The Biglow Papers | Page 2

the book did not need it. The very slight knowledge which every educated Englishman has of Transatlantic politics will be quite enough to make him enjoy the racy smack of the American soil, which is one of their great charms; and, as to the particular characters, they are most truly citizens of the world as well as Americans. If an Englishman cannot find 'Bird-o'-freedom Sawins,' 'John P. Robinson's,' 'pious editors,' and candidates "facin' south-by-north" at home--ay, and if he is not conscious of his own individual propensity to the meannesses and duplicities of such, which come under the lash of Hosea--he knows little of the land we live in, or of his own heart, and is not worthy to read the "Biglow Papers."
Instead, therefore, of any attempt of my own, I will give Mr. Lowell's own account of how and why he came to write this book. "All I can say is," he writes, "the book was thar. How it came is more than I can tell. I cannot, like the great G?the, deliberately imagine what would have been a proper 'Entstehungsweise' for my book, and then assume it as fact. I only know that I believed our war with Mexico (though we had as just ground for it as a strong nation ever had against a weak one) to be essentially a war of false pretences, and that it would result in widening the boundaries, and so prolonging the life of slavery. Believing that it is the manifest destiny of the English race to occupy this whole continent, and to display there that practical understanding in matters of government and colonization which no other race has given such proofs of possessing since the Romans, I hated to see a noble hope evaporated into a lying phrase to sweeten the foul breath of demagogues. Leaving the sin of it to God, I believed, and still believe, that slavery is the Achilles-heel of our own polity, that it is a temporary and false supremacy of the white races, sure to destroy that supremacy at last, because an enslaved people always prove themselves of more enduring fibre than their enslavers, as not suffering from the social vices sure to be engendered by oppression in the governing class. Against these and many other things I thought all honest men should protest. I was born and bred in the country, and the dialect was homely to me. I tried my first Biglow paper in a newspaper, and found that it had a great run. So I wrote the others from time to time during the year which followed, always very rapidly, and sometimes (as with 'What Mr. Robinson thinks') at one sitting. When I came to collect them and publish them in a volume, I conceived my parson-editor, with his pedantry and verbosity, his amiable vanity and superiority to the verses he was editing, as a fitting artistic background and foil. He gave me the chance, too, of glancing obliquely at many things which were beyond the horizon of my other characters."
There are two American books, elder brethren of "The Biglow Papers," which it would be unjust in an Englishman not to mention while introducing their big younger brother to his own countrymen,--I mean, of course, "Major Downing's Letters," and "Sam Slick;" both of which are full of rare humour, and treat of the most exciting political questions of their day in a method and from points of view of which we are often reminded while reading the "Biglow Papers." In fact, Mr. Lowell borrows his name from the Major's Letters;--"Zekel Bigelow, Broker and Banker of Wall Street, New York," is the friend who corrects the spelling, and certifies to the genuineness, of the honest Major's effusions,[2] and is one of the raciest characters in the book. No one, I am sure, would be so ready as Mr. Lowell to acknowledge whatever obligations he may have to other men, and no one can do it more safely. For though he may owe a name or an idea to others, he seems to me to stand quite alone amongst Americans, and to be the only one who is beyond question entitled to take his place in the first rank, by the side of the great political satirists of ancient and modern Europe.
Greece had her Aristophanes; Rome her Juvenal; Spain has had her Cervantes; France her Rabelais, her Moli��re, her Voltaire; Germany her Jean Paul, her Heine; England her Swift, her Thackeray; and America has her Lowell. By the side of all those great masters of satire, though kept somewhat in the rear by provincialism of style and subject, the author of the "Biglow Papers" holds his own place distinct from each and all. The man who reads the book for the first time, and is