Forty Years of the Atlantic Monthly

WITH this number The Atlantic Monthly ends its fortieth year.

On the 29th of April, 1857, Longfellow wrote in his journal: " Lowell was here last evening to interest me in a new magazine, to be started in Boston by Phillips and Sampson. I told him I would write for it if I wrote for any magazine.” A week later the journal contained this entry : " Dined in town at Parker’s, with Emerson, Lowell, Motley, Holmes, Cabot, Underwood, and the publisher Phillips, to talk about the new magazine the last wishes to establish. It will no doubt be done; though I am not so eager about it as the rest.” The eagerness of Phillips himself did not receive its full impetus until Mrs. Stowe promised him her cordial support. That there was at least one other dinner for the discussion of the project before it was definitely adopted, Longfellow’s journal gives further testimony. 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 Quincy, and other writers 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 enterprise was assured from the start, and a new era in American literature was inaugurated.”

Lowell had shrewdly insisted as “ a condition precedent ” that Dr. Holmes should be engaged as the first contributor. He demurred, but yielded to his friend’s urgency, and in later years could say of Lowell that he “ woke me from a kind of literary lethargy in which I was half slumbering, to call me to active service.” Mr. F. H. Underwood was chosen assistant editor.

Ten of the fourteen authors who made the principal contributions to the first number were Motley, Longfellow, Emerson, Charles Eliot Norton, Holmes, Whittier, Mrs. Stowe, J. T. Trowbridge, Lowell, and Parke Godwin. Whittier and Longfellow each contributed a poem ; Lowell, his sonnet The Maple, the verses on The Origin of Didactic Poetry, and editorial pages of prose ; Emerson gave, besides the essay Illusions, four short poems, of which two were Days and Brahma; Mrs. Stowe and Mr. Trowbridge were represented 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 offhand 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 BreakfastTable 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 generation which had not yet learned the Autocrat’s habit of thought. The authorship of the articles was evidently an open secret in some quarters, for the Boston correspondent of the Springfield Republican was able to send his paper immediately an ascription of all the articles to their several writers.

These notes about the first number of The Atlantic — for this paper is a bundle of random notes rather than formal history — are set down to recall the serious and clear aim of the projectors of the magazine : they were making American Literature. It was not as a mere publishing enterprise, but as an institution, that they regarded it. Nearly all the other American magazines that were then in existence have perished, and those that have survived have radically changed their character. Holding fast to the faith of its founders, that Literature is one of the most serious concerns of men, and that the highest service to our national life is the encouragement and the production of Literature, The Atlantic has never had owner or editor who was tempted to change its steadfast course by reason of any changing fashion. The first volume contained several articles which are curiously paralleled by contributions of the past twelve months. It would be extremely interesting to develop this parallelism, but it must suffice here to give two lists of titles, representing respectively the first volume of The Atlantic and the seventyninth : (1) Béranger, Intellectual Character, The Winds and the Weather, Notes on Domestic Architecture, The Kansas Usurpation, Mr. Buchanan’s Administration, The Financial Flurry, Florentine Mosaics, Our Birds and their Ways; (2) Ferdinand Brunetiére and his Criticism, On Being Civilized too Much, Mercury in the Light of Recent Discoveries, Two Interpreters of National Architecture, A Typical Kansas Community, Mr. Cleveland as President, The Good and the Evil of Industrial Combinations, Notes of a Trip to Izumo, Young America in Feathers.

In 1857 there were not wanting those who were on a keen lookout for heterodoxy in matters of religious belief in the pages of the new magazine. 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 morality.” The next month it was a little better: “ With the exception of a slur at the doctrine of eternal retribution, 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 forty years ago its sentiments could not pass unchallenged.

It was, indeed, especially in the writings of Dr. Holmes that the seeds of danger were believed to be planted. In a letter written to Motley in 1861, he exclaimed, apropos of The Atlantic, “ 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.” 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 appeared as a book: “ We presume that we do but speak the general conviction, as it certainly is our own, when we say that that which was to have 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 acquired by the preceding papers.”

Writing of these papers nearly twentyfive 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 at this time from those who do not accept them were treated as if they were the utterances of a Nihilist incendiary.”

