No More Learning

Nothing Ideal, a plain-people's man
At the first glance, a more deliberate ken
Finds type primeval, theirs in whose veins ran
Such blood as quelled the dragon In his den,
Made harmless fields, and better worlds began:
He came grim-silent, saw and did the deed
That was to do; in his master-grip
Our sword flashed joy; no skill of words could breed
Such sure conviction as that close-clamped lip;
He slew our dragon, nor, so seemed it, knew
He had done more than any simplest man might do.
Yet did this man, war-tempered, stern as steel
Where steel opposed, prove soft in civil sway;
The hand hilt-hardened had lost tact to feel
The world's base coin, and glozing knaves made prey
Of him and of the entrusted Commonweal;
So Truth insists and will not be denied.
We turn our eyes away, and so will Fame,
As if in his last battle he had died
Victor for us and spotless of all blame,
Doer of hopeless tasks which praters shirk,
One of those still plain men that do the world's rough work.




APPENDIX


I. INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND SERIES OF BIGLOW PAPERS

[Lowell took occasion, when collecting in a book the several numbers of
the second series of 'Biglow Papers,' which had appeared In the
'Atlantic Monthly,' to prefix an essay which not only gave a personal
narrative of the origin of the whole scheme, but particularly dwelt upon
the use in literature of the homely dialect in which the poems were
couched. In this Cabinet Edition it has seemed expedient to print the
Introduction here rather than in immediate connection with the poems
themselves. ]

Though prefaces seem of late to have fallen under some reproach, they
have at least this advantage, that they set us again on the feet of our
personal consciousness and rescue us from the gregarious mock-modesty or
cowardice of that _we_ which shrills feebly throughout modern literature
like the shrieking of mice in the walls of a house that has passed its
prime. Having a few words to say to the many friends whom the 'Biglow
Papers' have won me, I shall accordingly take the freedom of the first
person singular of the personal pronoun. Let each of the good-natured
unknown who have cheered me by the written communication of their
sympathy look upon this Introduction as a private letter to himself.

When, more than twenty years ago, I wrote the first of the series, I had
no definite plan and no intention of ever writing another. Thinking the
Mexican war, as I think it still, a national crime committed in behoof
of Slavery, our common sin, and wishing to put the feeling of those who
thought as I did in a way that would tell, I imagined to myself such an
up-country man as I had often seen at antislavery gatherings capable of
district-school English, but always instinctively falling back into the
natural stronghold of his homely dialect when heated to the point of
self-forgetfulness. When I began to carry out my conception and to write
in my assumed character, I found myself in a strait between two perils.
On the one hand, I was in danger of being carried beyond the limit of my
own opinions, or at least of that temper with which every man should
speak his mind in print, and on the other I feared the risk of seeming
to vulgarize a deep and sacred conviction. I needed on occasion to rise
above the level of mere _patois_, and for this purpose conceived the
Rev. Mr.
Wilbur, who should express the more cautious element of the New
England character and its pedantry, as Mr. Biglow should serve for its
homely common-sense vivified and heated by conscience. The parson was to
be the complement rather than the antithesis of his parishioner, and I
felt or fancied a certain humorous element in the real identity of the
two under a seeming incongruity. Mr. Wilbur's fondness for scraps of
Latin, though drawn from the life, I adopted deliberately to heighten
the contrast. Finding soon after that I needed some one as a mouth-piece
of the mere drollery, for I conceive that true humor is never divorced
from moral conviction, I invented Mr. Sawin for the clown of my little
puppet-show. I meant to embody in him that half-conscious _un_morality
which I had noticed as the recoil in gross natures from a puritanism
that still strove to keep in its creed the intense savor which had long
gone out of its faith and life. In the three I thought I should find
room enough to express, as it was my plan to do, the popular feeling and
opinion of the time. For the names of two of my characters, since I have
received some remonstrances from very worthy persons who happen to bear
them, I would say that they were purely fortuitous, probably mere
unconscious memories of sign-boards or directories. Mr. Sawin's sprang
from the accident of a rhyme at the end of his first epistle, and I
purposely christened him by the impossible surname of Birdofredum not
more to stigmatize him as the incarnation of 'Manifest Destiny,' in
other words, of national recklessness as to right and wrong, than to
avoid the chance of wounding any private sensitiveness.

The success of my experiment soon began not only to astonish me, but to
make me feel the responsibility of knowing that I held in my hand a
weapon instead of the mere fencing-stick I had supposed. Very far from
being a popular author under my own name, so far, indeed, as to be
almost unread, I found the verses of my pseudonym copied everywhere; saw
them pinned up in workshops; I heard them quoted and their authorship
debated; I once even, when rumor had at length caught up my name in one
of its eddies, had the satisfaction of overhearing it demonstrated, in
the pauses of a concert, that _I_ was utterly incompetent to have
written anything of the kind. I had read too much not to know the utter
worthlessness of contemporary reputation, especially as regards satire,
but I knew also that by giving a certain amount of influence it also had
its worth, if that influence were used on the right side. I had learned,
too, that the first requisite of good writing is to have an earnest and
definite purpose, whether aesthetic or moral, and that even good
writing, to please long, must have more than an average amount either of
imagination or common-sense.