
1871-1881
IV
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
1881-1890
V
Horace Elisha Scttddeb
. 1890-1898
VI
Walter Hines Page
. 1898-1899
VII
Bliss Perry
1899-1909
VIII
Elleby Sedgwick'
Publishers
1909-
I
Phillips, Sampson & Co. .
. 1857-1859
II
TicKNOR & Fields
1859-1867
III
Fields, Osgood & Co. .
. 1868-1870
IV
James R. Osgood & Co.
1871-1873
V
H. 0. Houghton & Co.
. 1874-1877
VI
Houghton, Osgood & Co. .
. 1878-1879
VII
Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
1880-1908
VIII
Atlantic Monthly Co.
. 1908-
PREFATORY
WHEN THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY reached
its sixtieth birthday in its issue of November,
1917, it was older by six years than the oldest
man concerned with the production of its first issue in
November, 1867. This was Ralph Waldo Emerson, then
fifty-four years old. Of the other eminent founders who
accepted the invitation of the first publisher, Moses Dresser
Phillips of the Boston firm of Phillips, Sampson & Co.,
to a dinner at the Parker House on May 5, 1857, to con-
sider the establishment of a new literary and political
magazine, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, then fifty, stood
next in point of age. Oliver Wendell Holmes was forty-
eight; John Lothrop Motley, less identified with the mag-
azine after its launching than any of the others, forty-
three; Jamss Russell Lowell, the first editor, thirty-eight;
James Elliot Cabot, many years afterward the biographer
of Emerson, thirty-six; and Francis H. Underwood, the
"literary man" of Phillips, Sampson & Co., and the
prime mover in the whole undertaking, but thirty-two.
The Atlantic has long been a venerable institution.
The uyriters who gave it first its high position stand in the
public mind as the "venerable men" of American letters.
Their ages in 1857 betoken the interesting fact that the
Atlantic was never entirely a youthful experiment: it
was planned and placed firmly on its feet by a remarkable
group of men in or near the very prime of their great
powers. The purpose of the following pages is to bring
together from a variety of sources the chief facts regarding
its beginnings and its growth to what it has become, illus-
trating these facts as freely as possible with passages of
the personal record and remembrance which may impart to
narrative something of the human quality which vitalizes the
inner story of every institution.
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
AND ITS MAKERS
ON April 29, 1857, Longfellow wrote in his journal :
"Lowell was here last evening to interest me in a
new magazine, to be started in Boston by Phil-
lips and Sampson. I told him I would write for it if I
wrote for any magazine." A week later the journal con-
tained this entry: "Dined in town at Parker's, with
Emerson, Lowell, Motley, Holmes, Cabot, Underwood,
and the publisher, Phillips, to talk about the new maga-
zine the last wishes to establish. It will no doubt be
done, though I am not so eager about it as the rest."
A more detailed account of this dinner is found in a
letter from Phillips himself, given in Edward Everett
Hale's " James Russell Lowell and His Friends " : —
I must tell you about a little dinner-party I gave about
two weeks ago. It would be proper, perhaps, to state that
the object, first, was to confer with my literary friends on
a somewhat extensive literary project, the particulars of
which I shall reserve till you come. But to the party : my
invitations included only E. W. Emerson, H. W. Longfel-
low, J. E. Lowell, Mr. Motley (the " Dutch Eepublic " man) ,
O. W. Holmes, Mr. Cabot, and Mr. Underwood, our literary
man. Imagine your uncle at the head of such a table, with
such guests. The above-named were the only ones invited,
and they were all present. We sat down at three p.m., and
arose at eight. The time occupied was longer by about
four hours and thirty minutes than I am in the habit of
consuming in that kind of occupation, but it was the rich-
est time intellectually by all odds that I have ever had.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
From a crayon by Rowse in 1857, the year
of the founding.
JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 15
Leaving myself and " literary man " out of the group, I
think you will agree with me that it would be difficult to
duplicate that number of such conceded scholarship in
the whole country besides. Mr. Emerson took the first post
of honor at my right, and Mr. Longfellow the second at my
left. The exact arrangement of the table was as follows : —
Mr. Underwood
Cabot Lowell
Motley Holmes
Longfellow Emerson
Phillips
They seemed so well pleased that they adjourned, and in-
vited me to meet them again to-morrow, when I shall again
meet the same persons, with one other (Whipple, the es-
sayist) added to that brilliant constellation of the philo-
sophical, poetical, and historical talent. Each one is known
alike on both sides of the Atlantic, and is read beyond the
limits of the English language. Though all this is known
to you, you will pardon me for intruding it upon you. But
still I have the vanity to believe that you will think them
the most natural thoughts in the world to me. Though I
say it that should not, it was the proudest moment of my
life.
Dr. Hale added to this letter his own report of the
words with which Phillips announced the plan of the
magazine — a little speech which was apparently a mat-
ter of common knowledge at the time : " Mr. Cabot is
much wiser than I am. Dr. Holmes can write funnier
verses than I can, Mr. Motley can write history better
than I, Mr. Emerson is a philosopher and I am not, Mr.
Lowell knows more of the old poets than I, but none of
you knows the American people as well as I do."
This may have been the truth. Whether it was or not,
one cannot help wishing that in all the acknowledg-
ments of superiority made by Phillips, either in his
16 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
spoken words or in the letter so frankly revealing his
satisfaction in the unwonted company in which he
found himself, he had given Underwood credit for being
something more than "our literary ma,n." Professor
Bliss Perry, in an article in the Fiftieth Anniversary
number of the AtlaMic, now included in his volume of
"Park Street Papers," defined Underwood far more ac-
curately as " The Editor who was never the Editor."
He was indeed something more than that — he was the
fons et origo of the entire enterprise. Of Massachusetts
birth (in 1825), Underwood, after a period of study in
Amherst College, had lived in Kentucky, where a native
repugnance to slavery had become a militant antipathy
to it. Returning to Massachusetts in 1850, he interested
himself in the Free Soil movement, was appointed in
1852 Clerk of the State Senate, and by 1853 had per-
suaded the publishing firm of J. P. Jewett & Co. to stand
behind him in the establishing of a new magazine.
These publishers had issued "Uncle Tom's Cabin,"
which Phillips, Sampson & Co. had refused for fear of
alienating their Southern customers; and it was only
natural that J. P. Jewett, the head of the house, should
see eye to eye with Underwood in his vision of a peri-
odical which should unite the strongest forces of expres-
sion in the joined cause of letters and reform. As early,
therefore, as 1853 — four years before the first issue of
the Atlantic — Underwood is found in active corres-
pondence with the chief writers of the country, especially
the outstanding New England group, in the interest of
a magazine to make its initial appearance at the be-
ginning of 1854. There was a cordial response, not only
in promises but in manuscripts, and there was every
expectation that the dream would become a reality,
with Underwood at the helm of the new venture, when.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 17
near the end of 1853, the Jewett firm met with no less
a misfortune than failure.
It was a sad business for Underwood, to whom Lowell
wrote, December 5, 1853 : " The explosion of one of these
castles in Spain sometimes sprinkles dust on all the rest
of our lives ; but I hope you are of better heart, and will
rather look upon the affair as a burning of your ships
which only makes victory the more imperative." So it
seems indeed to have been with him. Prom his associa-
tion with the Jewett project. Underwood passed to the
publishing office of Phillips, Sampson & Co. It was, how-
ever, not until 1857 that he could persuade the cautious
Phillips to take up the project which Jewett had been
obliged to drop. He might not have succeeded then, but
that Mrs. Stowe, whose " Dred " Phillips had been bold
enough to publish in 1856, added her persuasions to
Underwood's. Her influence was potent. Its exercise was
followed by the dinner already chronicled. Though
Underwood, in his employer's eyes, cut but an obscure
figure at it, the gathering would hardly have taken
place but for his imagination and enthusiasm, to say
nothing of his personal relations of friendship with
Lowell and others hitherto outside the immediate circle
of Phillips himself. "The Editor who was never the
Editor " has received his full recognition only in later
years. At the beginning he was content, after doing all
the work preliminary to the establishment of the Atlan-
tic, to nominate its first editor, and to serve as his office
assistant.
This editor was James Russell Lowell. His previous
slight editorial experience, with the short-lived Pio-
neer and the Anti-Slavery Standard, of which he had
been a corresponding editor, was a smaller qualification
for the post than his acknowledged position as poet.
18 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
scholar, and man of letters. He never showed the in-
stincts of a good editor more truly than by insisting
as " a condition precedent " to accepting the editor-
ship that Oliver Wendell Holmes should be engaged
as the first contributor. Holmes at that time had
written but little that gave definite promise of the
place his "Autocrat " and the succeeding " Breakfast-
Table " papers were to give him. Many years later he
wrote : " I think therefore that the Atlantic came for
my fruit just as it was ripe to gathering, but I never
knew it was so until afterwards." Lowell appears to
have known it in advance.
Besides standing as the one indispensable contribu-
tor. Dr. Holmes had the important function of naming
the magazine. Many titles were in the air. J. T. Trow-
bridge wrote to Underwood : "If the 'American Monthly'
will not do, what do you say to the 'Anglo-American' ?"
Emerson suggested "Town and Country," presumably
in relation to a "Town and Country Club" to which he
and many of his circle had belonged.
Other titles [wrote Arthur Gilman in the Atlantic of
November, 1907] had been suggested, but none proved at
once satisfactory. Dr. Holmes told me that one day after
he had retired to "his virtuous couch," he suddenly roused
himself and exclaimed to his wife: " I have it! It shall
be called The Atlantic Monthly Magazine! Soon you'll
hear the boys crying through the streets, ' Here's your At-
lantic, 'tlantic, 'tlantic, 'tlantic!' " Atlantic it became, but
the publishers dropped the word "magazine," and were
sufficiently upbraided by the word-mongers for their stu-
pidity in making a noun of an adjective, although
" Monthly " had been used in Eneland, perhaps for a hun-
dred years, in the same way.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 19
It is a genial circumstance that most of the deci-
sions regarding the early courses of the Atlantic were
taken at dinner-tables. Longfellow's journal records a
second dinner for the discussion of the magazine project
before it was definitely adopted ; and in Pickard's "Life
of Whittier" the following passage is found : —
At a dinner given by Mr. Phillips, the publisher, in the
summer of 1857, there were present Longfellow, Emerson,
Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Motley, Edmund Qulncy, and
other critics of high reputation. The plans for the new
magazine were discussed and arranged at this dinner. Mr.
Underwood nominated Lowell as Editor-in-chief, and his
name was received with enthusiasm. Holmes suggested
the name The Atlantic Monthly. The success of the enter-
prise was assured from the start, and a new era in Ameri-
can literature was established.
Many other dinners marked these early days — gen-
erally at the Parker House, once at Fontarive's restau-
rant in Winter Place, where the host, " a quaint and de-
lightful artist in his way," according to Underwood,
"produced a menu worthy of LucuUus." Still another
dinner took place at the famous North Cambridge tav-
ern kept by one Porter, whose name long survived in
" Porter's Station," and is even associated in local ety-
mology with the Porterhouse steak of national fame.
On this occasion the host made the answer, embalmed
in Dr. Holmes's verse, to the query what is left of a
goose when the breast and legs are taken : —
And Landlord Porter, with uplifted eyes,
Smiles on the simple querist and replies,
" When from a goose you've taken legs and breast.
Wipe lips, thank God, and leave the poor the rest."
20 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLT
At Porter's the ancient secret of making flip survived,
and there is an envious legend that the poets and sages
who attended this dinner made zig-zag homeward tracks
in the snow that had fallen while they sat at the board.
This legend is refuted, but not the other that, as they
walked to Cambridge, the younger members of the party
chanted the East Indian ballad : —
" This is a Rajali !
Putterum ! "
And there is no occasion to challenge Underwood's ex-
cellent bit of reminiscence : "Every one was in supreme
good humor. The Medical Professor shone with an
easy superiority, and tossed about his compliments like
juggler's balls. Being particularly gracious towards
Longfellow, and having just written that authors were
like cats, sure to purr when stroked the right way of
the fur, Longfellow, with a merry twinkle in his eyes,
interrupted him with ' I purr, I purr ! ' "
There were so many other meetings of the publishers,
editors, and contributors, in celebration of the monthly
appearance of the magazine, that a loosely organized
" Atlantic Club " came into a brief being. This has been
confused with the vigorously surviving Saturday Club,
which had its origin at about the same time and con-
tained many of the same members; but they were in
reality distinct. In T. W. Higginson's " Cheerful Yes-
terdays " there is a description of one of the most mem-
orable meetings of the Atlantic Club, so pleasantly
charged with the spirit of the time that it must be
quoted entire : —
During the first year of the magazine under PhiUips &
Bampson's management, these were monthly dinners, in
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 21
or near Boston, under the generalship of Francis H.
Underwood, the office editor, and John 0. Wyman, then
his assistant. The most notable of these gatherings was
undoubtedly that held at the Kevere House, on the occasion
of Mrs. Stowe's projected departure for Europe. It was
the only one to which ladies were invited, and the invita-
tion was accepted with a good deal of hesitation by Mrs.
Stowe, and with a distinct guarantee that no wine should
be furnished for the guests. Other feminine contributors
were invited, but for various reasons no ladies appeared
except Mrs. Stowe and Miss Harriet Prescott (now Mrs.
Spofford), who had already won fame by a story called
" In a Cellar," the scene of which was laid in Paris, and
which was so thoroughly French in all its appointments
that it was suspected of being a translation from that
language, although much inquiry failed to reveal the sup-
posed original. It may be well to add that the honest
young author had so little appreciation of the high com-
pliment thus paid her that she indignantly proposed to
withdraw her manuscript in consequence. These two
ladies arrived promptly, and the gentlemen were kept
waiting, not greatly to their minds, in the hope that other
fair contributors would appear. When at last it was de-
cided to proceed without further delay. Dr. Holmes and
I were detailed to escort the ladies to the dining-room:
he as head of the party, and I as the only one that knew
the younger lady. As we went upstairs the vivacious Auto-
crat said to me, " Can I venture it? Do you suppose that
Mrs. Stowe disapproves of me very much? " he being then
subject to severe criticism from the more conservative
theologians. The lady was gracious, however, and seemed
glad to be rescued at last from her wearisome waiting.
She came downstairs wearing a green vn-eath, of which
Longfellow says in his diary (July 9, 1859) that he
" thought it very becoming."
We seated ourselves at table, Mrs. Stowe at Lowell's
right, and Miss Prescott at Holmes's, I next to her, Ed-
W. PHILLIPS SARGENT BARTOL
WHISS H.JAMES, SR.
CRANCH HOLMES WHITTIF.R
T. W. HIGGINSON
A Radical Club meeting at the house o£ the Rev. John T. Sargent,
13 Chestnut Street, attended by Atlantic contributors.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 23
mimd Quincy next to me. Dr. Stowe was at Holmes's left,
WMttier at Ms; and Longfellow, Underwood, John Wy-
man, and others were present. I said at once to Miss Pres-
cott, "TMs is a new edition of "Evelina, or a Young Lady's
Entrance into the World.' Begin at the beginning: what
did you and Mrs. Stowe talk about for three quarters of
an hour? " She answered demurely, " Nothing, except that
she once asked me what o'clock it was, and I told her I
didn't know." There could hardly be a better illustration
of the curious mixture of mauvaise honte and indifference
which often marred the outward manners of this remark-
able woman. It is very likely that she had not been intro-
duced to her companion, and perhaps had never heard her
name; but imagine any kindly or gracious person of mid-
dle age making no effort to relieve the shyness of a young
girl stranded with herself during three quarters of an
hour of enforced seclusion!