The reverential liberality of religious thought, expressed by Emerson and Dr. Holmes, each in his own way, became (as it could not fail to become) characteristic of the magazine. James Freeman Clarke wrote for The Atlantic most of his Ten Great Religions, and at a later time John Fiske published here The Idea of God, a study in religion from an evolutionist’s point of view, which forms part of a series that is not yet concluded.

In 1862 scientific articles by Agassiz began to appear, and a long succession of his writings was brought to an end by a paper published in 1874, just after his death. Even if The Atlantic had done nothing else in the field of science this record would be worth making ; but the great achievements of these later years have always formed an important part of its contents, and have been related by men like Rodolfo Lanciani, Percival Lowell, N. S. Shaler, G. F. Wright, and T. J. J. See, who has a notable article in the present number.

The choice of Lowell as editor committed The Atlantic at once to the highest standards in literature and politics. The first number showed clearly its views with regard to the overwhelming social and political problems of the time. In an article on the Financial Flurry Parke Godwin wrote of “the Slave Power, which consults no interest but its own in the management of government, and which will never make a concession to the manufacturers or the merchants of the North, unless it be to purchase some new act of baseness, or bind them in some new chains of servility.” To the second number Edmund Quincy contributed a spirited denunciation of the outcome of slavery, in an article under the title Where Will it End? It was to the use of such articles as these that Mr. Underwood referred when he wrote, “ The public understood and felt that this was the point of the ploughshare that was to break up the old fields.”

When the war began, the spirit of the magazine was shown by its ceasing to print on its cover the rather melancholy woodcut of John Winthrop, and putting in its place the flag of the Union, which is to be found on the title-pages of the bound volumes as late as 1873. But the real patriotism of The Atlantic was written in every kind of contribution to its pages. As one of the many forms of expression which it took, it is pleasant to recall that here for the first time appeared Barbara Frietchie,The Man without a Country, Battle Hymn of the Republic, Our Orders, and the second series of The Biglow Papers. The list might be almost indefinitely extended, to include writings passing beyond the wartime, through all the troublous days that followed, and into these later decades charged with new problems of their own.

In dealing with all these new problems, — of reconstruction, of civil service reform, of our foreign relations, of a sound currency, —liberality and vigor, we hope it can be said, have marked the course of The Atlantic. Certainly, one important fact has never been forgotten, — that political questions are, and have always been, material for good literary work. It is but a few years since the ringing lines of Mr. Aldrich’s Unguarded Gates carried on the tradition of the magazine in bringing the art of the poet to bear upon a matter of the highest moment to the citizen; and during the last twelve months, E. J. Phelps, Charles W. Eliot, E. L. Godkin, Albert Shaw, Francis C. Lowell, and Theodore Roosevelt have added to our political literature articles on Arbitration and our Relations with England, American Liquor Laws, the Real Problems of Democracy, the Nominating System, Greater New York, Legislative Shortcomings, and Municipal Administration.

The first important change in The Atlantic’s history followed the breaking up, in 1859, of the firm of Phillips, Sampson & Co., through the death of the principal partners. It passed then into the hands of Ticknor & Fields. From them it has descended, through the succession of firms which has followed, to the present publishers. For more than a year after the transfer to its new proprietors Lowell remained its editor. His correspondence, through all the period of editorship, is full of references to The Atlantic. “ To be an editor is almost as bad as being President,” he says, at a time when he was “ at work sometimes fifteen hours a day.”

In 1864, when The North American Review, of which Lowell was at that time one of the editors, also passed into the hands of Ticknor & Fields, he wrote to Mr. Fields : " It’s a great compliment you pay me that, whenever I have fairly begun to edit a journal, you should buy it.’ In 1861 he had handed over to Mr. Fields himself the editorship of The Atlantic, with this philosophical conclusion to a most cordial letter : “ Nature is equable. I have lost The Atlantic, but my cow has calved as if nothing had happened.” All the good wishes that he made for the success of the new editor were abundantly realized. Mr. Fields possessed, to an exceptional degree, the power of establishing and maintaining intimate personal relations with such men and women as those who had been associated with The Atlantic from the first. By the use of the same gift the circle of opportunity was extended year by year, and all the results were inevitably to the advantage of The Atlantic and its publishers. In recording his recollections of Mr. Fields, John Fiske has said that “ in his youth he used to surprise his fellow clerks by divining beforehand wliat kind of a book was likely to be wanted by any chance customer who entered the store.”