The modest entertainment proceeded; conversation set
in, but there was a visible awkwardness, partly from the
presence of two ladies, one of whom was rather silent by
reason of youth, and the other by temperament ; and more-
over, the thawing influence of wine was wanting. There
were probably no men of the party, except Whittier and
myself, who did not habitually drink it, and various little
jokes began to circle sotto voce at the table; a suggestion
for instance, from Longfellow, that Miss Prescott might
be asked to send down into her Cellar for the wine she had
described so well, since Mrs. Stowe would allow none
above stairs. Soon, however, a change came over the as-
pect of affairs. My neighbor on the right, Edmund Quincy,
called a waiter mysteriously, and giving Mm his glass of
water remained tranquilly wMle it was being replenished.
It came back suffused Avith a rosy hue. Some one else fol-
lowed Ms example, and presently the "conscious water"
was blusMng at various points around the board, although
I doubt whether Holmes, with water-drinkers two deep
on each side of Mm, got half Ms share of the coveted bev-
24 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
erage. If he had, it miglit have modified the course of his
talk, for I remember that he devoted himself largely to
demonstrating to Dr. Stowe that all swearing doubtless
originated in the free use made by the pulpit of sacred
words and phrases ; while Lowell, at the other end of the
table, was maintaining for Mrs. Stowe's benefit that "Tom
Jones" was the best novel ever written. This line of dis-
cussion may have been lively, but was not marked by emi-
nent tact; and Whittier, indeed, told me afterwards that
Dr. and Mrs. Stowe agreed in saying to him that, while
the company at the club was no doubt distinguished, the
conversation was not quite what they had been led to
expect. Yet Dr. Stowe was of a kindly nature and perhaps
was not seriously disturbed even when Holmes assured
him that there were in Boston whole families not per-
ceptibly affected by Adam's fall; as, for instance, the
family of Ware.
From this long and slightly premature digression it
is time to turn back and look with some care at the first
issue of the magazine, dated November, 1857, and ap-
pearing late in October. Ten of the fourteen authors
who made the principal contributions to it were Motley,
Longfellow, Emerson, Charles Eliot Norton, Holmes,
Whittier, Mrs. Stowe, J. T. Trowbridge, Lowell, and
Parke Godwin. Whittier's contribution was his poem,
" Tritemius," Longfellow's his " Santa FUomena," in
praise of Florence Nightingale, who had recently shown
in the Crimea, for the first time, what nursing might
contribute to war. Lowell contributed his sonnet, " The
Maple," his characteristic rhymes on "The Origin
of Didactic Poetry," and, in an editorial " Round
Table," the graceful prose setting for some verses of
Holmes to Motley on his departure for Europe. Emer-
son gave, besides the essay " Illusions," four poems,
"The Rommany Girl," "The Chartist's Complaint,"
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 25
"Days," and "Brahma." The supremely felicitous
word " hyprocritic," in the first line of " Days," — the
little poem which alone would have secured a perma-
nent place for Emerson in American literature, — re-
sulted from a suggestion of Lowell's that the poet's
original word " hypercritical " did not say precisely
what he meant. (It should be said in passing that,
in the second issue, Whittier's " Skipper Ireson's Ride "
owed the Marblehead flavor of its
"Here's Find Oirson, fur his horrd liorrt,
Torr'd an' futherr'd an' corr'd in a corrt,"
to Lowell's keen ear for New England dialect and a cor-
responding suggestion accepted by Whittier.) Mrs.
Stowe and Trowbridge were represented in the first issue
by short stories ; and there was the first installment of
" The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table." All the articles
were unsigned, and it is no wonder that every one asked
himself and his neighbor who this Autocrat might be
with his oflfhand introduction, " I was just going to say
when I was interrupted " ; for there could not have been
one reader in a thousand who recalled that in the old
New England Magazine for 1831 and 1832 there were
two papers of an " Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table " by
a young" student of medicine ; and the whimsicality
of going on after an interruption of twenty-five years
would have puzzled even the knowing ones of a genera-
tion that had not yet learned the Breakfast-Table habit
of thought.
Emerson's characteristic justification of the practice
of anonymity was that " the names of contributors wUl
be given out when the names are worth more than the
articles." Motley wrote to Holmes, apropos of the con-
tributors to an early issue : " Doubtless I shall know
26 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
them all by the ' twinkling of their eyes.' " Indeed, the
authorship was evidently an open secret in many quar-
ters. Norton made no scruple of telling Clough in a
letter of 25 October, 1857, who were the chief contrib-
utors to the first number. Even the Boston correspond-
ent of the Springfield Republican was able to send
his paper immediately an ascription of all the articles
in this issue to their several writers. Through the first
eight volumes — four years — the authors' names were
not printed, even in the semi-annual index. The prac-
tice of printing them there began in the ninth volume ;
not until the twenty-sixth (1870) was the present usage
of attaching the authors' names to all but editorial con-
tributions begun.
The magazine inevitably scored an immediate success.
There were of course other periodicals at the time, in
New York and Philadelphia, but no one of them, either
in personnel of contributors, amounting virtually to a
" staff," or in controlling purposes, could engage in a
serious rivalry with the Atlantic. The Knickerhocker,
Putnam's, and the Philadelphia magazines of the period
are now long vanished. Writing retrospectively in
1882, Underwood said: —
Of the purely literary magazines still existing, we can
remember only Harper's that was successful then. But
in 1857, and before that time, Harper's was largely filled
with copied articles, and neither that nor any other liter-
ary periodical was an outspoken organ of opinion. It was
then supposed necessary to avoid controverted topics, and
epicene literature was mostly in vogue. Writers and
thinkers might deplore this, but publishers were timid,
and kept a weather eye open to watch the vanes of public
opinion. The Atlantic Monthly was started with the defi-
nite purpose of concentrating the efforts of the best
JAMES UtrSSELTi T.0WEL1, 27
writers upon literature and politics, under tie light of the
highest morals.
Two years later Underwood wrote in his biography
of Whittier : " The Atlantic was intended, first of all,
to be entertaining; but every number contained a po-
litical article by Parke Godwin or by Lowell, and the
public understood and felt that this was the point of
the ploughshare that was to break up the old fields."
The magazine's own definition of its political aim, on
the back cover of its first issue, read as follows : —
In politics, the Atlantic will be the organ of no party
or clique, but will honestly endeavor to be the exponent
of what its conductors believe to be the American idea. It
will deal frankly with persons and with parties, endeavor-
ing always to keep in view that moral element which
transcends all persons and parties, and which alone makes
the basis of a true and lasting national prosperity. It will
not rank itself with any sect of anties : but with that body
of men which is in favor of Freedom, National Progress,
and Honor, whether public or private.
In the same pronouncement of aims the publishers
declared, with special reference to Literature, that
"while native writers will receive the most solid en-
couragement, and will be mainly relied upon to fill the
pages of the Atlantic, they will not hesitate to draw
from the foreign forces at their command, as occasion
may require, relying rather on the competency of an
author to treat a particular subject, than on any other
claim whatever." The " native writers " were at first
chiefly natives of New England ; and, though not to be
ranked " with any sect of anties," were of that body of
men whose belief in freedom implied a strong corre-
sponding disbelief in slavery. " This group of writers,"
28 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
wrote T. W. Higginson in his " Cheerful Yesterdays,"
" was doubtless a local product ; but so is every new va-
riety of plum or pear which the gardener finds in his
garden. He does not quarrel with it for having made
its appearance in some inconvenient corner instead of
in the centre, nor does he think it unpardonable that
it did not show itself everywhere at once ; the thing of
importance is that it has arrived."
The Atlantic had no greater good fortune in its be-
ginnings than that Lowell was its editorial chief gar-
dener. The public knew him for what verUy he was — so
true and spirited a patriot that no fear of consequences
withheld him from open identification with the hetero-
dox cause of anti-slavery; so genuine a poet, so pene-
trating a critic, so sound a scholar, that in all the por-
tions of his editorial field his word was the word of
authority. One likes perhaps best of all the fun he
found in his labors, at least until they became too oner-
ous for him. His pet name " Maga " for the magazine
implied in itself even a sort of tolerance for the " pen-
and-inkubus " which an irksome contributor might be-
come, or for the critic to whom he felt "inclined to
apply the quadrisyllable name of the brother of Agis,
King of Sparta " — a Grecian character whom Pelton
was learned enough to identify as Eudamidas. It is
pleasant to find him writing, in the earliest days of
his editorship, about the compensations of the mag-
azine : —
First, it has almost got me out of debt, and next, it com-
pels me into morning walks to the printing office. There
is a little foot-path wMch leads along the river bank, and
it is lovely; whether in clear, cold mornings, when the
fine filaments of the bare trees on the horizon seem float-
ing up like sea-masses in the ether sea, or when (as yes-
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 29
terday) a gray mist fills our Cambridge cup and gives a
doubtful loom to its snowy brim of hills, wbile tlie silent
gulls wteel over tlie rustling cakes of ice whicli the
Charles is vrhirling seaward.
Of one of his morning walks to his editorial work
Trowbridge has told the following story, bearing upon
Lowell's dealings with rejected manuscripts : —
He was walking one windy morning over Cambridge
bridge, when his hat blew off, and fell into the Charles,
with half a dozen or more manuscripts with which it was
freighted, and which he was returning to the Boston office.
A boatman recovered the hat, but the scattered manu-
scripts perished in those waves of oblivion. "If they had
been accepted articles," Lowell remarked, "it wouldn't
have been quite so bad; for we might with some grace ask
the writers for fresh copies. But how can you tell a self-
respecting contributor that his manuscript has been not
only rejected, but sent to a watery grave!"
There are many evidences, besides such words as
these and the fortunate editing of Emerson's and Whit-
tier's lines to which allusion has already been made,
that Lowell dealt helpfuUy with his contributors. That
he also dealt loyally with them appears in his backing
up of Dr. Holmes under the attacks of the evangelical
press. The " Autocrat " papers had rendered him clearly
suspect on questions of orthodoxy in religion. The
"Professor" called forth violent condemnation. "If
you could believe many of the newspapers," wrote Hor-
ace E. Scudder in his biography of Lowell, " Dr. Holmes
was a sort of reincarnation of "Voltaire, who stood for
the most audacious enemy of Christianity in modern
times." It was thus that Lowell wrote to him on the
50 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
appearance of the first installment of "The Profes-
sor " : " The religious press (a true sour-cider press
with belly-ache privileges attached) wUl be at you, but
after smashing one of them you will be able to furnish
yourself with a Sampson's weapon for the rest of the
Philisterei."
Many such weapons would have been needed to safe-
guard the Atlantic as a whole at this time. Of the very
first number one of the sectarian papers, published in
Boston, said, " We shall observe the progress of the
work not without solicitude." Their watchfulness was
soon rewarded in a measure, for of the third number
they declared, " The only objectionable article is one
by Emerson on ' Books,' in which the sage of Concord
shows his customary disregard of the religious opinions
of others and of the fundamental laws of social moral-
ity." The next month it was a little better : " With the
exception of a slur at the doctrine of eternal retribu-
tion, in the Literary Notices, we do not recall anything
really exceptionable in its pages." The curious reader
may find the slur in a single sentence of Dr. Holmes's
review of Mrs. Lee's " Parthenia " — a sentence which,
aside from its great length, has nothing astonishing
about it except the fact that sixty years ago its senti-
ments could not pass unchallenged.
But of course it was the writings of Dr. Holmes
which gave the vigilant defenders of orthodoxy the
greatest concern. In a letter written to Motley in 1861
Holmes exclaimed: "But oh! such a belaboring as I
have had from the so-called ' Evangelical ' press for the
last two or three years, almost without intermission!
There must be a great deal of weakness and rottenness
when such extreme bitterness is called out by such a
good-natured person as I can claim to be in print."
JAMBS EUSSELL LOWELL 31
Even the New York Independent, which was printing
every week the sermons of Henry Ward Beecher, said
of " The Professor at the Breakfast-Table " when it ap-
peared as a book : —
We presume that we do but speak the general convic-
tion, as it certainly is our own, when we say that that
which was to ha^e been apprehended has not been avoided
by the "Professor," but has been painfully realized in his
new series of utterances. He has dashed at many things
which he does not understand, has succeeded in irritating
and repelling from the magazine many who had formerly
read it with pleasure, and has neither equaled the spirit
and vigorous vivacity, nor maintained the reputation,
shown and acqxdred by the preceding papers. It would
have been better for aU concerned if the pen of the "Auto-
crat" had never been resumed by a hand wearied with its
previous work, and a mind made almost comically self-
sufficient and dogmatical by an unexpected measure of
literary success.
Writing of these papers nearly twenty-five years after
their first publication. Dr. Holmes himself said : " It
amuses me to look back on some of the attacks they
called forth. Opinions which do not excite the faintest
show of temper in this time from those who do not ac-
cept them were treated as if they were the utterances of
a Nihilist incendiary. It required the exercise of some
forbearance not to recriminate."
Lowell's editorship of the Atlantic was next to the
shortest of all the eight which have spanned its history
of more than sixty years. It lasted but four years, end-
ing in 1861. By that time he had become somewhat
weary of its necessarily exacting routine, but he had
laid the enduring foundations which owed much of their
CHARLES ELIOT NORTON
Contributor to the first issue of the Atlantic and
to its Fiftieth Anniversary Number.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 33
permanence to the spirit behind his words : " 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 gen-
tlemen who read with ease)." How permanent the
structure was to be, he could not have imagined, any
more than his friend Norton, writing from Paris on
June 8, 1857, when he first heard of the plans for the
new periodical, and characteristically went to work at
once to help the editor, as he did with great success, in
securing valuable contributions from English writers.
Of course [said Norton] it will succeed with you as its
Editor, and with such liberal arrangements for its begin-
ning. But such things are never permanent in our coun-
try. They burn brightly for a little while, and then burn
out, — and some other light takes their place. It would be
a great thing for us if any undertaking of this kind could
live long enough to get affections and associations con-
nected with it, whose steady glow should take the place of,
and more than supply, the shine of novelty, and the dazzle
of a first go-off. I wish we had a Sylvanus Urban a hun-
dred and fifty years old. I wish, indeed, we had anything
so old in America; I would give a thousand of our new
lamps for the one old, battered, but true magical light.
Both Lowell and Norton lived to see a long step in the
direction of this faithful friend's desire.
How many years Lowell might have retained the
editorship of the magazine if its publication had not
changed hands, it is impossible to say. But in 1859
both Phillips and Sampson died, and their firm was
dissolved. The Atlantic was then purchased by the
firm of Ticknor & Fields, and Underwood's editorial
connection with it ceased. Lowell held his post for two
years longer under the new employers, when considera-
34 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
tions of office economy played their part in the transfer
of the editorship to the well-qualified hands of James
T. Fields, the " literary " member of the firm. When
these publishers acquired the magazine, Fields himself
was in Europe, and the circumstances of the purchase,
related in a " Contributors' Club " paper in the Atlan-
tic of November, 1907, were curiously haphazard in
character. This is the story there given : —
You remember that in its extreme youth the magazine
was transferred from the publishing house of Phillips and
Sampson, to whose enterprise it owed its existence, to that
of Ticknor and Fields, then occupying the " Old Corner
Bookstore," on School Street, just a little farther down
than the Old South Church. The late Governor Alexander
H. Eice told me on that November evening [of a meeting
described by the writer] how the transfer was made. The
original publishers had failed, and Mr. Eice was their as-
signee, upon whom rested the responsibility of settling the
business. The Atlantic was a valuable part of the assets,
of course, and Mr. Eice said that he sent letters to a dozen
different publishers telling them that he would sell it to
the highest bidder whose offer should be received by noon
on a certain day. The day arrived, and not one bid had
come. Mr. Eice walked out to the ofBlce of Ticknor and
Fields, and said to Mr. Ticknor, " I have not yet received
your bid for the Atlantic." " No," replied the publishers,
" and you will not, for we don't care to undertake the re-
sponsibility of the venture." In point of fact, Mr. Eice
told me, the risk was not great, for the circulation at the
time stood at thirty thousand copies.
Mr. Eice was not to be put off in this cavalier fashion.
He pointed to the clock on the Old South, and it was after
half-past eleven. " I am about to go to my ofl&ce to open
the bids," said he, " and I am sure that Ticknor and Fields
will be sorry if I find none there from them." Mr. Ticknor
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 35
was apparently immovable. Mr. Fields was in Europe.
Mr. Eiee continued Ms appeals. The hands of the old
clock kept on their way, and soon they indicated five min-
utes of twelve. Then Mr. Eice made his last effort, and
Mr. Ticknor turned to his desk and wrote a line on a piece
of paper, handing it to the governor, sealed. Mr. Eice
carried it to his office, and solemnly proceeded to open it.
It was the only bid, and the sum mentioned was ten thou-
sand dollars. Mr. Eice went at once to Mr. Ticknor again,
and said, "The Atlantic is yours!" Mr. Ticknor was
startled, and replied, " Pray let no one know what I bid,
for all my friends would think me crazy ! " The brilliant
history of the magazine, during this period of the ovsmer-
ship by the honored house of Ticknor and Fields shows at
once how little publishers are able to forecast the future
and how difficult it is to estimate the value of literary
assets. Doubtless Mr. Ticknor thought, when he handed
his little slip of paper to Governor Eice, that he had made
a bid so modest that he was in no danger of having it ac-
cepted; and it seems equally sure that, when he found no
other publisher had bid so high as he, he was alarmed
lest he had made a deplorable exhibition of a lack of
business acumen.
Another rendering of the transfer of the magazine
appears in Scudder's biography of Lowell. " There was
a lively competition," he says, " among publishers to
secure the magazine. The Harpers purposed to buy it,
to suppress their rival, it was said; there were offers
from Philadelphia, and some of the younger men con-
nected with the firm of Phillips and Sampson made an
effort to establish a new firm which should buy the
whole business of Phillips and Sampson, including the
magazine."
In any event Lowell's editorship would have come
to an end about when it did. His cheerful acceptance
■^^ (Psjii ,v/^ ./^^/^?6i y
• ^//j-j _, — „-
'/'
1^
-^
Ji
'/'.
y r^j.j^y
'W'
ij r' /j-i'.i'/
/ IT y^.O^f Iff
xg^ — -^ -s
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 37
of the situation was made clear in a letter of May 23,
1861, to his successor in the editorial chair: —
Mt dear Fields, — I "wish you all joy of your work. You
■will find it no bad apprenticeship or prelude for that
warmer and more congenial world to which all successful
booksellers are believed by devout authors to go. I was
going to say I was glad to be rid of my old man of the sea.
But I don't believe I am. I doubt if we see the finger of
Providence so readily in the stoppage of a salary as in its
beginning or increment. A bore, moreover, that is period-
ical gets a friendly face at last and we miss it on the
whole. Even the gout men don't like to have stop too
suddenly, lest it may have struck to the stomach.
Well, good-by, delusive royalty! I abdicate with what
grace I may. I lay aside my paper crown and feather
sceptre. I have been at least no Bourbon — if I have not
learned much, I have forgotten a great deal. . . .
You will be surprised before long to find how easily you
get on without me, and wonder that you ever thought me
a necessity. It is amazing how quickly the waters close
over one. He carries down with him the memory of Ms
splash and struggle, and fancies it is still going on when
the last bubble even has burst long ago. Good-by. Nature
is equable. I have lost the Atlantic, but my cow has
calved as if nothing had happened.
JAMES T. FIELDS
Second Editor of the Atlantic Monthly
1861-1871
II.
The second editor of the Atlantic, James Thomas
Fields, held in the world of letters no such command-
ing place as Lowell's. Yet he held a distinctive and
important place, and contributed through the ten years
of his editorship — 1861 to 1871 — the special element
of variety and strength which a publisher of the widest
possible acquaintance and sympathies could bring to
the pages of his periodical ; for it should be said that,
excepting the present editor, Fields has been the only
one who was also a publisher of the magazine, and thus
responsible for both its literary and its business success.
Among publishers Fields stood quite alone. In all
the annals of American commerce in books there is no
other such instance of a man who combined in his own
person the oflBces of friendship and of business. His warm
personal friends, who valued him equally for what he was
and for what he did in their interest, were the remarkable
company of writers in England as in America, who gave
especially to the third quarter of the nineteenth cen-
tury its "Augustan " quality in letters. Born in Ports-
mouth, New Hampshire, Fields came to Boston in 1831,
as a fourteen-year-old boy-of-all-work in a bookstore.
He seized every opportunity of improving his mind, and
even by the time he was twenty-one received recognition
as a local poet. As a bookseller, John Fiske related of
him that "in his youth he used to surprise his fellow
clerks by divining beforehand what kind of a book was
likely to be wanted by any chance customer that entered
the store." As time went on, the Old Corner Bookstore,
with which he was identified, became a notable Boston
40 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
institution. The place and the man who made it what
it was were thus described by George William Curtis,
in Harper's Monthly, soon after Fields's death in 1881 :
?TV|5lM^'fil
THE OLD CORNER BOOKSTORE
Corner of Washington and School Streets, 1880.
The annals of publishing and the traditions of publish-
ers in this country -s\'ill always meution the little Corner
Book-Store in Boston as you turn out of Washington
Street into School Street, and those who recall it in other
days mil always remember the curtained desk at which
poet and philosopher and historian and di\'ine, and the
doubting, timid, young author, were sure to see the bright
face and to hear the hearty welcome of James T. Fields.
What a crowded, busy shop it was, with the shelves full of
books, and piles of books upon the counters and tables,
and loiterers tasting them mth their eyes, and turning
the glossy new pages — loiterers at whom you looked curi-
ously, suspecting them to be makers of books as well as
JAMES THOMAS FIELDS 41
readers. You knew that you miglit be seeing there in the
flesh and in common clothes the famous men and women
whose genius and skill made the old world a new world
for every one upon whom their spell lay. Suddenly, from
behind the green curtain, came a ripple of laughter, then
a burst, a chorus ; gay voices of two or three or more, but
always of one — the one who sat at the desk and whose
place was behind the curtain, the literary partner of the
house, the friend of the celebrated circle which has made
the Boston of the middle of this century as justly re-
noTSTied as the Edinburgh of the close of the last century,
the Edinburgh that saw Burns, but did not know Mm.
That curtained corner in the Corner Book-Store is re-
membered by those who knew it in its great days, as Beau-
mont recalled the revels at the immortal tavern : —
What things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid ! heard words that have been
So nimble and so full of subtle flame,
As if that every one from whence they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest !
What merry peals! What fun and chaff and story! Not
only the poet brought his poem there still glowing from
Ms heart, but the lecturer came from the train with Ms
freshest touches of local humor. It was the exchange of
wit, the Kialto of current good tMngs, the hub of the hub.
And it was the work of one man. Fields was the genius
loci. Fields, with Ms gentle spirit, Ms generous and ready
sympathy, Ms love of letters and of literary men, Ms fine
taste, Ms delightful humor, Ms business tact and skill,
drew, as a magnet draws its own, every Mnd of man, the
shy and the elusive as well as the gay men of the world
and the self-possessed favorites of the people. It was Ms
pride to have so many of the American worthies upon Ms
list of authors, to place there if he could the English poets
and "belles-lettres" writers, and then to call them all per-
sonal friends.
42 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
This passage from the sensitive pen of Curtis has more
to do with Fields as a publisher of books, and as the
human being he was in all his relations, than as editor
of the Atlantic. It can fortunately be supplemented by
some paragraphs from T. W. Higginson's "Cheerful
Yesterdays," specifically dealing with Fields in his edi-
torial capacity : —
In 1859 the Atlantic Monthly passed into the hands of
Ticknor & Fields, the junior partner becoming finally its
editor. It was a change of much importance to all its con-
tributors, and greatly affected my own literary life.
Lowell had been, of course, an appreciative and a sympa-
thetic editor, yet sometimes dilatory and exasperating.
Thus, a paper of mine on Theodore Parker, which should
have appeared directly after the death of its subject, was de-
layed for five months by being accidentally put under a pile
of unexamined manuscripts. Lowell had, moreover, some
conservative reactions, and my essay " Ought Women to
Learn the Alphabet? " which would now seem very innocent
and probably had a wider circulation than any other mag-
azine article I ever wrote, was not accepted without some
shaking of the head, though it was finally given the place
of honor in the number. Fields had the advantage over
Lowell of being both editor and publisher, so that he had
a free hand as to paying for articles. The prices then paid
were lower than now, but were raised steadily; and he
first introduced the practice of paying for each manu-
script on acceptance, though he always lamented that this
failed of its end so far as he was individually concerned.
His object was to quiet the impatience of those whose con-
tributions were delayed; but he declared that such per-
sons complained more than ever, saying, " Since you valued
my contribution so highly as to pay for it, you surely
should print it at once." He had a virtue which I have
never known in any other editor or publisher — that of
JAMES THOMAS FIELDS 43
volunteering to advance money on prospective articles, yet
to be written; and lie did tMs more than once to me. I
have also known him to increase the amount paid, on find-
ing that an author particularly needed the money, espe-
cially if this were the case of a woman. His sympathy with
struggling women was always very great; and I think he
was the only one in the early Atlantic circle, except Whit-
tier and myself, — with Emerson also, latterly, — who
favored woman suffrage. This financial kindliness was a
part of his general theory of establishing a staff, in which
effort he really succeeded, most of his contributors then
writing only for him — an aim which his successors aban-
doned, as doubtless became inevitable in view of the rapid
multiplication of magazines. Certainly there was some-
thing very pleasant about Fields's policy on this point;
and perhaps he jjetted us all rather too much. He had
some of the defects of his qualities — could not help being
a little of a fiatterer, and sometimes, though not always,
evading the telling of wholesome truths.
I happened to be one of his favorites; he even wished
me, at one time, to undertake the whole critical depart-
ment, which I lucidly declined, although it appears by
the index that I wrote more largely for the first twenty
volumes of the magazine than any other contributor ex-
cept Lowell and Holmes. Fields was constantly urging
me to attempt fiction, and when I somewhat reluctantly
followed his advice, he thought better of the result, I be-
lieve, than any one else did; for my story of "Malbone, "
especially, he prophesied a fame which the public has not
confirmed. Yet he was not indiscriminate in his praise,
and suggested some amendments which improved the tale
very much. He was capable also of being influenced by
argument, and was really the only editor I have ever en-
countered whose judgment I could move for an instant by
any cajoling; editors being, as a rule, a race of adamant,
as they should be. On the other hand, he advised strongly
against my writing the "Young Folks' History of the
EDWARD EVERETT HALE
whose " Man Without a Country " first appeared in the
Atlantic Monthly for December, 1863.
JAMES THOMAS FIELDS 45
"United States," wMcli nevertheless turned out incompa-
rably the most successful venture I ever made, having sold
to the extent of two hundred thousand copies, and still
selling well after twenty years. His practical judgment
was thus not infallible, but it came nearer to it than that
of any other literary man I have ever known. With all
his desire to create a staff, Fields was always eagerly
looking out for new talent, and was ever prompt to coun-
sel and encourage.
Fields was the editor of the Atlantic throughout the
Civil War ; and it is interesting to note the part played
by the magazine, under him, in the enlightenment and
guidance of the public mind through that national
crisis. From its very beginning, when Edmund Quincy
contributed to the second issue his denunciation of
slavery in an article, "Where Will It End?" so vehe-
ment in its tone that Norton wrote to Clough, " It is a
new thing to see a magazine in this country take such
ground " — even thus, before the war-cloud broke, there
could have been no doubt where the Atlantic would
stand upon the issues of the conflict. But as one turns
over the pages of the volumes from 1861 to 1865, one is
struck with the fact that, although the war is con-
stantly reflected in them, this reflection does not usually
appear in more than one or two items in the monthly
programme. By far the greater portion of each issue
was devoted to the fiction, the essays, the poetry, the
criticism that would have appeared in any period of
peace. A department in which the magazine most
clearly sought to influence opinion was that of the po-
litical article, editorial in its character, for which
Lowell and Parke Godwin had established so definite
a precedent. Then there were the special papers, like
Emerson's on "The President's Proclamation " (Novem-
46 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
ber, 1862), Holmes's "My Hunt for the Captain" (De-
cember, 1862), Hawthorne's "Chiefly about War Mat-
ters" (July, 1862), and Dr. Hale's national classic, the
story of "The Man without a Country" (December,
1863),
Of Hawthorne's article just mentioned, it should be
said in passing that the manner of its presentation
speaks volumes for the strength of the friendship be-
tween Hawthorne and Fields: it was so underscored
with foot-notes of editorial dissent, — together with
statements that peculiarly objectionable passages had
been omitted, — that a reader at the time might readily
have imagined the breaking-ofE of all personal relations
between author and editor. Donald G. Mitchell, indeed,
wrote to Hawthorne when the article was printed : " I
am glad to see your work in the Atlantic, but should
be ready to swear at the marginal impertinences. Pray,
is Governor Andrew editor? A man's opinions can
take no catholic or philosophic range nowadays, but
they call out some shrewish accusation of disloyalty."
As a matter of fact. Fields and Hawthorne remained
the closest of friends until Hawthorne's death, after
which Fields, in his " Yesterdays with Authors," related
the fact, not only that the changes, including the omis-
sions of an unrestrained description of President Lin-
coln's personal appearance, were made with the au-
thor's good-natured consent, but that Hawthorne him-
self wrote all the foot-notes! The knowledge of this
circumstance gives a special pungency of satisfaction
to the note under the passage in which Hawthorne re-
joiced at the hanging of John Brown: "Can it be a
son of old Massachusetts who utters this abominable
sentiment? For shame!"
To return to the other expressions of the spirit of
JAMBS THOMAS FIELDS 47
the time in the magazine, it was nowhere more dis-
cernible than in the poetry. Lowell's " Washers of the
Shroud," one of the most memorable of his poems on
national topics, appeared in the Atlantic of November,
1861. At the instance of Fields, he began, in January,
1862, his second series of " Biglow Papers," which con-
tinued intermittently untU May, 1866. In September,
1865, his "Commemoration Ode" was printed in the
Atlantic. Whittier was represented during the four
dark years by many war-poems, including "Barbara
Frietchie." Longfellow's "Cumberland" appeared in
December, 1862; his "Killed at the Ford," in April,
1866. On the first page of the issue of February, 1862,
Mrs. Howe's " Battle Hymn of the Republic " first saw
the light. In October, 1863, came Emerson's "Volun-
taries," — with its immediately and eternally provoca-
tive lines : —
When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, / can.
Such instances as these — and they might be greatly
multiplied — illustrate the fact that the pages of the
Atlantic were in large measure merely the medium for
the expression of what was uppermost in the minds of
its contributors. The appearance of the contributions
which have just been named was no more characteristic
of the magazine at the time than the fact that in the
Atlantic of June, 1864, Eobert Browning gave the
world, in his "Prospice," one of his lyrics which the
world has most cherished. It may fairly be said that
the war, as a definite topic, did not receive the special
emphasis for which the periodical of a later day would
surely have made the passing events of such a crisis the
occasion. The clear inference is that the editors of
JTJLIA WARD HOWE
whose " Battle Hymn of the Republic " first appeared
in the Atlantic Monthly for February, 1862.
JAMES THOMAS FIELDS 49
fifty years ago were far more likely than their succes-
sors of our own time to take what came to them, and
be thankful, — as well they might, — than to seek dili-
gently for contributions of a special nature. A reader
of the present-day Atlantic has called attention to the
fact that recently, wishing to inform himself about the
issues of the Franco-Prussian War, he sought for
some light upon the subject in the Atlantics of 1870 and
thereabouts — and sought in vain. In view of the brev-
ity and concentration of that conflict, this is hardly
surprising. Yet this reader might have found in the
Atlantic of April, 1871, an article, by J. K. Hosmer,
on "The Giant in the Spiked Helmet," which is not
without its bearing even upon present circumstances.
Our own Spanish War, though not a world-shaking
circumstance, left a much clearer trace, in editorial
and special articles, in the Atlantic of 1898. But in
leaving the war of 1861-65 to take care, in considerable
measure, of itself, so to speak, Fields cannot be called
other than editor of his own time.