If one should go through the volumes between 1861 and 1871, the decade in which Mr. Fields conducted the magazine, and transcribe the names of most frequent recurrence, together with some of the titles to which they are joined, the result would be merely a list of many of the best known authors and their works. Lowell himself remained a constant contributor of the best things that came from his pen, as for example The Cathedral and the Commemoration Ode. It was almost as if he had a vision of the future that when he sent his successor the poem from which the lines are cut into the granite beneath St. Gaudens’s imperishable monument to Shaw, he wrote, “ I wanted the poem a little monumental.”

Besides the names that have already been recited, there were other shining ones steadily reappearing. Among them, that of Hawthorne, under the writings published in his last years and posthumously, must stand alone. From the earliest days of the magazine, when Lowell wrote to Mr. Higginson, not yet a colonel, that he thought his contributions “ the most telling essays we have printed,” there was an infinite variety of work from the pen which within the present year has been recording those Cheerful Yesterdays. Professor Charles Eliot Norton, who wrote for the first number, has been a contributor at intervals ever since; only a few months ago he wrote about Kipling’s latest volume of verse. Beginning almost as early, and continuing virtually as late, have been the contributions of Dr. Edward Everett Hale. In the earlier days the names of E. P. Whipple and Richard Grant White were constantly in evidence, and by the side of Mrs. Stowe, in the long list of notable women who in this early time wrote for The Atlantic, stood Miss Prescott, now Mrs. Spofford, Miss Rose Terry, afterwards Mrs. Cooke, Mrs. Thaxter, Miss Lucy Larcom, Miss Rebecca Harding, now Mrs. Davis, and Helen Hunt. This brilliant group of women were the forerunners of many more, among them Mrs. Fields, Mrs. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, Mrs. Catherwood, Mrs. Deland, Mrs. Foote, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Kirk, Mrs. Miller, Mrs. Wiggin, Miss Jewett, Miss Murfree, Miss Preston, Miss Repplier, Blanche Willis Howard, “Octave Thanet,” Miss Baylor, Miss Alice Brown, Miss Sophia Kirk, Miss Vida Scudder, and Miss Eliza Orne White. But a catalogue of Homeric completeness would attain Homeric dimensions.

As the magazine was inaugurated at a dinner-table, and owed still more to a certain Breakfast-Table, it is not surprising that a sort of social bond was felt to exist between the publishers, editors, and principal contributors. Longfellow and Underwood have both recorded the meetings of an Atlantic or Magazine Club which met for dinner at about the time The Atlantic was issued each month. Later, the publishers of The Atlantic celebrated the seventieth birthdays of Whittier, Holmes, and Mrs. Stowe, by giving “ breakfasts ” or garden-parties of an importance and a significance greater by as much as the fame of the writers they sought to honor had grown during the interval.

Even in the days of the monthly Atlantic Dinner — which was made possible by the fact that most of the contributors lived in the neighborhood of Boston — the magazine was not local. It attracted to itself writers from all sides, and soon had many contributors at distances which forbade their participating in Boston festivities. It is seldom now that a number appears which does not show the coöperation of authors in many parts of the country,—if not, also, from other lands.

After the passing of its first group of great writers, The Atlantic continued to hold a supremacy which was generally conceded. The year 1866 was marked by the coming to Boston of the two men whose names for the next twenty-four years were to be most closely associated with the magazine, Mr. T. B. Aldrich and Mr. W. D. Howells. When Mr. Fields retired from the editorship, Mr. Howells succeeded him. Lowell wrote to him about “ sitting in the seat of the scorner where I used to sit.” From 1871 until 1880, when he gave place to Mr. Aldrich, he was not only the editor, but so constantly a contributor that perhaps no one person in the whole history of the magazine has given more to its pages. Mr. Aldrich, too, has published in these pages, before and since his period of editorship as well as during that period, much of his permanent work in prose and verse. Mr. Horace E. Scudder, who became editor in 1890, had already done much work as a contributor of both signed and editorial articles.