There was one episode of the period of his editorship
— though it happened to fall while he himself was in
Europe — which throws a significant light upon the
ways of the reading public in the sixties. This was the
publication, in the issue of September, 1869, of Mrs.
Stowe's article, " The True Story of Lady Byron's Life,"
an exceedingly outspoken "revelation" of Lord Byron's
personal character. It would be apart from the pres-
ent purpose to recite the circumstances of its publica-
tion or the hideous charges it contained. What is note-
worthy, with special reference to the history of the
Atlantic, is that the article so outraged a large num-
ber of its readers that the circulation of the magazine
suffered a grievous reduction — indeed, so serious a blow
50 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
that the recovery from it was not accomplished for
many years. Now that it has become ancient history,
it may be calmly regarded as a conspicuous instance of
the " Stop-the-Tribune " habit, through which the read-
ers of an older generation tellingly registered their dis-
approval even of a favorite periodical. An editor of
our own time might be wary of putting his clientele
to so stringent a test of adherence as this occasion pro-
vided; yet it may fairly be questioned whether even
such an action as the Atlantic's in printing the Lady
ByrOn article, backed as it was by the powerful prestige
of Mrs. Stowe's signature, would now be visited so dis-
astrously upon the offending magazine. This is really
a large social question, involving the whole temper of
the reading public and its past and present capacity for
expressing its own moral indignation. If the edge
of the older capacity is dulled, who shall say that we
are better ofE?
As the editorship of Fields bore so close a relation
to the Atlanti&s change of ownership, there will per-
haps be no more fitting occasion than at this point to
record the succession of publishing firms which' have
been responsible for the magazine. Only three volumes,
beginning November, 1857, and ending June, 1859, were
published by Phillips, Sampson & Co., at 13 Winter
Street, Boston. Volumes IV to XXI, inclusive (July,
1859, to June, 1868), bore the imprint of Ticknor &
Fields, whose office, through Volume XV (ending June,
1865) , was at 135 Washington Street, — the Old Corner
Bookstore, — and thereafter at 124 Tremont Street, op-
posite the Park Street Church. Volumes XXII to
XXVT (July, 1868, to December, 1870), inclusive, were
issued by Fields, Osgood & Co., who defined themselves
as "Successors to Ticknor & Fields." From volume
JAMBS THOMAS FIELDS 51
XXVII to XXXII (January, 1871, to December, 1873),
the imprint was that of James R. Osgood & Co., " Late
Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood & Co." Then,
from January, 1874, to December, 1877 (volumes
XXXIII to XL), came the double imprint of " Boston:
H. O. Houghton & Co., New York : Hurd & Houghton."
The four following volumes, XLI-XLIV (January,
1878, to December, 1879), were published by Houghton,
Osgood & Co. In January, 1880 (volume XLV), began
the long ownership of Houghton, Mifflin and Company,
which continued through the first number of volume
CII (July, 1908). Since then the magazine has been
published by the Atlantic Monthly Company.
Through all these changes, which have come nat-
urally and without distressing transitions, the home of
the Atlantic has almost invariably been an agreeable
place; even if it were possible to visualize it under
every editor and publisher, space for such a process
would here be inadequate. Fortunately, however, this
can be done for the period of Fields's control, through
reproducing most of a paper, " The Atlanti^s Pleasant
Days in Tremont Street," which appeared unsigned
in the Atlantic of November, 1907, and was written
by Miss Susan M. Francis, an editorial assistant of
every Atlantic editor except only the first and the
eighth. Her picture of Fields himself supplements ex-
cellently what has already been related of him.
My first knowledge of the making of the Atlantic was
in the last years of Mr. Fields's editorship and of his con-
nection with the house of Ticknor and Fields, or, as it
was at his retirement, Fields, Osgood and Co. The office
was his private room at 124 Tremont Street, one of the
spacious dwelling-houses, of an earlier generation, in that
street, which business had of a sudden absorbed and in
52 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
some sort reconstructed. His was the smaller front room
on the second floor, — the larger, in which Mr. Aldrich, as
editor of " Every Saturday, " had his desk, was a general
reception-room, — with one window looking upon Tremont
Street, and another upon Hamilton Place. It was a cheer-
ful little room, with open fire, opposite to which was a
sofa for ^asitors, with prints, mostly portraits, upon the
walls, and Mr. Pields's standing desk in one comer, on
which lay an ahvays open book in which from time to
time he noted appointments of all sorts, and every other
thing, no matter how trifling, that he wished to remember,
the recent pages being always carefully examined more
than once a day. This habit, among others, made him one
of the most dependable persons I have ever known. He
never forgot an engagement of any kind or the slightest
promise and he was punctuality itself. . . . The broad
window seats were covered with MSS., while on the floor
were piled books sent to the magazine. Mr. Howells, the
assistant editor, did his work, the greater part of the
actual editorial labor, at his home in Cambridge or at
the University Tress. Mr. Fields was at that time unable
to use his hand in writing, and dictated his letters, beside
requiring other assistance. Between whiles, I was set to
weed out the MSS., so that the hopeless need not be sent
to Cambridge. Typewriters had not come, to save editorial
eyes, and, to my inexperience, a large part of the effusions
were at first more or less illegible, while the number
written with pale ink on thin paper and rolled seemed
painfully large. "When I kept an exact account in later
times, the number of MSS. received from year to year
hardly varied, and I should judge that it was much the
same in those days, for if there were fewer writers, there
were fewer magazines. The volume of stories was large,
but the " dialect story," so-called, was then inconspicuous,
and chiefly represented by New England rural tales and
flshing- village sketches. The wild west was hardly in evi-
dence, and there were not many war stories. It was too
JAMES THOMAS FIELDS
53
near to write easily of — what there were usually came
from Northern pens. There were certainly as many verses
as to-day, with the same tendency toward a widespread
outburst of rhyme on any sensation of the hour.
THE SCENE OF THE "ATLANTIC'S PLEASANT
DAYS IN TEEMONT STKEET"
But it is impossible to say much about that room with-
out speaking particularly of Mr. Fields, the gracious host
of more distinguished visitors than any other Atlantic
office can have known. Like all men who have risen to
an emaable position without extraneous aid of any sort,
Mr. Fields had detractors and unfriends who were willing
to magnify any little foible or affectation; but I, — and I
54 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
only speak of myself by way of illustration, — coming to
him very young and self-distrustful, suddenly faced •with,
the problem of earning a living, and fully conscious of no
training for that end, shall be thankful and grateful to
the last day of my life, that at the outset I fell into such
kind, considerate hands. I knew that I often did badly, I
know it better now; but there was never a word of blame
or even a look of annoyance, while for anything that could
by any possibility be commended, praise was never lack-
ing. Always there was thoughtful courtesy and a pleasant
humor, making dull tasks easy. No one could have been
gentler or more sympathetic to the procession of literary
aspirants who found their way to him, though he firmly
refused to be bored beyond reasonable limits, and seemed
to have discovered the secret of the inclined plane for lin-
gering visitors which Dr. Holmes longed for, the inclina-
tion as imperceptible to most as it was efQcacious. Love
of literature was as genuine and heart-felt a feeling in him
as in any one I have ever known. Not a writer, — in any
literary sense, — he had an unbounded and generous appre-
ciation of the literary gifts of others, and was even will-
ing, not once or twice, to publish to his own loss that
which he felt was good. And it should be said that his
judgment as to the commercial success of any venture was
usually excellent, so far as one can judge in such matters,
and that he was a very shrewd and competent man of
business, one not in the least likely to be imposed upon
or self-deceived in a question of affairs. I remember his
speaking to me in those days and later of the deteriora-
tion in the taste of American readers which he believed
had set in after the war. Before, he declared, any good
edition of a good book was almost sure of at least a fair
sale — a surety which seemed to have quite passed away.
There were many more readers, but the best books were
less read.
As I look back on those few years, nothing impresses
me so much as the good spirits, even the gayety, that per-
JAMES THOMAS FIELDS 55
vaded the establishment. I think it was a very prosperous
time for the Atlantic, loyally supported as it was by the
best writers in the country, and with practically hardly a
rival in its own kind; while business flourished amain.
. . . The members of the house, Mr. Aldrich, Mr. Anthony
(the art manager), Mr. Howells, when in town, and fre-
quent guests, used to have luncheon every day (brought
in from the Parker House, I think) in an upstairs room.
This must have been a particularly cheerful board —
certainly those who sat round it could make it so. As for
the visitors in Mr. Tields's little room, I remember one
day when Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, and
Whittier were all crowded together there, when the portly
figure of Mr. Bayard Taylor blocked the doorway, and it
was decided to seek seats and space in a larger room.
Visitors such as these need not be described — that has
been done so oTten and sometimes so well, that I could
scarcely presume to give my superficial and superfluous
impressions, though I can say that for brilliant, sugges-
tive, entertaining, pungent, and humorous talk, no one
of them, not even Dr. Holmes, nor any other man of letters
whom I have met, could be compared to Lowell. . . .
As I recall those pleasant rooms in Tremont Street, it
seems as though they were always full of sunshine (they
really had a northern exposure), as if the cheerfulness
that pervaded them had left a visible brightness in the
memory. There could not be grayness or dullness with
Mr. Fields, Mr. Aldrich, and Mr. Osgood in possession,
and the constant visitor, who, the chances were, would be
wise, or witty, or both. Literary bores and cranks of
course found their way there in considerable numbers,
but they only appeared to give the needed relief. And
much work was done, but nimbleness of spirit seemed to
give quickness and deftness to head and hand. I think
clouds and rain began to come when Mr. Fields retired.
Perhaps he took from the house, besides more material
things, a desirable element of conservatism and wise cau-
A corner in the library of James T.Fields in his Charles Street house,
for many years the centre of hospitality to the Atlantic circle ;
here also Dickens, Thackeray, and other English
visitors were familiar guests.
JAMEg THOMAS FIELDS 57
tion. For six months thereafter he retained the headship
of the magazine, when Mr. Howells became sole editor,
and there was no longer a Boston office. Mr. Fields still
retained his room, though he was in it less, and it was
still a resort for friends old and new. But there was a
change in the atmosphere of the establishment — new en-
terprises proved costly, and necessarily, at their outset,
unremunerative, and possibly times were changing every-
where. Then came the calamity of the Great Fire. The
Atlantic Monthly was sold to Messrs. Hurd and Houghton,
and, until that house united with that of J. R. Osgood
and Co., I knew nothing save by hearsay of the making of
the magazine. . . .
From the pleasant quarters in Tremont Street the house
moved to Winthrop Square, and never again till it reached
Park Street did it know the comforts of home, so to speak
— it had only business offices. The whole quarter of the
city where the new building stood was in a chaotic state —
rising from its ashes would, I suppose, be the proper ex-
pression. At that time came the consolidation of J. E.
Osgood and Co. with Hurd and Houghton, of course bring-
ing back the Atlantic and some of my old work therein.
But there was no real Atlantic office in that building,
which one winter night was burned to the ground. Many
Atlantic MSS. were burned with it — how many I never
exactly knew, for the book where they were recorded went
too. So far as I could recollect them, I wrote to the pos-
sible contributors of their loss; and as I remember, with
very few exceptions, they behaved exceedingly well, though
very few of them seemed to have kept copies, even of poems.
It was with a new name, Houghton, Mifflin and Co., that
the house came to Park Street. Here Mr. Howells on his
weekly visits had the use of a small, dark room, which
was certainly never considered an Atlantic office. That
came with Mr. Aldrich's assumption of the editorship, the
first office of the magazine in Boston since the Tremont
Street days.
58 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
In one of the foregoing paragraphs allusion has been
made to the "detractors and unfriends who were willing
to magnify any little foible or affectation" in Fields. Be-
sides these, there was one contributor, Gail Hamilton,
who so completely "fell out" with him in matters of
business dealing — royalties, percentages, etc. — as to
make the publisher-editor of the Atlantic the chief sub-
ject of her satiric volume, "A Battle of the Books."
Prom its pages it is worth whUe to transcribe a pas-
sage reflecting a feeling which may not have been con-
fined to a single recalcitrant. Its reading to-day may
possess some of the interest of the " Game of Authors."
There are never wanting persons who, not content with
writing history as it is, are always conjuring up what
would have been if things had happened differently. If
Charles I. had not lost his head, if Napoleon had beaten
at Waterloo, if Booth's pistol had missed fire, events
would have gone thus and thus. A fruitful field opens be-
fore such speculators in the history of our country's liter-
ature. Had Messrs. Brummell and Hunt gone into the
grocery business, for instance, Homer would have been
cobbling shoes at Haverhill, or at most, chronicling small
beer in a country newspaper. Dante would have been a
lawyer in chambers, drawing up vsdlls and plodding
through deeds, but leaving no foot-prints on the sands of
time. Boccaccio would have been milking cows at Brook
Farm, or growing round-shouldered over Ms desk in the
Jerusalem Court House. Miriam would have been writing
stories for the "Little Cormorant," at fifty cents a column,
and as "Uncle Tom's Cabin" would never have been buHt,
the South would never have been provoked into rebellion;
we should have had no war and no greenbacks, prices
would never have risen, ten per cent, and fifteen cents
would have been the same, and we should all have died
comfortably in our beds.
JAMES THOMAS FIELDS 59
There was a kindred note of complaint against the
Atlantic circle of the day in an article, " Old Connecti-
cut vs. the Atlantic Monthly" published in the April,
1865, issue of the New Haven quarterly. The New
Englander. The author of this article, the Reverend
Increase N. Tarbox, welcomed a flavor of " fresh talent
from the outside world " in Donald G. Mitchell's story,
"Dr. Johns," which began with 1865, and, on reading
with joy an article in the Atlantic of February, 1865,
on "The Pleiades of Connecticut," exclaimed: "We
have often wished that a little of that conceit which
centres about the city of Boston might be abated.
Proud as she may well be of her position, we think
she would stand in a more grand and noble attitude,
if she had a juster conception of what has been and
is going on elsewhere, and from what sources she her-
self derives no small share of her strength."
Whatever justice may have lain at the root of this
feeling, it is a significant fact that in 1866, only one
year later, a young Ohioan, WUliam Dean Howells, re-
cently returned from his consulship in Venice, became
assistant editor of the Atlantic, and in 1871, on the re-
tirement of Fields from the editorship, succeeded to his
post.
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELL S
Third Editor of the Atlantic Monthly
1871-1881
Ill
It is a piece of complete good fortune that Mr.
Howells himself, in his delightful volume, "Literary
Friends and Acquaintance," in his " EecoUections of
an Atlantic Editorship," in the November, 1907, At-
lantic, and elsewhere ("There are now so many other
places!" he himself exclaimed in the Atlantic article),
has made his association with the magazine a matter
of such illuminating record. Even so early as in the
editorship of Lowell, his first connection with the
Atlantic was established through the acceptance and
publication of several poems. This fact emboldened
the youthful poet and journalist, on his first pilgrim-
age from Columbus to New England, in the summer of
1860, to present himself, timorously enough, to Lowell
in Cambridge. The older man received him with the
greatest friendliness and asked him to dine at the
Parker House in Boston a few days later. Of the meet-
ing there, a few of Mr. Howells's own paragraphs about
it will give the best report.
As it fell out, I lived without further difSculty to the
day and hour of the dinner Lowell made for me; and I
really think, looking at myself impersonally, and remem-
bering the sort of young fellow I was, that it would have
been a great pity if I had not. The dinner was at the old-
fashioned Boston hour of two, and the table was laid for
four people in some little upper room at Parker's, which
I was never afterwards able to make sure of. Lowell was
already there when I came, and he presented me, to my
inexpressible delight and surprise, to Dr. Holmes, who
was there with Mm. . . .
62 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
A little wMle after, Fields came in, and then our num-
ber and my pleasure were complete.
Nothing else so richly satisfactory, indeed, as the whole
affair could have happened to a like youth at such a point
in his career; and when I sat down, with Doctor Holmes
and Mr. Fields, on Lowell's right, I felt through and
through the dramatic perfection of the event. The kindly
Autocrat recognized some such quality of it in terms
which were not the less precious and gracious for their
humorous excess. -I have no reason to think that he had
yet read any of my poor verses, or had me otherwise than
wholly on trust from Lowell ; but he leaned over towards
his host, and said, with a laughing look at me, "Well,
James, this is something like the apostolic succession;
this is the laying on of hands." I took his sweet and caress-
ing irony as he meant it ; but the charm of it went to my
head long before any drop of wine, together with the
charm of hearing him and Lowell calling each other James
and Wendell, and of finding them still cordially boys
together.
It was, indeed, far more than Holmes could possibly
have foreseen, a laying on of hands, for two of Lowell's
three guests were to follow him in the bishopric of the
magazine, of which the third was to remain its coad-
jutor for life. The talk that made that dinner-table so
memorable to Mr. Howells is devoutly recorded in Ms
pages — also Lowell's promise of a letter of introduction
to Hawthorne. The note that accompanied it is given
in Lowell's "Letters," and bears its own testimony to
the first editor's faith in his young contributor : —
Cambkidge, Monday, August, 1860.
My dear young Fueend, — Here is a note to Mr. Haw-
thorne, which you can use if you have occasion.
Don't print too much and too soon; don't get married
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 63
in a hurry; read, what will make you think, not dream;
hold yourself dear, and more power to your elbow! God
bless you!
Cordially yours,
J. K. Lowell.
There was a reaffirmation of Lowell's confidence in
his younger successor, when he wrote to Fields about
an article by Mr. Howells in the January, 1869, At-
lantic: " That boy will know how to write if he goes on,
and then we old fellows will have to look about us."
Fields must have shared Lowell's immediate belief in
Mr. Howells, for besides asking him to his own hospitable
breakfast-table on the morning after the dinner at the
Parker House, he imparted to the young man such a
sense of friendliness that Mr. Howells went direct to
him after his day in Concord and confided the discom-
fiture he had experienced in a visit to Emerson. Some-
how he had felt himself sadly to blame for making so
scant a success of his call upon Emerson, of which he
wrote : —
By this time I could see It In a humorous light, and I
did not much mind his lying back In his chair and laugh-
ing and laughing, till I thought he would roll out of it.
He perfectly conceived the situation, and got an amuse-
ment from it that I could get only through sympathy with
him. But I thought it a favorable moment to propose my-
self as the assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly
[Fields was then its publisher, not yet its editor], which
I had the belief I could very well become, with advantage
to myself, if not to the magazine. He seemed to think so
too; he said that if the place had not just been filled, I
should certainly have had it ; and it was to his recollection
of this prompt ambition of mine that I suppose I may
have owed my succession to a like vacancy some four years
later.
64 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
During this intervening period Mr. Howells had
served his consulship in Venice, — from which resulted
his early book "Venetian Days," — had returned to
America, and settled in New York as a writer for the
Nation. One evening in the winter of 1866 he met
Mr. and Mrs. Fields at the house of Bayard Taylor.
"Don't despise Boston!" Fields said to him; and he
replied, "Few are worthy to live in Boston." Three
days later he received a letter from Fields asking him
to become assistant editor of the Atlantic. After some
consideration of the offer, says Mr. Howells, —
I went to Boston to see Mr. Fields concerning details. I
was to sift all the manuscripts and correspond with con-
tributors; I was to do the literary proof-reading of the
magazine; and T was to write the four or five pages of
book-notices, which were then printed at the end of the
periodical in finer type; and I was to have forty dollars
a week. I said that I was getting that already for less
work, and then Mr. Fields offered me ten dollars more.
Upon these terms we closed, and on the 1st of March,
which was my twenty-ninth birthday, I went to Boston
and began my work. I had not decided to accept the
place without advising with Lowell; he counselled the
step, and gave me some shrewd and useftd suggestions.
The whole affair was conducted by Fields with his un-
failing tact and kindness, but it could not be kept from
me that the qualification I had as a practical printer
for the work was most valued, and that as proof-reader
I was expected to make it avail on the side of economy.
Somewhere in life's feast the course of humble-pie must
always come in; and if I did not wholly relish this bit
of it, I dare say it was good for me, and I digested it
perfectly.
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 65
The extent and value of Mr. Howells's work for the
Atlantic for fifteen years, first as assistant editor, then
for about ten years as editor, can hardly be estimated.
His own modest and charming story of it all is to be
found in the book and magazine article already men-
tioned. To illustrate the more technical side of his
labors, a paragraph may be taken from his " Recollec-
tions of an Atlantic Editorship":—
Except for the brief period of a year or eighteen months,
I had no assistance during my editorship. During the
greater part of the time I had clerkly help, most eflacient,
most intelligent; but I read all the manuscripts which
claimed critical attention; I wrote to contributors who
merited more than a printed circular; I revised all the
proofs, verifying every quotation and foreign word, and
correcting slovenly style and syntax, and then I revised
the author's and my own corrections. Meanwhile I was
writing, not only criticisms, but sketches, stories, and
poems for the body of the magazine; and in the course
of time, a novel each year. It seems like rather full work,
but I had always leisure, and I made a long summer away
from Cambridge in the country. The secret, if there was
any secret, lay iu ray doing every day two or three hours'
work, and letting no day pass idly. The work of reading
manuscripts and writing letters could be pushed into a
comer, and taken out for some interval of larger leisure;
and this happened often er and oftener as I grew more
and more a novelist, and needed every morning for fiction.
The proof-reading, which was seldom other than a pleas-
ure, with the tasks of revision and research, I kept for
the later afternoons and evenings; though sometimes it
took well-nigh the character of original work, in that
liberal Atlantic tradition of bettering the authors by edi-
torial transposition and paraphrase, either in the form
of suggestion or of absolute correction. This proof-read-
66 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
ing was a school of verbal exactness and rhetorical sim-
plicity and clearness, and in it I had succeeded others,
my superiors, who were without their equals. It is stUl
my belief that the best proof-reading in the world is done
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it is probably none
the worse for my having a part in it no longer.
As I have intimated, I found it by no means drudgery;
though as for drudgery, I think that this is for the most
part in the doer of it, and it always is a very wholesome
thing, even when it is real, objective drudgery. It would
be a much deceuter, honester, and juster world if we each
took his share in it, and I base my best hopes of the future
in some such eventuality. Not only the proofs were a
pleasant and profitable drudgery, but the poor manu-
scripts, except in the most forbidding and hopdess in-
stances, yielded their little crumbs of comfort; they sup-
ported while they fatigued.
Such were the details of Mr. Howells's laborious
days. The spirit in which all his work was done — the
essential kindliness of all its human relationships, the
constant hospitality to new ideas and new writers,
everything that an eager mind and a generous person-
ality could contribute to the functions of an editor —
shines through the record of his Atlantic years. To
his special credit must be counted the lengthening of
its tent-ropes. " The fact is," he says, " we were grow-
ing, whether we liked it or not, more and more Ameri-
can. Without ceasing to be New England, without ceas-
ing to be Bostonian at heart, we had become southern,
mid-western, and far-western in our sympathies. It
seemed to me that the new good things were coming
from those regions rather than from our own coasts and
hills, but it may have been that the things were newer
oftener than better." Thus it was characteristic of
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 67
him to have suggested to Mark Twain his writing for
the Atlantic his "Old Times on the Mississippi" — or
perhaps rather to have recorded the circumstance by
saying, " I hope I am not too fondly mistaken in think-
ing I suggested his writing [it] for the magazine." Of
Mark Twain's very first contribution to the Atlantic,
he says: "'A True Story' was but three pages long,
and I remember the anxiety with which the business
side of the magazine tried to compute its pecuniary
value. It was finally decided to give the author twenty
dollars a page, a rate unexampled in our modest his-
tory. I believe Mr. Clemens has since been offered a
thousand dollars a thousand words, but I have never
regretted that we paid him so handsomely for his first
contribution."
At the invitation of Fields, prompted by Miss Fran-
cis, Bret Harte had first written for the Atlantic. It
was with Howells, in Cambridge, that he made his stay
when, several years later, in 1871, he made his tri-
umphal progress to the East. Then it was, according
to Mr. Henry C. Merwin's "Life of Bret Harte," that
the New York publishers made him inadequate offers
for his writings, " and a few days later Bret Harte ac-
cepted the offer of James R, Osgood and Company, then
publishers of the Atlantic, to pay him ten thousand
dollars during the ensuing year for whatever he might
write in the twelve months, be it much or little. This
offer, a magnificent one for the time, was made despite
the astonishing fact that of the first volume of Bret
Harte's stories, issued by the same publishers six
months before, only thirty-five hundred copies had then
been sold," Harte redeemed the arrangement by con-
tributing to the Atlantic four stories, one of which
was "How Santa Clans Came to Simpson's Bar," and
68 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
Ave poems. It is easy to detect the hand of Mr. Howells
in the whole transaction.
The older writers of the New England group re-
mained faithful to the Atlantic — even Whittier, after
Mr. Howells, in what he afterwards felt to be a mis-
taken exercise of his editorial authority, had declined
one of his poems. To the promising members of the
younger group Mr. Howells's welcome was unfailingly
cordial — to none more so than to the fellow novelist and
contemporary, Henry James, with whose work his own
was so often compared and contrasted. " My desert in
valuing him," says Mr. Howells, " is so great that I can
confess the fact that two of his stories and one of his
criticisms appeared in the magazine some years before
my time, though perhaps not with the band of music
with which I welcomed every one afterwards." Giving
full credit also to his predecessor for the recognition
of the quality in the stories of Miss Sarah Orne Jewett,
he adds : " It is the foible of editors, if it is not
rather their forte, to flatter themselves that, though
they may not have invented their contributions, they
have at least invented their contributors; and if any
long-memoried reader chooses to hail me as an inspired
genius because of my instant and constant appreciation
of Miss Jewett's writing, I shall be the last to snub
him down."
Another of the feminine contributors to the Atlantic,
though not immediately accredited to this company,
received prompt recognition from Mr. Howells, who
shall tell the story himself : —
I do not remember any man who feigned himself a
woman, but now and then a woman liked to masquerade
as a man, though the disguise never deceived the editor.
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 69
even when it deceived the reader, except in the very signal
and very noted instance of Miss Mary N. Murfree, whom,
till I met her face to face, I never suspected for any but
Charles Egbert Craddock. The severely simple, the ro-
bust, the athletic hand which she wrote would have suf-
ficed to carry conviction of her manhood against any
doubts. I believe I took the first story she sent, and for
three or four years I addressed my letters of acceptance,
or criticism, to Charles Egbert Craddock, Murfreesboro,
Tennessee, without the slightest misgiving. Then she came
to Boston, and Aldrich, who had succeeded me, and who
had already suffered the disillusion awaiting me, asked
me to meet Craddock at dinner. He had asked Dr. Holmes
and Lawrence Barrett, too; and I should not attempt to
say whose astonishment he enjoyed most. But I wish I
could recall word for word the exqtiisite terms in which
Dr. Holmes turned his discomfiture into triumph, in that
most delicately feminine presence.
Still another Boston editor of the same period — it
may be said without digressing too widely — fell into
still more serious trouble through the Southern practice
of not restricting masculine names to men. This irre-
proachable bachelor had long been in correspondence
with another Tennessee writer whom he had assumed
to be of his own sex, and hearing that " he " was coming
to Boston at a certain time wrote a cordial letter in-
viting " him " to share his room in the boarding-house
of his long inhabitance. To his utter discomfiture a
Southern lady announced herself one day in his office
as the recipient of his invitation. It is not reported
that any Dr. Holmes was at hand to save the situation
with his verbal agility.
If the experience of Mr. Howells with Miss Murfree
was unique in Atlantic annals, it was not the only
70 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
novelty connected with his editorship. One innovation
of his own he described in writing. "For a while, I
think for a year, I indulged the fancy of printing each
month a piece of original music, with original songs;
but though both the music and the songs were good,
or at least from our best younger composers and poets,
the feature did not please — I do not know why — and
it was presently omitted."
In the unadorned pages of the Atlantic these songs to-
day present a somewhat strange appearance ; but there
they are — Whittier's "Hymn written for the Opening
of the International Exhibition, Philadelphia, May 10,
1876," with its music by John K. Paine, filling together
two pages in June, 1876 ; and later, the " Sunset Song "
of Celia Thaxter and Julius Eichberg, the "Creole
Lover's Song" of Edmund C. Stedman and Dudley
Buck, " A Dream " by W. W. Story and F. Boott, a
" Song " by George Parsons Lathrop and George L. Os-
good. There were also many bits of mtisical score in
the papers of musical criticism which William F. Ap-
thorp long contributed to the magazine. Excellent
line drawings, moreover, accompanied the series of
articles on " Crude and Curious Inventions at the Cen-
tennial Exhibition," by Edward H. Knight. In the
previous decades of the sixties many simple sketches
had illustrated Agassiz's articles on various processes
of nature. A paper on " The New Gymnastics " by Dr.
Dio Lewis, in the issue of August, 1862, — a physical-
culture article which would now be thought more ap-
propriate to a Sunday newspaper, — carried with it
forty-three remarkably inartistic drawings of men and
women exercising with dumb-bells, rings, wands, and
bean-bags. Thus the Atlantic, which, in spite of its
occasional necessary maps, diagrams, and the like, has
WILLIAM DEAN HOWBLLS 71
never been one of the illustrated periodicals, has had its
moments of pictorial adornment — and Mr. Howells's
introduction of pages not wholly given to reading-mat-
ter was not, after all, a complete innovation.
THE TICKNOB MANSION
at the head of Park Street.
One portion of the magazine — a department now
sufficiently venerable — owed its origin entirely to him.
This is the "Contributors' Club," of which he has
written : —
In the course of time, but a very long time, the magazine
felt the need of a more informal expression than it found
in the stated articles, and the Contributors' Club took
the place of all the different departments, those of politics,
music, and art having been dropped before that of litera-
ture. The new idea was talked over with the late George
72 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
Parsons Lathrop, who had become my assistant, and we
found no way to realize it but by writing the first para-
graphs ourselves, and so tempting others to write for
the Club. In the course of a very few months we had more
than help enough, and could easily drop out of the co-
operation.
During the period of Mr. Howells's editorship one
practice of an earlier day was revived — that of the
meeting together of editors, publishers, and contribu-
tors at the dinner-table. Several occasions of this na-
ture are described in Arthur Gilman's article, "Atlan-
tic Dinners and Diners," in the Fiftieth Anniversary
number of the magazine. The first of these revivals of
a past custom took place at the Parker House, Decem-
ber 15, 1874, and marked the acquisition of the maga-
zine by the firm of H. O. Houghton & Co. On Whit-
tier's seventieth birthday, December 17, 1877, another
notable assembling of the masculine pillars of the
Atlantic, as guests of its publishers, occurred at the
Brunswick Hotel in Boston ; still another, at the same
place, on December 3, 1879, in celebration of Dr.
Holmes's seventieth birthday, which had fallen incon-
veniently on the 29th of the previous August. " When
the day arrived," wrote Mr. GUman, "more than one
hundred sat together around six large tables. A re-
markable change is found in the fact that more than
one-third of the company were ladies ! " The next, and
last, festivity of the kind was itself in honor of a lady,
Harriet Beecher Stowe, and marked her seventy-first
birthday, June 14, 1882, by which time Aldrich had
succeeded Mr. Howells in the editorship of the maga-
zine. It took the form of an out-door luncheon on the
grounds of Governor Claflin at Newtonville.
WILLIAM DEAN HOWBLLS 73
At each of these feasts the towering figures of New
England letters — it is superfluous to catalogue them —
were present, and speeches and verses of all possible
fitness, grace, and feeling were uttered. When the un-
expected happens, it is often more illuminating than
the expected. Let us therefore pass over all the felici-
tous expressions at the gatherings of what so nearly
resembled a clan, and draw perhaps a truer impression
of the general scene from Mr. Howells's own account,
in his " My Mark Twain," of the havoc wrought by the
great humorist on the occasion of the dinner in honor of
Whittier.