There is a long list of other famous names: in Fiction, for instance, besides Howells and Aldrich and the brilliant women already named, Henry James, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Thomas Hardy, F. Marion Crawford, Arthur S. Hardy, Frank R. Stockton, S. Weir Mitchell, Gilbert Parker, F. Hopkinson Smith, and many more. In later years, too, and down into the present volume, has come the unique work of Lafeadio Hearn. Of other kinds of literature may be mentioned, in a passing list that makes no pretensions to completeness even in the enumeration of the greatest names, Mr. Fields’s Yesterdays with Authors, Mrs. Kemble’s Reminiscences, Dr. Hale’s A New England Boyhood, Mrs. Lathrop’s Memories of Hawthorne, Colonel Higginson’s Cheerful Yesterdays, Dr. Birkbeck Hill’s A Talk over Autographs, and the many contributions, both prose and verse, of John Hay, Charles Dudley Warner, E. C. Stedman, R. H. Stoddard, G. E. Woodberry, John Burroughs, and Bradford Torrey.

In Politics and History The Atlantic has never lost sight either of the foundations of our national life or of the great questions of current interest. Parkman in his studies of colonial history, and Fiske in a great variety of historical papers, afterward gathered into his several books, are among the contributors in this field. They call to mind, also, Carl Schurz’s Abraham Lincoln, James C. Carter’s Tilden, Royec’s Frémont, Mahan’s series of the companions of Nelson, Ropes’s General Sherman, Dr. Allen’s Phillips Brooks, J. N. Denison’s General Armstrong, Senator Dawes’s Recollections of Stanton, Woodrow Wilson on President Cleveland, Fiske on Arbitration, Eliot on Five American Contributions to Civilization, and a long line of articles by Charles Francis Adams, Edward Atkinson, William Everett, Henry Cabot Lodge, and F. B. Sanborn.

As is sure to be the case in note-making, one of the most important subjects of many papers in The Atlantic has not yet even been mentioned. The contributions to Education that have been published in the magazine began earlier than President Eliot’s formulation of the New Education in 1869, and have continued in an unbroken succession down to the present. Conspicuous, but not alone among the notable papers on Education have been Mr. Scudder’s which furthered the revolutionary movement for the use of complete pieces of literature in the schools.

The conditions of American life have changed greatly since the early days of The Atlantic, and the task of a magazine whose aim it is to give literary interpretation of American life is a very different task from what it was forty years ago. Not only is life much more complex, but the conditions of the publication of literature are wholly different, — unlike what they were even a dozen years ago. The increased volume of production that has followed the cheapening of manufacture and the lessened cost of distribution has not unnaturally led to much confusion of thought. We sometimes hear that the day of a high literary standard and of definite literary aims is past. Yet fair comparison of the literary work done in the United States to-day with the work that was going on in 1857 will show that there has been no real decline except in Poetry. In Fiction, if Hawthorne be set aside (as it is fair to set aside any great genius), there is much more work done now of the grade next to the very highest than was done forty years ago ; in History there has been as great an improvement in style as there has come a wider and surer grasp in these days of fuller knowledge; in Politics and Social Science there has been no falling away by our few best writers, and the field is larger and the spirit of liberality more generous ; and by the Exact Sciences new worlds full of revelation and romance have been discovered since Agassiz first wrote for The Atlantic. The conspicuous changes that have taken place are two : we have no single group of men of such genius as the group that contributed to the early numbers ; and as a result of the spread of culture no man of less than the very highest rank can now hold as prominent a position as a man of the same qualities held when good writers were fewer. There are in fact more contributors to the present volume of The Atlantic who have made literature the chief work of their lives, whose standard is high, whose aims are definite, and who have won success, than there were to the first volumes ; and the range of subjects treated now is wider. But amid all the changes of these forty years the magazine has tried not to forget the purpose of its early days, — to hold Literature above all other human interests, and to suffer no confusion of its ideals.