The passing years have left me in the dark as to the
pretext of that supper at which Clemens made his awful
speech, and came so near being the death of us all. At the
breakfasts and luncheons we had the pleasure of our lady
contributors' company, but that night there were only
men, and because of our great strength we survived.
I suppose the year was about 1879, but here the almanac
is unimportant, and I can only say that it was after
Clemens had become a very valued contributor of the
magazine, where he found himself to his own great explicit
satisfaction. He had jubilantly accepted our invitation,
and had promised a speech, which it appeared afterwards
he had prepared with unusiial care and confidence. He
believed he had been particularly fortunate in his notion
for the speech of that evening, and he had worked it out
in joyous self-reliance. It was the notion of three tramps,
three dead-beats, visiting a California mining-camp, and
imposing themselves upon the innocent miners as respec-
tively Ealph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Long-
fellow, and Oliver WendeU Holmes. The humor of the
conception must prosper or fail according to the mood of
the hearer, but Clemens felt sure of compelling this to
74 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
sympathy, and he looked forward to an unparalleled
triumpli.
But there were two things that he had not taien into
account. One was the species of religious veneration in
which these men were held by those nearest them, a thing
that I should not be able to realize to people remote from
them in time and place. They were men of extraordinary
dignity, of the thing called presence, for want of some
clearer word, so that no one could well approach them
in a light or trifling spirit. I do not suppose that anybody
more truly valued them or more piously loved them than
Clemens himself, but the intoxication of his fancy carried
them beyond the bounds of that regard, and emboldened
him to the other thing which he had not taken into account
— namely, the immense hazard of working his fancy out
before their faces, and expecting them to enter into the
delight of it. If neither Emerson, nor Longfellow, nor
Holmes had been there, the scheme might possibly have
carried; but even this is doubtful, for those who so de-
voutly honored them would have overcome their horror
with difficulty, and perhaps would not have overcome it
at all.
The publisher, with a modesty very ungrateful to me,
had abdicated his office of host, and I was the hapless
president, fulfilling the abhorred function of calling peo-
ple to their feet and making them speak. When I came to
Clemens, I introduced him with the cordial admiring I
had for him as one of my greatest contributors and dear-
est friends. Here, I said, in sum, was a hiimorist who
never left you hanging your head for having enjoyed his
joke; and then the amazing mistake, the bewildering
blunder, the cruel catastrophe was upon us. I believe that,
after the scope of the burlesque made itself clear, there
was no one there, including the burlesquer himself, who
was not smitten with a desolating dismay. There fell a
silence, weighing many tons to the square inch, which
deepened from moment to moment, and was broken only
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 75
by tte hysterical and blood-curdling laughter of a single
guest, whose name shall not be handed down to infamy.
Nobody knew whether to look at the speaker or down at
his plate. I chose my plate as the least affliction, and so
I do not know how Clemens looked, except when I stole
a glance at him, and saw him standing solitary among
his appalled and appalling listeners, with his joke dead
on his hands. From a first glance at the great three whom
his jest had made its theme, I was aware of Longfellow
sitting upright, and regarding the humorist with an air
of pensive puzzle, of Holmes busily writing on his menu,
with a well-feigned effect of preoccupation, and of Emer-
son holding his elbows, and listening with a sort of
Jovian oblivion of this nether world in that lapse of mem-
ory which saved Hm in those later years from so much
bother. Clemens must have dragged his joke to the climax
and left it there, but I cannot say this from any sense
of the fact. Of what happened afterward at the table
where the immense, the wholly innocent, the truly unim-
agined affront was offered, I have no longer the least
remembrance. I next reniember being in a room of the
hotel, where Clemens was not to sleep, but to toss in
despair, and Charles Dudley Warner's saying, in the
gloom, "Well, Mark you're a funny fellow." It was as
well as anything else he could have said, but Clemens
seemed unable to accept the tribute.
So wretched, indeed, was Mark Twain over the whole
performance that on his return to Hartford, he wrote
to Mr. Howells : " It wUl hurt the Atlantic for me to
appear in its pages now"; and begged his friend to
return the proofs of a story then awaiting publication.
A humor so genuine as that which Mr. Howells re-
veals in his account of " the cruel catastrophe " is needed
to cope, not only with a humorist, but with the daUy
transactions of life. His whole mental and spiritual
76 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
attitude, as it appears in his own retrospect of his
editorship of the Atlantic, constituted an ideal element
of qualification for his task. No other editor, assistant
and chief, has been associated with the magazine for
so many years as the fifteen which Mr. Howells gave to
this work. It could not have been otherwise than that
his labors should have continued long to yield their
fruits. " The magazine," he has himself written, " was
already established in its traditions when I came to it,
and when 1 left it fifteen years later, it seemed to me
that if I had done any good, it was little more than
to fix it more firmly in them." " Little more " are the
words in this sentence which another hand would
especially revise.
IV
The ensuing seventeen years, 1881-1898, were divided
in the Atlantic editorship, between two men, Thomas
Bailey Aldrich and Horace Elisha Scudder, of whom
Aldrich held the post for nine, Scudder for eight years.
These were the two editors of a later day who have
been first to follow Lowell and Fields beyond the sight
of the present generation. Each stepped naturally into
the editorial office, and each brought with him and gave
to the magazine something distinctive and valuable.
There are two incidents linking Aldrich character-
istically with the first two editors of the Atlantic
wholly in their editorial capacity. In Mr. Ferris
Greenslet's " Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich " it is re-
lated that for the first three years of the Atlantic's ex-
istence, he had offered poetical contributions, without
success. (Elsewhere it appears that in the pride of
his youth, he had lost one opportunity to appear in the
Atlantic through not changing a faulty rhyme in one
of his poems, which he subsequently mended.) At
length, in April of 1860, he received the following note
from Lowell : —
Mt dear Sir, —
I welcome you heartily to the Atlantic. When I receive
so fine a poem as "Pythagoras," I don't think the check of
Messrs. Ticknor & Fields pays for it. I must add some
thanks and appreciation. I have put it down for June.
Very truly yours,
J. E. Lowell.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
Fourth Editor of the Atlantic Monthly
1881-1890
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH 79
The true flavor of Aldrich was imparted to the inci-
dent long afterwards. " Twenty-five years later," says
Mr. Greenslet, "when Aldrich in his turn had become
editor of the Atlantic, he accepted a poem that Lowell
sent him, with a copy of this note. Lowell promptly
called at the ofiBce to say that he was so enheartened by
its recognition that he had about made up his mind to
follow literature as a profession."
His early contact with Fields as editor was even
more characteristic. The story goes that, bearing a
poem of his own one day to Fields's offlce in the Old
Corner Bookstore, he found the editor out, but noticed
on his desk a memorandum of things to be done at once.
" Don't forget to maU E his contract," he read ; and
"Don't forget H ^'s proof." With a delicious im-
pudence the young poet wrote beneath these reminders
of obligations to Emerson and Holmes, "Don't forget
to accept A 's poem," left the manuscript, and de-
parted. " The poem " — as Professor Bliss Perry repeats
the anecdote in his " Park Street Papers " — " was ac-
cepted, paid for, and, truest kindness of all, — as Mr.
Aldrich asserted, — was never printed. But the re-
sourceful youth never lost his deferential attitude to-
ward the bearers of those famous initialed names that
had once preceded his own."
It has been said that Aldrich stepped naturally into
the Atlantic editorship. When Howells came from
New York to Boston, in 1868, as assistant editor of the
magazine, he found Aldrich installed, but a few months
earlier, in the office of the same publishing house, as
editor of its weekly journal, Every Saturday. Aldrich
had already gained a considerable editorial experience
in New York, in connection with several periodicals,
the suspension of one of which, the Saturday Press,
80 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
he had announced in terms bearing his distinctive
touch : " This paper is discontinued for lack of funds,
which is, by a coincidence, precisely the reason for
which it was started." Of the Aldrich that Mr. How-
ells found in Boston he has written: "We were of
nearly the same age, but he had a distinct and dis-
tinguished priority of reputation, in so much that in
my Western remoteness I had always ranged him with
such elders and betters of mine as Holmes and Lowell,
and never imagined him the blonde, slight youth I
found him, with every imaginable charm of contem-
poraneity."
The two young men became the best of friends, and
in their other friendships none should more surely be
counted than those they formed with their employers.
Fields, and his younger partner, James R. Osgood. On
the retirement of Fields from the firm, Osgood, whose
" reach," as Mr. Greenslet has well put it, " rather ex-
ceeded his grasp," undertook expansion which led to
business disaster. When the Atlantic was sold to H. O.
Houghton & Co., Every Saturday, also disposed of,
was suppressed. Mr. Howells records some sort of
funereal rite in which he and Aldrich joined with Os-
good, on the day after the sale, and the spirit in which
the three men had worked together reveals itself clearly
in his words about Osgood: —
We all knew that it was his necessity that had caused
him to part with the periodicals; but he professed that
it was Ms pleasure, and he said, He had not felt so light-
hearted since he was a boy. We asked him. How could
he feel gay when he was no longer paying us our salaries,
and how could he justify it to his conscience? He liked
our mocking, and limped away from us with a rheumatic
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
81
easing of Ms weight from one foot to another: a figure
pathetic now that it has gone the way to dusty death, and
dear to memory through benefactions unalloyed by one
unkindness.
STUDY OF THOMAS BAILEY ALDBICH
AT PONKAPOG
Released from editorial duties, Aldrich remained in
Boston and its neighborhood, — not "genuine Boston"
himself, as Mr. Greenslet tells us he liked to say, " but
Boston plated," — and wrought faithfully at his work
as a writer. From 1874 to 1881 he continued, as he had
begun, to be a prolific contributor of poems, short
stories, and novels to the Atlantic. When he succeeded
Mr. Howells in the later of these two years, it was
as if in prophetic verification of the words in Profes-
sor Perry's " Park Street Papers " which carry one both
back of Aldrich's time and beyond it : —
The editors of the Atlantic have always been drafted
from the ranks of its contributors; mere contributors, who
82 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
once enclosed stamps for the return of manuscript and
waited and wondered if it would prove " magazinable."
How can such a one, drawn in a moment, like Browning's
conscript,
From the safe glad rear to the dreadful van,
pretend that he has been invested with infallibility? "I
am fain to think it vivacious," wrote Lowell of a certain
Contributors' Club which he was submitting to the editor
in 1890, nearly thirty years after his own editorship
closed, "but if your judgment verify my fears, don't
scruple to return it. I can easily make other disposition of
it, or at worst there is always the waste-basket." His Club
was accepted, in spite of Lowell's fears — and, as it hap-
pened, it was hisi last contribution to the magazine.
Once, when Lowell was in Europe, Aldrich, for two
years, had occupied his Elmwood house in Cambridge.
His surroundings were always invested with charm.
When he came to the Atlantic, says Mr. Greenslet in his
biography, "even in his editorial office Aldrich con-
trived to surround himself with the homelike comfort to
which he was accustomed"; and the biographer goes
on: —
He chose for his purpose a, little back room at No.
i Park Street, reached by a spiral stairway much
resembling the pictures of Dante's Purgatorio with the
terrestrial Paradise at its summit. Its windows over-
looked that haunt of ancient peace, the Old Granary
Burying-Groxmd, where, as he liked to say, lay those who
would never submit any more manuscript. But any melan-
choly that might have arisen from the scenery was miti-
gated by an open fire of cannel coal, by a pipe, — an engine
which had not hitherto been in favor in that oflce, but
which was expressly nominated in the bond between the
THOMAS BAILEY ALDEICH 83
editor and his publisher, — and by the constant attendance
of Ms setter " Trip." Once when Trip ate a sonnet, Aldrich
asked, "How did he know it was doggerel? "
For the manner in which his daUy work was done
Mr. Greenslet evoked the memories of Miss Francis,
whose recollections of the Atlantic office under Fields
have already been cited; and one cannot do better in
this place than to copy again some records of this edi-
torial assistant, who worked with Aldrich through all
the nine years of his incumbency.
The routine of the office was simple enough. The prose
manuscripts were read, sifted, commented on, and all with
the smallest degree of merit placed in a drawer which
quickly became over-full, waiting for the editor's exami-
nation on a clearing-up day, of uncertain date, when he
energetically went through the mass, and laid aside a few
for further consideration. These did not usually wait long,
for as an editor Mr. Aldrich lived from hand to mouth;
the box, in which accepted manuscripts were kept was
never very full, was often half empty. He had an unwill-
ingness to accumulate copy — for which much might be
said — as well as a fastidious taste, and was not infre-
quently a solicitor for articles. Sometimes destitution
seemed to stare Mm in the face, but with Ms usual good
fortune tMngs altogether desirable arrived at the last
moment, and the supply never failed. The poetry I never
read, as he wished to see all that came, and Ms reading
was certainly qiute sufficient. His judgment in the case
of verse was very quick and sure, even the single felicity
of phrase or graceful thought in a poor poem never
escaped Ms notice. His standard of what Atlantic verse
should be was Mgh and not often to be attained to, but he
came as near to it as circumstances allowed and never
accepted poems lightly or unadvisedly. In the matter of
84 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
short stories lie was nearly as critical, while a slovenly
or careless style in any sort of article would almost ob-
scure whatever other merit the paper might possess. He
was, however, very fair-minded towards articles treating
of subjects which did not appeal to his personal tastes,
if the writers thereof were clear-headed and had a reason-
able amount of literary skill. . . .
To work with him was usually a most agreeable ex-
perience, but, as to accomplishment, it had its disad-
vantages. It was likely to remind him of something much
more interestiag. Some bit of autobiography, oftenest an
anecdote of his early life, which led to another and yet
another. Ah, if it could be possible to put that desultory
talk, vivid narration, scintillating humor, into cold type,
it would leave any tale he ever told with pen and ink
far behind!
Another detail of his ways as an editor appears in
Mr. Howells's " KecoUections of an Atlantic Editor-
ship." After describing his own struggles with the
bushel of accepted manuscript inherited from his two
predecessors, a load which he gradually lightened by
counting each manuscript dead when its author died,
and he could lay "his unpublished manuscript like a
laurel crown upon his tomb," he proceeds: "When
Aldrich came to my relief, I placed a pathetic remnant
of the bushel, say a half -peck, in his hands, and it was
with a shock that I learned later of his acting upon a
wholly different conception of his duty to these heir-
looms; he sent them all back, dead or alive, and so
made an end of an intolerable burden."
In the following terms Mr. Greenslet has summarized
the results of Aldrich's work as an Atlantic editor : —
Whatever were his alternations of mood and easy-going
methods, Aldrich made an excellent magazine for the
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH 85
lettered reader. Under Ms conduct the Atlantic attained
a notable unity of tone and distinction of style. A little
less accessible to new and unknown talent than Mr. Howells
had been, he was yet quick to perceive the note of distinc-
tion, and few of his swans turned out geese. He was not
a militant editor, and was not greatly concerned about
politics and affairs. His interest was first and always
literature, and perhaps no editor of the Atlantic printed
more of it. During Ms tenure of of&ce the afterglow of
the great day of New England literature was fading, but
fading slowly. He coxdd count on occasional poems from
Longfellow, Holmes, WMttier, and Lowell, to say notMng
of the younger group headed by Sill. He had Parkman
and Fiske for Mstorical papers ; James, Helen Hunt Jack-
son, Miss Murfree, Mrs. Oliphant, Marion Crawford, Miss
Jewett, and the two Hardys, American and English, for
fiction. He developed the critical department of the maga-
zine to a Mgh degree of competence by marshaling what
has seldom been seen in tMs country, a thorougMy com-
pact and capable coterie of critical reviewers. TMs group,
wMch was composed of Kichard Grant WMte, G. E. Wood-
berry, George Parsons Lothrop, Horace Scudder, and Miss
Harriet Waters Preston, contributed a surprisingly large
proportion of the material that is embodied in the score of
volujnes of Ms editing. Eead to-day, after the lapse of
twenty years, it is still remarkable for penetration of in-
sight and felicity of expression. It was under Aldrich, too,
that the Atlantic won its international reputation as
being, in the phrase of an English review, " the best edited
magazine in the English language." To his fastidious
sense of phrase and syntax, reading proof was a sacra-
ment. If he habitually delegated the celebration of it to
Ms assistant, Ms interest in the result was none the less
keen, and it fared ill with any split infinitive or suspended
nominative — even with such seemingly innocent locutions
as "several people" — that fell under his searching eye.
The editorial letters that Aldrich wrote out in Ms beau-
86 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLT
tiful round Iiaiid are models of terse and luminous expres-
sion, and many of Ms younger writers remember their
helpfulness with sincere gratitude. With all his contrib-
utors, both known and unknown, he was something of a
martinet, particularly in the matter of the pruning away of
longueurs; but both classes soon came to trust his editorial
acumen and literary craftsmanship. The books in which
his correspondence was copied are fruitful reading for the
magazine writer, professional or amateur.
His own view of one important service of the Atlantic
was expressed in a private letter, not hitherto quoted
in print, to the writer of an historical sketch of the
magazine, published in the Fortieth Anniversary num-
ber, in 1897. " I am sorry that the Atlantic/' he wrote,
" did not put in its claim to being the father of the short
story. Of course there were excellent short stories be-
fore the Atlantic was born — Poe's and Hawthorne's
— but the magazine gave the short story a place which
it had never before reached. It began with ' The Dia-
mond Lens ' of Fitz- James O'Brien, and ended with —
well, it has not ended yet."
As a revisitant of his editorial haunts, Aldrich
makes the following apparition in Professor Perry's
"Park Street Papers": —
For many years he had been wont to visit more or less
regularly the editorial room which still claimed his name
and fame as one of its treasured possessions. Perched
upon the edge of a chair as if about to take flight, he would
often linger by the hour, to the delight of his listeners.
His caustic art played around every topic of conversation.
He did not disdain the veriest " shop talk " concerning
printers' errors and the literary fashions of the hour.
" Look at those boys! " he exclaimed once, as he picked up
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRIOH 87
an illustrated periodical containing the portraits of a
couple of tliat month's beardless novelists. " When I began
to vrrite, we waited twenty years before we had our por-
traits printed, but nowadays these young fellows have
themselves photographed before they even sit down to
write their book." Himself a fastidious composer and re-
viser, Mr. Aldrich was severely critical of current maga-
zine literature. " That was a well- written essay," he once
said of an Atlantic contribution which he liked, " but you
will find that he used a superfluous ' of ' upon the second
page." ... More than once I have heard him declare that
he would have rejected Mr. Kipling's " Recessional " if it
had been offered to the Atlantic — so extreme was his dis-
like for one or two harsh lines in that justly celebrated
poem. The one American poem which he would have most
liked to write, was, he said, Emerson's "Bacchus" —
where, amid inimitable felicities, there are surely harsh
lines enough.
It was indeed, in the maintenance and reinforcement
of the strictest literary traditions of the Atlantic —
traditions both of workmanship and of spirit — that
Aldrich rendered his peculiar service to the magazine.
Not of the "reformer type" himself, like Lowell, "he
cared no more," in the words of Professor Perry, " for
the practical later phases of transcendentalism than
for the earlier speculative ones " ; and he never lost " his
engaging air of detachment from New England's cher-
ished enterprises." Yet on occasion there could appear
in his personal dealings a vigor quite foreign to the
dilettante: witness, for example, the instance of the
ill-regulated contributor who on receipt of a "declina-
tion with thanks," retorted : " My robust nature abhors
your disgusting duplicity. You are a vulgar unblush-
ing Eascal and an impudent audacious Liar. . . . You
ought to be publicly horsewhipped. Nothing would
88 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
gratify me more than to give you a sounder thrashing
than you have yet received." Aldrich preserved the
letter, with a neatly penciled note thereon : " The gen-
tleman with the 'robust nature' was politely invited
to call at No. 4 Park Street on any day that week be-
tween 9 A.M. and 3 p.m., but the 'robust nature' failed
to materialize." If the meeting had taken place, Aldrich
would certainly not have impaired the broad applicabil-
ity of the lines which Dr. Henry Van Dyke addressed
to him on his seventieth birthday : —
You've done your work with careful, loving touch, —
An artist to the very core of you, —
You've learned the magic spell of " not too much " ;
We read, — and wish that there was more of you.
Aldrich was not an autobiographical person, nor was
Scudder, who succeeded him in 1890 and held the editor-
ship of the magazine — actively, until 1896, when Mr.
Walter H. Page became associated with its conduct and
assumed many of its labors ; nominally until 1898, when
Mr. Page succeeded to the post both in fact and in name.
For the present purpose it is unfortunate, moreover,
that the fifth editor of the Atlantic has not been the
theme, like all his predecessors, of biography and remi-
niscence. There is no fund of written record concern-
ing him or by him upon which to draw. This may be
ascribed to the fact that he was primarily an editor —
not primarily a poet, novelist, public figure, though,
even as they who came before him, essentially a man of
letters. He was, besides, an editor whose work, with
an extraordinary unity of faithfulness, was done for a
single publishing house, or, more strictly, for that suc-
cession of firms from which in 1880 emerged the firm of
Houghton, Mifflin & Company.
HORACE ELISHA SCUDDER 89
In the issuance of periodicals Scudder had served
an early apprenticeship as editor of the Riverside
Magazine for Young People, published by H. O. Hough-
ton & Co. Well within the first decade of the Atlantic
he appeared among its contributors both of verse and
of fiction, each of a delicate quality presaging a keen
perception of the dulce in writing, even after his pro-
duction of the utile had come to engage all his own
efforts. In later life he wrote to his friend, Henry M.
Alden, of Harpers' Magazine, of a "former state of
existence when we were poets " ; and said of the change
that came to him : " I woke to find myself at the desk
of a literary workman." From 1872 he made a three-
years' experiment of membership in the Houghton firm,
but dropped with relief the more commercial interests
of publishing. The manufacture and sale of books con-
cerned him less than the earlier processes of their
making.
One of his valuable labors in these younger days
was to prepare, in 1876, the first comprehensive index
of the Atlantic, covering its first twenty years. Oppo-
site his own name, twenty-eight contributions are en-
tered, chiefly reviews. The later indexes show this
number vastly increased. His unacknowledged work
for what he delighted to call " the house " was legion —
voluminous and sympathetic long-hand correspondence
with authors; deft and enlightening introductions to
single volumes ; series of books planned and editorially
executed, most notably, perhaps, that " Riverside Liter-
ature Series" which embodied so effectively his cher-
ished belief that the very best of reading was none too
good for those whose taste was still in process of forma-
tion. In this field of education he was indeed among
the pioneers, A trustee of Williams College, of which
HORACE ELISHA SCUDDER
Fifth Eflitor of the Atlantic Monthly
1890-1898
HORACE ElilSHA SCUDDBR 91
he was a graduate, he held the cause of education
among his strongest personal interests, and seized
every opportunity to forward it through all the means
afforded by his connection with an influential publish-
ing house and with the Atlantic.
No less naturally, then, than Aldrich, did Scudder
step into the editorship of the Atlantic. It was the
best editorial position in the gift of his "house," and
when it fell vacant, to whom but to Scudder, the most
faithful and practised of editors, should it be offered?
If the eight years of his editorship may be said to
mark the climax of the magazine's identification with
the firm which published it, this was more intrinsic than
apparent in the pages of the Atlantic. They reflected,
probably more than ever before, an editor's personal
interest in education. Otherwise the magazine was
much as it had been; for what Professor Perry has
said of Aldrich's time was only a little less true of
Scudder's ; " It was before the day of wild west feats
of editorial chase, capture, and exhibition " ; and Scud-
der, content, as some of his predecessors had been, to
take chiefly, and gratefully, what came to him, left to
his successors the full development of editorial initi-
ative through invitation.
The years of his editorship were none the less years of
extraordinary industry. When he took charge of the At-
lantic he did not drop his work as literary director of
the firm's book-publishing enterprises, but only added
the new to the old labors. An assistant recalls Scudder's
coming to his desk on one of this "new hand's" first
days in the editorial ofSce, and depositing thereon some
ten or eleven volumes of a new edition of Thoreau, in
page proofs, with a request for an index of the entire set.
" I always like to keep some knitting-work of that kind
92 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
on hand myself," said the indefatigable chief, as if in
token of the standard of industry to which the members
of his office family were expected to attain. What he
looked for in others he demanded inexorably of himself.
It was he, rather than any one of his editorial helpers,
who sped out of the offlce late in the afternoon bearing a
huge green-baize bag stuflfed with books and manuscripts,
bespeaking more than knitting-work in the evening, and
sped back with it at an early morning hour, ready for a
long and cheerful day of work. Into its busy hours
he could crowd the writing, the highly skillful and
competent writing, of many of the " Comments on New
Books " to which the later pages of the Atlantic were
then devoted. There was always time for friendly con-
sultations with contributors, for encouragement to
promising beginners, for suggesting directions to be
followed by more practised hands. In that variable
fraction of an editor's work which consists of giving
freely. of his time and thought to the writers who most
need such help, Scudder was indeed a liberal giver.
The essential goodness of the man, the true kindness
of his heart, made him a friend dearly prized and re-
membered by many. The Atlantic, from which he re-
tired, a man of sixty years, in 1898, had given expres-
sion, not only to the devoted nature of its editor, but
also to the most distinctive inheritances of its two-score
years.
Scudder was the last of the Atlantic editors who be-
longed, even as a younger contemporary, to the group
of writers which dominated the magazine through its
earlier years. With him an era in the history of the
magazine may be said to hare come to an end. The
full score of years since his retirement belongs essen-
tially to our own day. As this is not the place for a
contemporaneous history of the magazine, or for weigh-
ing the work of men whose activities are, happily, stUl
unfinished, it will sufQce in a few remaining pages to
make a hasty survey of the personal forces which have
directed the course of the magazine since 1896.
In that year Mr. Walter Hines Page, whose services
as United States Ambassador to Great Britain from
1913 to 1918 have recently brought him to an honored
central place on the stage of the world, began his asso-
ciation with the Atlantic. A native of North Carolina,
educated in the South, he represented even more than
Mr. Howells, with his Ohio background, and Aldrich, on
whom the influences of New Orleans and New York had
made his New England birth seem almost an accident,
the identification of the Atlantic with America rather
than with any section of it. For five years before be-
coming, in 1895, a literary adviser to the firm of Hough-
ton, Mifflin & Co., he had been editor of the Forum in
New York. A deep interest in national afifairs, finding
its outlet both in this magazine and, from 1900 to 1913,
in his editorship of the World's Work, gave a stronger
color to the political aspect of the Atlantic than any
previous editor had imparted to it. His term of service,
From a paintlDg by Lazlo, by courtesy of Tlu ff^'orld's ff^ork
WALTER HINES PAGE
Sixth Editor of the Atlantic Monthly
1898-1899
BLISS PERRY 95
the three years from 1896 to 1899, through two of which
the titular editorship remaiued with Scudder, though
absent for many months in Europe, was the shortest of
all the editorships of the magazine — Lowell, with his
four years, standing next in order of brevity. But, like
all the editors who had preceded him, he left his clear
individual imprint on its pages, the definite work of a
powerful personality which had for its chief concern
the problems of our national life.
To him succeeded, in 1899, Professor Bliss Perry, a
native of Western Massachusetts, educated at Williams
College and German universities, a professor of Eng-
lish at Princeton at the time his editorship began, the
holder of a similar chair at Harvard before it ended.
In him also was embodied a larger American interest
than that which derives its special suffusion of tint
from the dome of the State House in Boston. During
the ten years of his editorship, the interest of letters
received the emphasis which might have been expected ;
but it seems more than fortuitous that the first honor-
ary doctorate conferred upon him was that of L.H.D.,
for the "more humane letters" were surely his chief
concern as editor.
A later historian of the Atlantic will be sure to draw
freely upon the volume of "Park Street Papers," in
which Professor Perry has brought together the "Pro-
logues" with which he made it his custom, as "toast-
master" at the Atlantic's board, to open, in January
numbers of the magazine, the annual feast for which
he was responsible. Here a single fragment wUl serve
the twofold purpose of illustrating Professor Perry's
conception of his task and of the place for such a peri-
odical as the Atlantic in American life : —
BLISS PERRY
Seventh Editor of the Atlantic Monthly
1899-1909
THE LAST TEN TEARS 97
If the Atlantic Monthly were a repository; if it confined
itself to tte discussion of Eoman antiquities, or the son-
nets of Wordsworth, or the planting of the colony of Mas-
sachusetts Bay, no one but the specialists would concern
themselves with the opinions expressed in its pages. But
it happens to be particularly interested in this present
world; curious about the actual conditions of politics and
society, of science and commerce, of art and literature.
Above all, it is engrossed with the lives of the men and
women who are maMng America what it is and is to be.
With notable success Professor Perry gave ten years
to the realization of this humanistic ideal. If it has
seemed unsuitable to deal in detail with the achieve-
ments of recent editors, it would be even less possible
in these pages to recount and appraise the work of the
present management of the magazine, A few facts,
however, should be given.
In the summer of 1908, when Professor Perry was
planning to free himself from editorial responsibilities,
it happened that the publishers of the magazine were
facing the problems of a general rearrangement of
their business organization. At that moment an oppor-
tunity to part with the Atlantic on terms assuring the
continuance of its historic place in American life pre-
sented itself. Mr. EUery Sedgwick, then of New York,
where he had given himself a rigorous training in the
editing and publishing of periodicals, proposed to estab-
lish the Atlantic Monthly Company, under his presi-
dency, and to acquire the magazine, to be conducted
under his editorship, with Mr. MacGregor Jenkins, long
associated with the magazine in the office of Houghton,
Mifflin & Company, as publisher. This offer was ac-
cepted, and in August, 1908, the Atlantic began to ap-
pear under the new auspices. For the first time since
98 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
the days of James T. Fields the editor was directly con-
cerned with the publishing success of the magazine. As
it found favor with a larger and larger public, the
business of the company responsible for it expanded,
by the acquisition of two other periodicals, — first the
House Beautiful, then the Living Age, established by
E. Littell in 1844, — and also through the publication
of books bearing the imprint of the Atlantic Monthly
Press. Thus the magazine has come to stand at the
centre instead of the circumference of the circle of
interests with which it is associated.
In the summer of 1918, the new company celebrated
its tenth anniversary with a dinner, which differed from
the old Atlantic feasts chiefly through the absence of
all contributors and the presence of all the men and
women, employers and employed, more than fifty in
number, who are actively engaged in the daily work of
the corporation. Certain things may be said under
cover of rhyme which are inappropriate to matter-of-
fact prose. It may, therefore, be permitted to print the
following verses which were read on that occasion : —
AN ATLANTIC PORT
No harborside of mystery, where silent troops set sail,
No secret haven for the saved along the TJ-boat's trail —
A happier roadstead this, wherein are sunk all doubts and fears,
The safe Atlantic anchorage — the Port of Ten New Years !
The good ship bears an ocean's name — the ocean on whose breast
Our fathers, brave adventurers all, fared forth into the west —
Across whose leagues our flower of gallant youth now eastward
fare.
Beneath the flag of human-kind a comrade's part to bear.
THE LAST TEN YEARS 99
Like to the sea itself the ship, with healing on its wings,
Fresh spirit to the wearied, fresh hope and courage, brings ;
Tet bounded by no shore it sails — o'er city, hill and plain.
Borne on an ever-rising tide — a new Atlantic main !
FuU fifty years its argosies sailed monthly forth in pride —
The spoils of all our Samarcands bulging the vessel's side;
Tet sails were growing obsolete, far lands lay unexplored,
Fresh voyages beckoned when a new young captain stepped on
board.
The rivets all he tightened, to sail-power added steam.
Installed new turbine engines, extended length and beam.
Signed year by year a growing crew — mates, seamen, yeomen,
brave —
Teowomen, too ! — and sailed, yeo-ho ! out on the rolling wave !
Letters of marque the ship bore none ; yet prizes struck their
Calling, " We'd sail with you before our banners are in rags !" —
Strange caravels, and quaintly named, as from some mythic
age—
The "Houseboat Beautiful" came first, and then the "Living
Wage ! "
So grows the squadron, one by one, with small boats, shaped
like books.
Swarming about, with lines austere, or gallant, or de luxe!
So may it great and greater grow, while landsmen swell their
cheers
For captain, mates, and crew, moored now in the Port of Ten
New Years I
A final word must be said to link together the At-
lantic of the present and of the past. The magazine
defined itself at the very beginning as "Devoted to
Literature, Art and Polities." That devotion, embrac-
ing the " Science " which for some time was interpolated
between "Literature" and "Art," has remained una-
100 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
bated through all the changes and chances of more than
sixty years. The magazine has never called itself a
mirror, but that is what it has always been, or tried to
be — a mirror reflecting whatever has most vitally con-
cerned the life of the nation and its thinking citizens
through six eventful decades. In the first of these a
great war cast its shadow across the face of America.
The shadow, and many glorious lights which it caused
to stand out but the more clearly, were reflected in the
Atlantic's mirror. In the sixth decade another and a
vastly fiercer war has darkened the face of all the
world. The reflection of it in a great variety of its
infinitely complex phases has been precisely as char-
acteristic of the Atlantic to-day as the poems and war
papers of the sixties were characteristic of the maga-
zine in that period. It is an utterly different world in
which we have come to live, and the paths of many
of its quests lead into new and different fields ; but the
men and women who inhabit it have much in common
with the essential nature of their grandfathers and
grandmothers. Clothes and houses, means of communi-
cation and transportation, external trappings of every
kind, have changed in a thousand ways. The physical
form and spiritual content of the Atlantic have been
modified rather than altered to meet the demands of a
new day. Like the hearts and minds which are the best
possession of our country, the magazine has truly rep-
resented one of the constant elements in the life of the
nation.
An incident of the past summer is significant. A
friend of the Atlantic was traveling from Chicago to
New York on the Twentieth Century Limited. The
smoking-car in which he sat contained perhaps a dozen
men reading magazines. The most distinguished of them
THE LAST TEN YEARS 101
in outward appearance — perhaps the president of a
hank, thought the observer, if not of a university — ^was
deep in the perusal of Snappy Stories. Another man,
of rat-like mien, buried himself in the Wall Street
Journal. All the other ten were reading the Atlantic.
One of them interrupted himself from time to time by
drawing pencil lines around certain passages. The
Atlantic's friend had the curiosity to stroll down the
aisle, and let his eye fall upon one of the marked pages.
The title above it was "Religion in War-Time."
It has never been other than a pitiable mistake to
believe that the best of Americans are indifferent to
the issues of life and death. They do not ask, or wish,
constantly to be confronted with them, stark and soli-
tary ; there is ample room in their scheme of things for
the humors and graces of living. But one likes to think
of the reader of " Religion in War-Time" — also of the
other nine. These wayfaring Americans, typical of
many thousands of their countrymen, now stand on the
threshold of a new era. Peace succeeds to war, the
processes of reconstruction must follow those of disrup-
tion. Men and women of open mind and heart, ready
for every effort to seize upon what is best in the fateful
future, face it with a confidence in which the Atlantic
shares.
Entrance to present office!
41 Mt. Vernon Street
THE TWENTY-ONE TITLES INCLUDED IN THIS LIST SEEM
ASSURED, BY UNIVEBSAL CONSENT, OF A PERMA-
NENT PLACE IN LITERATURE.
Aldrich — Marjorie Daw {January, 1873).
Browning — Prospice {May, 1864).
Clemens ^Old Times on the Mississippi {January-
June, August, 1875).
Emerson — Days {November, 1857).
Hale — The Man without a Country {November, 1863).
Harte — How Santa Claus came to Simpson's Bar
{March 1872).
Holmes — The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (in-
cluding "The Chambered Nautilus" and
"The Wonderful One Hoss Shay.") {No-
vember, 1857- October, 1858).
Mrs. Howe — The Battle Hymn of the Republic {Feb-
ruary, 1862)
HowELLS — The Lady of the Aroostook {November,
1878- March, 1879).
H. James, Jr. — Daisy Miller {April-June, 1883).
W. James — Talks to Teachers on Psychology {Febru-
ary-May, 1899).
Miss Jewett — The Country of the Pointed Firs {Jan-
uary, March, July, September, 1896).
Kipling —The Disturber of Traffic {September, 1891).
Longfellow —The Children's Hour {September, 1860).
Paul Revere's Ride {January, 1861).
Lowell — Commemoration Ode {September, 1865).
Biglow Papers {January- June, 1862; Feb-
ruary, 1863; April, 1865; May, 1866).
Moody — Ode in Time of Hesitation {April, 1900).
Parkman — Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham {Septem-
ber, 1884).
Sill —A Fool's Prayer {April, 1879).
'Whittier —Barbara Frietchie {October, 1863).
INDEX
AujEN, Henry M., 89.
AiDRicH, Thomas Bailet, fourth
editor, editor of Every Saturday,
62, 79; relations with Lowell and
Fields as editors 77, 78; succeeds
Howells, 81; as editor, Miss
Francis, Howells, and Greenslet
quoted concerning, 83, 84; as a
revisitant of the etUtorial haimts
86; 55, 69, 72, 93.
Anthony, Mr. 55.
Apthorp, W. P., 70.
Atlantic Club, memorable meet-
ing of, described by T. W. Hig-
ginson, iOff.
Atlantic Monthly, foundation of
13 Jf.; named by Holmes, 18, 19;
contributors to fiist number, 24,
85, 26; anonymity of authors in,
25, 26, abandoned, 26; a success
from the start, 26; its aims and
policy, 26-28; sold to Ticknor &
Fields, 33-35; in the Civil War,
46jf . ; in the Franco-Prussian and
Spanish wars, 49; the "True
Story of Lady Byron's Life," and
its effect, 49-51 ; successive own-
ers of, 51, 52; its home on Tre-
mont St., 52 Jf.; original music
printed in, 70; origin of the "Con-
tributors' Club," 71; "the best
edited magazine in the English
language, 85; and the short
story, 86; the present and the
past, 99-101.
Atlantic Monthly Company, 51,
97.
Atlantic Monthly Press, 98.
"Atlantic Port, An," 98.
Barrett, Lawrence, 69.
Beecher, Henry Ward, 31.
Boston Fire, 57.
Boott, Francis, 70.
Brown, John, 46.
Browning, Robert, his "Prospice,"
47.
Buck, Dudley, 70.
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 49.
Byron, Lady, the "True Story" of
her life, 49-51.
Cabot, James Elliot, 13, 15.
Civil War, the, and the Atlantic,
45 #.
Clafliu, William, 72.
Clemens, Samuel L., his first con-
tribution to the Atlantic, 67; his
famous speech at the Whittier
dinner, 73-75.
Clough, Arthur Hugh, 26, 45.
Contributors' Club, founded by
Howells, 71.
Craddock, Charles Egbert. See
Murfree, Mary N.
Crawford, F. Marion, 85.
Curtis, George William, quoted,
40.
Dinner-parties, and the early his-
tory of the Atlantic, 19 Jf.; re-
viewed in later years, 72.
Dodge, Mary A., A Battle of the
Books, quoted, 58.
Eichberg, Julius, 70.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, contrib-
utes to first number, 24 ; his poem,
"Days," 25; quoted, on the prac-
tice of anonymity, 25; his article,
"Books," criticized, 30; his "The
President's Proclamation," 45,
and "Voluntaries," 47; his Bac-
chus," 87; 13, 15, 55, 63, 73, 74.
Every Saturday, 52, 79, 80.
Felton, Cornelius C, 28.
Fielding, Henry, his Tom Jones, 24.
Fields, Jajmes T., second editor,
succeeds Lowell, 34, 37; as a
publisher, 39, 40, 41; as editor,
T. W. Higginson quoted, con-
cerning, 42-45; his Yesterdays
104
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
ivith Authors, quoted, 46; Miss
Francis, quoted, concerning, 52
#.; retires, 59; 62, 63, 64, 67, 77,
79, 80, 98.
Fields, Osgood & Co., 60, 51.
Fiske, John, 39, 85.
Fontarive's restaurant, 19.
Francis, Susan M., "The Atlantic's
Pleasant Days in Tremont
Street," quoted, 51-67; quoted,
on Aldrich as editor, 83; 67.
Gilman, Arthur, "Atlantic Dinners
and Diners," quoted, 18, 72.
Godwin, Parke,contributes to first
number, 24; 27, 45.
Greenslet, Ferris, his Thomas Bai-
ley Aldrich, quoted, 77, 80,81,
82, 83.
Hale, Edward Everett, his James
Russell Lowell and his Friends,
quoted, 13; "The Man without
a Country," 46.
Haniilton,Gail. See Dodge, Mary
A.
Hardy, Arthur S., 85.
Hardy, Thomas, 85.
Harper & Brother, 35.
Harpers' Monthly, 26. 40.
Harte, Bret, and the Atlantic, 67.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, "Chiefly
about War Matters," 46; 62, 86.
Higginson, T. W., his Cheerful Yes-
terdays, quoted, 20 jf. 27, 42.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, engaged
as "first contributor," 18; names
the magazine, 18, 19; at the
Atlantic Club dinner, 20^.; his
"Autocrat" in the first number,
24,25; the "Autocrat" and "Pro-
fessor" and the religious press,
29-31; "My Hunt tor the Cap-
tain," 46; dinner in honor of his
70th birthday, 72; 13, 15, 80,
54, 65, 61, 62, 69, 73, 74, 86.
Hosmer, James K., "The Giant in
the Spiked Helmet," 49.
Houghton, H. O., & Co., 51, 72.
Houghton, MiflBin & Co., 51, 57,
88, 93, 97.
Houghton, Osgood & Co., 51.
House Beautiful, The, 98.
Howe, Julia Ward, "The Battle-
Hymn of the Republic," 47.
HowELiiS, WiLUAM Dean, third
editor, assistant editor, 52, 65,
64; succeeds Fields, 59; his lAt-
erary Friends and Acquaintance,
quoted, 61, 63, 64; "Recollec-
tions of an Atlantic Editorship,"
quoted, 65, 66, 84; quoted, on
Henry James and Miss Jewett,
68; prints original music in the
Allantic,10,1\ ; starts the"Club,"
71; his My Mark Twain, quoted,
73 75; quoted, on Aldrich, 80,
and Osgood, 80; 93.
Hurd & Houghton, 61, 57.
Independent, The, quoted, on
Holmes, 31.
Jackson, Helen Hunt, 85.
James, Henry, 68, 86.
Jenkins, MacGregor, 97.
Jewett, J. P. & Co., Underwood's
negotiations with, 16; failure of,
17.
Jewett, Sarah Orne, 68, 85.
Kipling, Rudyard, 87.
Knickerbocker, The, 26.
Knight, Edward H., 70.
Lathrop, George P., 70, 83.
Lewis, Dio, 70.
Living Age, The, 98.
Longfellow, Henry W., his Journal,
quoted, 13, 19; contributes to
first number, 24; "Cumberland"
and "Killed at the Ford," 47; 15,
20, 55, 73, 74, 85.
INDEX
105
Lowell, James Russell, jffrri edi- Paine JoIm£. 70.
tor, his selection due to Under- u i 'csi x -Jr' i a^i i- a:
wood, 17; his qualifications, 17, ^^""K^*"!?' ^°- *' ^^'^''^''^ "^"^
18; contributes to first number, * > •
24, 26; his painstaking criticism, Parkman, Francis, 86.
25; as editor, 28 Jf.; his helpful Pbrht, Bliss, seventh editor, his
dealings with contributors, 29, "Park Street Papers," quoted,
30; resigns, 33, 34, 36, 37; "Wash-
ers of the Shroud," 47; "Biglow
Papers, Second Series," 47;
Commemoration Ode," 47; and
Howells, 61, 62, 63, 64; his last
contribution, 82; 13, 16, 46, 65,
77, 79, 86.
Merwin, Henry C, his Life of Bret
Harte, quoted, 67.
Mitchell, Donald G., quoted, 46;
59.
Motley, John Lothrop, contri-
butes to first number, 24; 13, 16,
19, 25, 30.
Murfree, Mary N., anecdote of,
69; 86.
Music, original, printed in Atlantic,
70, 71.
16, 79, 81, 86, 87, 91, 97; as
editor, 95, 97.
Phillips, Moses D., describes the
dinner party at which the At-
lantic was founded, 13, 15; his
death, 33.
Phillips, Sampson & Co., first pub-
lishers of the Atlantic, 16, 17, 33,
60.
Pickard, Samuel T., his Life of
Whittier, quoted, 19.
Poe, Edgar A., 86.
Porter's Tavern, 19, 20.
Prescott, Harriet (Mrs. Spofford),
at the Atlantic Club Dinner, 21
#■
Preston, Harriet Waters, 86.
Putnam's Magazine, 26.
Quincy, Edmund, "Where will it
End?" 45; 19, 23.
Beligious Press, The, and Dr.
Holmes, 30, 31.
Rice, Alexander H., 34, 36.
"Native Writers," and the early
Atlantics, 27, 28.
New England group, The, 16, 27,
28, 68.
New England Magazine, The, iS.
New Englander, The, 69.
Nightingale, Florence, 24.
Norton, Charles Eliot, contrib- ^(aurday Press, The,J9.
utes to first number, 24; quoted, ~ " — •
33, 45; 26.
O'Brien, Fitz-James, 86.
Old Comer Bookstore, 39-41.
Oliphant, M. O. W., 85.
Osgood, George L., 70.
Osgood, James R., Howells on, 80;
55.
Osgood, James R. & Co., 51, 57, 67.
Page, Walter H., sixth editor, 93,
96.
ScuDDEK, Horace E., fifth editor,
his James Russell Lowell, quoted,
29, 36; as editor, 88-92; 85, 96.
Sedqwick, Ellert, eighth editor,
97.
Sill, Edmund R., 86.
Spofford, Harriet Prescott. See
Prescott, Harriet.
Springfield Republican, The, 26.
Stedman, Edmund C, 70.
Story, William W., 70.
Stowe, Calvin L., 23, 24.
106
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, her rela-
tions with the firms of Jewett
and Phillips, Sampson & Co.;
16, 17; influences Phillips in
favor of the new enterprise; 17;
at the Atlantic Club dinner, 21-
24; contributes to first number,
24, 25; "The True Story of Lady
Byron's Lite,"49-51; dinner in
honor of her 71st birthday, 72.
Tarbox, Increase N., "Old Connec-
ticut vs. the Atlantic Mcmihly,"
quoted, 59.
Taylor, Bayard, 56, 64.
Thaxter, Celia, 70.
Ticknor, William D., 34, 35.
Ticknor & Fields, purchase of the
Atlantic by, 33-35; 60, 61.
Trowbridge, John T., quoted, 18,
29; contributes to first number,
2425;
Twain, Mark. See Clemens, Sam-
uel L.
Underwood, Frances H., ("The
Editor who was never the Edi-
tor"), the fans et origo of the
foundation of the Atlantic, 16,
17; responsible for selection of
Lowell as editor, 17; becomes as-
sistant editor, 17; quoted, on the
aims of the magazine, 26, 27; 20,
21, 33.
Van Dyke, Henry, verses of, 88.
Warner, Charles Dudley, 75.
Whipple, Edwin Percy; 15.
White, Richard Grant, 85.
Whittier, John G., contributes to
first number, 24, 25; "Barbara
Frietchie," 47; dinner in honor
of his 70th bui,hday, 72, 73#.;
23, 66, 68, 70, 86.
Winthrop Square, 57.
Woodberry, George E., 85.
Wyman, John C, 21, 23.
McGrath-Sherrill Prets, Boston